Visuality, Violence and the Return of the Middle Ages: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds as an Adaptation of the Nibelungen Story

This chapter argues for the first time that Quentin Tarantino based his film Inglourious Basterds in part on the medieval tale of the Nibelungs, as mediated chiefly through Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen. Inglourious Basterds can therefore be fruitfully read as an instance of medievalism, perpetuating as well as re-evaluating the widespread association of the Middle Ages with violence. An awareness of this intertext allows a nuanced interpretation of Inglourious Basterds’ stance on the power as well as manipulability of visual signs, always seen in the context of their materiality. Tarantino’s adaptation also allows fresh perspectives on the medieval Song of the Nibelungs, especially on its depiction of violent revenge. These in turn throw into relief Tarantino’s interpellation of the viewer through violence and other techniques to prevent the passive spectator position that popular culture is often accused of demanding. The film succeeds in subtly altering the conventions of cinematic representations of premodernity, and in re-appropriating a tainted national origin myth for an international audience.

Chaucer’s and Wordsworth’s Vivid Daisies

In 1802, shortly after William Wordsworth read and translated Chaucer, he set down to write a series of poems that mark a shift from his primary focus on the rural poor to tiny and seemingly insignificant natural objects, insects, birds and small common flowers such as the celandine and, above all, the daisy. While Wordsworth’s identity as a nature poet has long been observed, literary critics have yet to notice that among the poems that Wordsworth read and indeed knew well was Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, written in 1386 or thereabouts, a poem whose prologue also includes not only close observation of the daisy but also a consideration of the kind of poetic language one should employ when encountering nature. Close study of Chaucer’s poem and Wordsworth’s multiple poems to daisies within the frame of Timothy Morton’s stimulating theory of ecomimetic ambient poetics reveals that for Wordsworth, Chaucerian medievalism offered a language for thinking through the strengths and limits of poetic encounters with nature.

Is Medieval Music the New Avant-Garde? The Wilful, the Wayward and the Playful

In his masterful exposé, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson deliciously debunks much traditional thinking about medieval music, arguing that changing perspectives on this increasingly re-discovered and available body of work may be more dependent on the personality of the scholars and performers involved in its dissemination than the findings of new research. In this chapter, writing from the point of view of a composer and musician equally involved in the performance of both new and early music, Graham Coatman examines the work of contemporary composers who have chosen medieval models as their starting point. Is their use of medieval material a means to establish identity and authenticity, or a reaction against the harmonic and formal legacy of the nineteenth century? How is the use of pre-existent material integrated into the contemporary creative process? With reference to selective case studies, Coatman finds parallels with their medieval counterparts that make their work all the more compelling.

‘Adventure? What Is That?’ On Iwein

Felicitas Hoppe gives an introduction to the art of adapting medieval poetry that is in itself a poetic work. In 2008, Hoppe adapted Hartmann von Aue’s Arthurian romance Iwein into a highly successful young adult novel. She speaks about this experience and about the art of adapting medieval literature more generally: about encountering popular images of knights looking like ladies and about inverted gender roles in Hartmann’s romance; about history as produced by wishes; about finding Iwein by chance in a bookshop and being captivated by its beauty; about the romance’s surprising timelessness in its psychologically astute characterisation, its sensible rationality and its uncompromising morality; about the dialectic between boredom and adventure, between the desire to grow up and the fear of growing up in all good children’s books (and Arthurian romances); about the relationship between honour and masculinity in the romance code of values; about Iwein’s insistence on physicality; and about narrative techniques for modernising the text (including the introduction of Iwein’s companion, the lion, as the narrator). As a whole, Hoppe’s piece is a remarkably sensitive analysis of how and why aspects of medieval literature exert a fascination on creative minds. It compellingly demonstrates the wealth of insights that adaptors of medieval texts gain, which can complement and inspire those of literary critics.

Writing the Nation: Historians and National Identities from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries

Many nineteenth-century national historians, such as Alexandre Herculano, Cesare Balbo, François Guizot, Jules Michelet and Thomas Babington Macaulay, self-consciously created the deep past of their respective nations for receptive and enthusiastic national audiences. Influenced by the novels of Walter Scott, they wrote history as biography of the nation, an account of how that nation, composed of the best of all of its social strata, had come into existence. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, novelistic and professional approaches to history bifurcated, with the former reducing the scope of historical writing to investigations of highly specialised topics that have little resonance outside of academe and with a wider public. This chapter explores alternative ways for professional historians to engage with their societies and asks about the legacy of contemporary historical writing.

Introduction

Here the editors review the long history of medievalism, starting with its origins as a period designation and continuing to survey its use in contemporary public discourse as a term of political opprobrium, and its influence as a source of inspiration and creativity in cultural and artistic endeavour in the twenty-first century. An overarching historical narrative of medievalism is therefore sketched out, in order that the detailed studies of individual chapters may be better contextualised. It is suggested that medievalism remains one of the main tropes by which the West figures itself as ‘modern’, and governs its relationship with the rest of the globe.

The Medium Is the Byzantine: Popular Culture and the Byzantine

The legacy of Byzantium in late modernity is still underdeveloped, particularly as it relates to the history of popular culture and new media. Tracing the interlaced narratives of excess and iconicity often associated with the Byzantine within British and American popular culture, this chapter explores how technological innovation and new media intersect with notions of the Byzantine so as to triangulate a system whereby the Byzantine operates as a fundamentally queer category amidst other narratives of medievalism. However, rather than focusing on citation and revivalism, this argument comes to seize ‘the Byzantine’ as a methodology for accessing and articulating the ontological shifts in the image and its medium in contemporary popular culture and art through the lens of contemporary queer theory.

Time, Place, Language and Translation: Ciaran Carson’s The Inferno and The Táin

Ciaran Carson’s translations of two major medieval texts, The Inferno (2002) and The Táin(2007), are part of a broader body of translation within his work. Appearing during a decade when a number of English-language poets turned their attention to the Middle Ages, Carson’s translations are in tune with other recent approaches in seeing affinities between his own circumstances and those of the medieval texts he translates. Carson’s approach is notable for a commitment to the formal qualities of the source texts. But these translations are also informed by Carson’s practice elsewhere, and both texts intersect with an interest in the themes of time, place, language, and translation across Carson’s broader body of work.

Forging ‘Medieval’ Identities: Fortini’s Calendimaggio and Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life

This chapter examines two nodal points in the reception of the Middle Ages in Italy and of Italian medievalism in politics since the 1920s: the festival of Calendimaggio in Assisi – its founding under Fascism and present-day functions in keeping a social fabric and identity alive in a city in demographic freefall; and the sui generis communism of Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, a colourful cinematic point of entry into the cultural politics of Italian Marxism and the militant Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Although distinct from one another and different in origin, the two cases intersect in their presentation of the Middle Ages as an ideal era of the popolo (common people; citizenry) and as a period whose revival offers a rallying point and potential salvation to populaces displaced from traditional contexts and thereby deprived of their cultures and identities.

Digital Mouvance: Once and Future Medieval Poetry Remediated in the Modern World

Chris Jones provides a unique insight into his involvement with two literary projects: Twitter poems composed with Jacob Polley as well as an Apple app of Seamus Heaney’s version of Robert Henryson’s Fables. These projects allow him to make carefully substantiated observations on the constant mutability inherent in medieval and medievalist poetry, rather than seeing the move to digital versions as the loss of an original. More generally, Jones also observes a significant return to medievalism among British poets in the twenty-first century, challenging the usual narrative that medievalism had its heyday in the nineteenth century.