Medieval Literature: The Basics

Angela Jane Weisl, Anthony Joseph Cunder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317210634
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Medieval Literature: The Basics is an engaging introduction to this fascinating body of literature. The volume breaks down the variety of genres used in the corpus of medieval literature and makes these texts accessible to readers. It engages with the familiarities present in the narratives and connects these ideas with a contemporary, twenty-first century audience. The volume also addresses contemporary medievalism to show the presence of medieval literature in contemporary culture, such as film, television, games, and novels. From Dante and Chaucer to Christine de Pisan, this book deals with questions such as:

• What is medieval literature?
• What are some of the key topics and genres of medieval literature?
• How did it evolve as technology, such as the printing press, developed?
• How has it remained relevant in the twenty-first century?

Medieval Literature: The Basics is an ideal introduction for students coming to the subject for the first time, while also acting as a springboard from which deeper interaction with medieval literature can be developed.

Game of Texts

The Magic of Medievalism

If you have purchased a book called Medieval Literature: The Basics, there is a good chance that you feel like you don’t know much about medieval literature, although it also suggests you are eager to learn more. You might know some names (Chaucer, Dante, Marie de France) and some themes (King Arthur, Knights in Shining Armor, Religion) but you likely are reading this because you feel like you need more background. There is certainly a great deal about medieval literature that you will learn from reading this volume, but you likely already know more than you think. The Middle Ages are having a vogue in contemporary culture: from The Lord of the Rings films to Game of Thrones, the period, or a fantasy of the period, has lately been occupying a great deal of screen time. Medieval movies, novels, video games, and television programs abound. The period appears in many other genres as well, including operas, fine arts, and architecture, among other forms. This post-medieval body of work that references the Middle Ages, called “medievalism,” is many people’s introduction to the Middle Ages. We wanted to begin with some contemporary responses to the medieval as a touchstone to establish a few key ideas, vocabulary, and concepts. So join us in this chapter – and in this book – as we travel back in time.

Tom Shippey has famously identified medievalism as:

the study of responses to the Middle Ages at all periods since a sense of the mediaeval began to develop. Such responses include, but are not restricted to, the activities of scholars, historians and philologists in rediscovering medieval materials;… and artistic creations, whether literary, visual or musical, based on whatever has been or is thought to have been recovered from the medieval centuries. The Middle Ages remain present, moreover, in the modern consciousness, both through scholarship and through popular media such as film, video games, poster art, TV series and comic strips, and these media are also a legitimate object of study, if often intertwined with more traditionally scholarly topics.

(Studies in Medievalism website: 2017, www.medievalism.net/conferences)

As part of the study of medieval literature, it is important to consider how what is often perceived as distant, archaic, and irrelevant is still vibrant and present in our own world today.

Based on students’ reactions to the Medieval Literature course at our university, it seems clear that it is a subject they think they do not know much about. Some students have encountered a little Chaucer in a British Survey course or some Dante in their Core Curriculum, but even they feel like they are embarking into uncharted territory. In fact, they often admit, they have no idea what they are getting into and are only there because the class meets at a convenient time or satisfies a requirement. However, a quick survey reveals that students actually know more about medieval literature than they think; even if they have not read The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Game of Thrones, they have seen the movies or TV shows. Maybe they have enjoyed Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale (2001) or Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) or have played the early iterations of Assassin’s Creed or Dragon Age. Or perhaps they have watched sports or gone to a Renaissance Fair or visited a Hall of Fame somewhere. Or their parents have made them watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). All of these, as contemporary as they may seem, and as un-literary as some may appear on the surface, in some form (intentionally or not) draw their inspiration from medieval literature. So, if the texts we will be talking about in the rest of this volume seem like artifacts of a distant past, in fact they still remain very much alive today.

Medievalism exists in many forms, all of it a kind of fantasy of a past narrowed down to certain traits. These can be frightening: many supremacist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, trace their origins to a fictionally unitary, white Middle Ages that never existed, and crusade rhetoric has been revived on both sides as conflicts between the West and groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda have escalated. Other forms also reduce the Middle Ages’ complexity, rendering a pagan fantasy seen at Renaissance Fairs (which collapse the Middle Ages and what follows into a blurred past of wenches and turkey legs and costumes) or a past of closed-mindedness and violence. Alternatively, medievalism can be found in the ways in which medieval artifacts are displayed or performed; medieval history can be repurposed to tell a variety of different stories. Medieval combat is reappearing in the Battle of the Nations and the revival of full-contact jousting; yet of course the Battle isn’t a real war because nobody dies, and the jousting tournaments are ends in themselves rather than knightly training for real combat to come. None of these fantasies are truly accurate to the Middle Ages; the kernels of truth within them, while interesting, are often very isolated from their contexts and exaggerated to mean something else. And yet, one thing they tell us is that there are multiple kinds of longings which the imagined Middle Ages fulfill. Because this volume is particularly concerned with the Middle Ages’ imagination of its own time in the form of its literature, our attention will focus here on genres which draw specifically from medieval literature, or which themselves use narrative to tell medieval stories. Works of medievalism of varying kinds abound for those who wish to pursue this study further.

Epic Fantasy and The Middle Ages

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay on what has come to be known today as “fantasy” literature, he states that there is a “desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self-made misery” (Tolkien 1983: 151). He goes on to explain how fantasy – or “fairy stories,” as he calls them – is an escapist genre, giving readers the opportunity to “fly from the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of the internal-combustion engine” for a time and to “visit, free as a fish, the deep sea” (Tolkien 1983: 151). At its core, the fantasy genre grounds itself in its ability to transport readers to another world, one with different rules or creatures from our own. We can, as Tolkien says, visit the marvels of a medieval castle without ever leaving the comfort of home – we can watch as knights battle from the backs of dragons or perhaps experience one of the “profounder wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things” (Tolkien 1983: 152) such as animals and beasts.

Although various subgenres of “fantasy” have emerged such as magical realism, urban fantasy, and steampunk – all of which generally take place in a contemporary setting – classic or “epic” fantasy most often requires a medieval background to properly take the name. Tolkien’s own pivotal work The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) takes place in a medieval world where horses (or eagles) are the only means of conveyance and the hum of the combustion engine is nowhere to be found. Christopher Paolini’s Eragon and the books that follow (2002–11), another popular fantasy about a boy who finds a dragon egg and becomes a dragon rider, take place in a similar medieval era where the modern innovations of the author’s world never appear. Even George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series (1996–present) (popularized by the HBO televised series Game of Thrones) takes place in a medieval world where enchantment and swordplay go hand in hand.

The list of examples goes on and raises the question of why contemporary authors find the Middle Ages such a fitting background against which to tell their magical stories. Is it because Tolkien set the example with his fundamental work that has come to define how we view the fantasy genre? Or is it something deeper, something that Tolkien himself hints at when he describes fairy stories as escapist in nature? Perhaps it can be a combination of the two.

While setting an “escapist” story in a contemporary world can still distract the reader from the unpaid bills piling up on the counter, or the minivan in the driveway that needs an oil change, there is a certain refuge in reading a story that takes place in a truly different world, not only in place but in time as well. There is a subtle magic in reading about elven spellcasters who live among the trees and travel by horseback – a magic even in reading about knights who must defend their castles against an ogre horde. Escaping into a romanticized version of the past – our world’s past, we must not forget – offers a charm of its own, and allows authors like Martin, Tolkien, and Paolini to immediately invoke the sentiment and aura of the Middle Ages without spending precious chapters building an entirely new world that science fiction authors, in some ways, must do. While we already know about the past, the future is necessarily a mystery. And while the geography in these fantasy stories will often be different from Medieval Europe, the tropes of feudalism, swordplay, knighthood, castles – even if understood only loosely by contemporary audiences – can be summoned with a sentence.

Additionally, fantasy stories often mimic their medieval counterparts in more than just setting. The themes and models of the medieval romance or epic find resonance in these novels and have become such a staple that no fantasy can be complete without employing some combination of them. These tropes include the quest, the hero, the coming of age both in terms of combat and sexuality, the sense of journey and learning something along the way, and betrayal. All of these abound in medieval texts and can certainly be found in any fantasy story published today, offering a link between the past and the present that goes deeper than the backdrop of castles and the absence of modern plumbing.

And yet, differences also remain between medieval texts and texts that look back to the Middle Ages. The modes of storytelling, for instance, have changed radically from the poets of the pre-modern eras. While Chaucer, Dante, and their compatriots wrote lengthy works in many genres, their narratives were predominantly linear, focusing on how characters (often limiting the primary protagonist to a single character) moved forward temporally to advance the action. Fantasy epics of today (like Martin’s) often have great temporal latitude, following multiple storylines, jumping forward and backward in time, and stretching out narratives for the span of three, four, five, or even twelve books.

Contemporary novels set in a medieval world differ from their historical predecessors in world building as well. It takes great effort to convince a modern reader to suspend his or her disbelief: as Tolkien writes, “To make a Secondary World in which [a] green sun will be credible, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft” (Tolkien 1983: 140). Medieval authors, on the other hand, did not have to establish the world in which their stories took place since it was their own, allowing them to focus more on character, plot, and action. This does not mean that medieval texts are devoid of description, but they (obviously) do not need to explain the Middle Ages. Scenes may be set, and historical contexts established, but the kind of description we think of as commonplace in medieval texts exists only to detail something out of the ordinary, such as the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. When magic appears in a medieval text, it is given little explanation and the readers must simply take it for granted that enchantment operated as a part of the world that the medieval author created.

Furthermore, as Alex Ross writes in “The Ring and the Rings: Wagner vs. Tolkien,” epic fantasy stories set in the Middle Ages have a way of interposing modern concerns upon tales of the past. For instance, Ross writes that:

it is surely no accident that the notion of a Ring of Power surfaced in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass destruction were appearing on the horizon. Pre-modern storytellers had no frame of reference for such things… those with power were born with power, and those without, without.

(Ross 2003)

In crafting a new mythology for England, Tolkien overlays the anxieties of his age with the visceral settings of his country’s Germanic past, using “myth [as] a window on an ideal world, both brighter and blacker than our own” (Ross 2003).

Medieval Movies

Tolkien is currently as famous for Peter Jackson’s films of his works as he is for the books themselves, and film is one of the places that offers a long history of medievalism. Medieval subjects appear in early silent films and continue today. But what makes a movie “medieval”? Probably it takes place in the Middle Ages or tells a medieval story, such as Kevin Reynold’s Tristan + Isolde (2006) or a classic like Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957), although the story likely has some differences from the medieval original. Of course, there are some obviously non-medieval elements: the characters are speaking in contemporary language and have really nice teeth. Also, while the setting is often clearly “medieval,” it may or may not echo the particular elements of the specific point at which the original text was written. For instance, Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur takes place in 487 CE, a date closer to when the historical Arthur might have lived, but it does not remotely resemble the world of the medieval Arthurian romances from which it (loosely) draws its story. The attempt to “historicize” or “authenticate” the work by making Arthur a Romanized Celt leading a cavalry of Iranian Sarmatians means that the film departs vastly from any extant version of the story, whether chronicle or romance. Similar effects can be seen in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010), starring Russell Crowe, in which Robin Hood, an archer in the English Army, reads letters from his stonemason father (who likely would not have been literate in the eleventh century): the French armies arrive in a scene that is essentially a medieval Omaha Beach; and Maid Marion fights in her father’s place (the last has some precedent in medieval romance, but seems more inspired by Eowyn in Tolkien’s Two Towers). Any sense of “history” or “authenticity” it attempts to provide is itself a fantasy. This sense of anachronistic time is parodied pointedly in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which opens with the date “932 A.D.” on the screen yet proceeds to offer obviously ruined castles and other elements of a medieval landscape enshrouded (sometimes literally) in an undemarcated “past,” in which any specificity about the period is blurred, creating a fantasy Middle Ages in which steeds are actually coconuts clacked together, the post-Norman (1066) French are already inhabiting castles and making fun of the English, and Modern Historians (not to mention anarchosyndicalist communes) appear in the landscape.

In Robert Zemekis’ Beowulf (2007), there is quite a bit of psychology driving the story, almost as if the film filters the Middle Ages through Freud, since the increasingly monstrous characters are all products of unions between the male characters and Angelina Jolie’s Grendel’s Mother, who might best be referred to as Monster Barbie. Obviously, this is not Beowulf, the eleventh-century Old English poem. In A Knight’s Tale, the poor page and son of a roofer, William Thatcher, ultimately becomes a knight by impersonating one; as Ulrich Von Lichtenstein – who seems to be named after a medieval writer who told many lavish tales of tournaments and jousting for ladies’ favor – his success at jousting wins him admiration, a lady, and eventually a title. His entourage begins with two fellow pages but they are quickly joined by Kate the Armorer who puts a Nike Swoosh on her products and Geoffrey Chaucer, who spends half the movie naked because he repeatedly loses his clothes gambling. These figures are not quite medieval; nor is the repeated playing of Jock Jams at the tournaments (especially Queen’s “We Will Rock You”), nor the various contemporary dance interpretations. Or are they?

In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Knight’s Tale, or Chrétien de Troyes’ Cliges, or the Alexander romances, or the Romans Antique, figures from the past appear looking decidedly like medieval knights and ladies, heroes and villains, engaging a similar kind of anachronism that these films do – even having classical figures reading medieval books and listening to medieval music (Criseyde, a Trojan, seems to be reading the twelfth-century Benoît de St. Maure’s Roman de Troie, for instance). The characters and stories may be “medieval” in contemporary adaptations, but they can still act like modern people and work out contemporary problems, just as Chaucer’s characters may be Trojans and Greeks, but the past becomes a place for Chaucer to work out his most medieval concerns about how romance and love operate, what constitutes appropriate masculine behavior, how war affects love, and how the future (readers of his story) will interpret the past he presents to them. This particularly literary relationship to the past, which brings the Middle Ages into the present through the injection of contemporary concerns and modern superficial details as a way of making it meaningful to a current audience, certainly finds its origin in medieval narrative. So if medieval movies (and other medieval forms such as novels, television shows, or video games) seem inherently anachronistic, that is actually when they are at their most medieval.

Medieval Video Games

Although technology has marked our era as starkly different from that of the Middle Ages, it cannot seem to divest itself entirely of an infatuation with the past. Like fantasy stories that harken back to medieval worlds, video games often take the same approach to offer gamers a way to experience a world of magic, dragons, and swordplay without any of the risks – and without giving up the safety and security of having a bathroom nearby. Games such as Dragon Age: Origins (EA Games 2009), Dante’s Inferno (EA Games 2010), and Fire Emblem Awakening (Nintendo 2013) bring gamers to a medieval world where they can wield swords, cast spells, battle monsters, and engage in the tactical art of strategic movement and archery while removing the “internal-combustion engine” and guns of other popular role-playing games (RPGs).

To emerge successful in the Dragon Age franchise, the player must be proficient in weaponry and warfare, defeating countless enemies along the way and killing the great dragon-esque Archdemon in the final battle. This closely parallels – at least superficially – the concerns of actual medieval texts where knights are judged on their prowess in battle (killing enemies and avoiding death thems...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Here Begynneth Game: The Basics of Medieval Literature
• 1. Game of Texts: The Magic of Medievalism
• 2. How to Wield a Sword in The Middle Ages: The Literature of War and Violence
• 3. Chivalry is Not Dead: The Literature of Love and Desire
• 4. Touching Heaven: The Literature of Religion
• 5. Meeting Monsters on the Map: Medieval Literature of Space and Time
• 6. The Most Extreme: Iconic Authors of the Middle Ages
• Web Resources
• Bibliography
• Index