Reviewed by: Medieval Women on Film: Essays on Gender, Cinema and History ed. by Kevin J. Harty Susan Aronstein kevin j. harty, ed., Medieval Women on Film: Essays on Gender, Cinema and History. North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2020. Pp. 208. isbn: 978–1–4766–6844–4. $39.95. Beginning with the publication of Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film in 1991, Kevin J. Harty’s work on the ‘reel’ Middle Ages has been invaluable for the study of medieval cinema, and Medieval Women on Film is a welcome contribution to this work. Chronicling the cinematic fortunes of medieval women, fictional and historical, the volume’s essays offer an insightful cross-disciplinary exploration of ‘the multiplicity of contradictory roles’ medieval women have played on film for over a century—‘as role models, as saviors, as saints, as sinners, as viragos, as victims, and as victimizers’ (p. 3). Amy Kaufman’s analysis of Hollywood’s Guinevere in the context of ‘evolving anxieties about women and sex in each cinematic generation’ places film Guineveres, from Vanessa Redgrave (1967) to Keira Knightley (2004), in the ‘feminist discourse of [their] time’ (p. 19). In the end, Kaufman concludes, filmmakers’ ‘troubling answer’ to ‘handling’ Guinevere ‘may be the one provided by . . . King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which has no Guinevere at all’ (p. 30). Usha Vishnuvajjala’s exploration of Morgan le Fay on film demonstrates that cultural discourses about women have also determined Morgan’s characterization, as films from the 2000s displace ‘contemporary [End Page 73] misogyny onto the past,’ resignifying the complex and sympathetic Morgan of the 1980s (p. 48). Valerie Johnson’s study of Maid Marian provides yet another example of the disturbing modern misogyny that persists in films set in the Middle Ages; her examination of Robin Hood films from the 1920s to the 2000s finds that ‘neomedieval archetypes [always] dictate Marian’s behavior, her story potential, her narrative role, and ultimately her value’ (p. 69). Of all the fictional screen women studied here, only Isolde, as Joan Tasker Grimbert argues, seems to escape this fate. Grimbert, however, gives medieval sources and not ‘modern feminism’ (or filmmakers) the credit for ‘Isolde’s cinematic characterization’ (p. 64). Turning to historical women, Sandra Gorgievski explores Lady Godiva’s film career, arguing that Godiva’s inconsistent cinematic characterization—‘dutiful wife, feminist activist, and sex symbol’—stems from ‘the audience’s expectation of a film’s genre . . . [and] the version of the legend [they are] familiar with’(p. 144). Fiona Tolhurst shows that narrative expectations also limit Eleanor of Aquitaine, as films never allow her to become the female hero proposed by 20th-century feminism’s Golden Myth of Eleanor. Instead, from Beckett to Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, filmmakers reframe her, using the medieval Black Legend to discredit Eleanor in various ways—as an adulteress, a bad mother, a catty wife, a jealous murderess, a traitor, a rebel. Among the historical women discussed in the collection, only Joan of Arc, as Kevin J. Harty demonstrates, has been allowed a heroic portrayal on film; however, she, too, has been subjected to the visions and agendas of filmmakers who have ‘wrestled with Joan the simple peasant girl, Joan the androgyne, Joan the woman, Joan the doubting sinner, Joan the standard-bearer of a nation, and Joan the self-assured saint’ (p. 196). In addition to these analyses of medieval women’s cinematic histories, the volume offers four in-depth studies of individual films. Donald L. Hoffman examines Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen, arguing that Lang’s legendary queens ‘despite being part of an exciting new medium . . . are creatures of an old worldview’ who precipitate Germany’s fall from myth into history (p. 94). Andrew B.R. Elliott, reading La Passion de Beatrice as both a Tavernier film and a product of French cinema in the 1980s and 90s, finds that this film also remains trapped in old worldviews; relying on a ‘fundamental gender essentialism’ that equates women with suffering and exploitation and men with violence and domination, Beatrice promises but does not deliver ‘a progressive, empowering and refreshingly different film that dares to depict genuine female agency’ (pp. 130, 116). Joseph M. Sullivan and Kristin...
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Jan 1, 2024
Valeria G Andreeva 
Open Access
