Lynn Ramey

Medieval Miscegenation: Hybridity and the Anxiety of Inheritance

Writing about medieval notions of motherhood, Clarissa Atkinson asserts that “medieval Europeans inherited a complex and diverse set of ideas that included widely different interpretations of basic processes.”1 Because medical theorizing was limited in the Western medieval period, sources of medieval ideas on procreation often come from commentaries on selected philosophies from antiquity. Depictions of reproduction in literature show that medieval writers imagined the process in very different ways, at times following the basic tenets of recorded philosophy and in other instances using unique combinations and variations on known currents of thought. Although Greek and Roman philosophies teach much about ways that Western medieval people may have viewed parenthood and the biological construction of gender, the philosophical record is largely silent on the question of miscegenation or mixed-race offspring. Medical writings address miscegenation rarely or obliquely, but the literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seems particularly preoccupied with intermarriage.

Introduction: Filming the “other” Middle Ages

For over a century, filmmakers have struggled with representing societies, both past and present, on the screen. From the outset, with Georges Melies’s Joan of Arc films in the late nineteenth century, the Middle Ages has served as a preferred setting for exploring on the silver screen some of society’s deepest concerns.1 But the marriage of film and history is frequently somewhat inharmonious because, as Vivian Sobchack observes, combining modern cinema with historical narratives confuses the very meaning of history: “In great part, the effects of our new technologies of representation put us at a loss to fix that ‘thing’ we used to think of as History or to create clearly delineated and categorical temporal and spatial frames around what we used to think of as the ‘historical event.’ ”2 Thus, when cinema meets history, the very meaning of “history” appears to crumble under the pressures to translate the truth of the past into the media of the present.

Collaborative Storytelling in Unity3D

While storytelling and narratology have long been the domain of humanists, creating and exploring narratives using a video game platform poses unfamiliar challenges for team coordinators used to working alone with traditional media. Issues to overcome include training collaborators on technology, mutually accessible storage, prevention of data loss, and version control. This poster describes a process used to create a dynamic and scalable team for a long-term project using video games to explore medieval texts.

In Praise of Troubadourism: Creating Community in Occupied France, 1942–43

In 1942, French medievalist Edith Thomas wrote in her personal diary a scathing review of Marcel Carne’s film Les Visiteurs du soir/The Devil’s Envoy coining the word “troubadourism” to describe the appropriation of the medieval past to create a sentimental present.1 While for Thomas troubadourism held dangerous implications of filmic collaboration with Hitler’s Germany, her argument that the Middle Ages is easily misused as a far-removed, imaginary space in which to address contemporary problems still holds sway. One year later, Jean Cocteau’s 1943 retelling of the Tristan and Isolde legend in L’Eternel retour (Eternal Return) that was directed by Jean Delannoy also met with mixed reviews, as Cocteau’s leading man and lady were criticized for being too “Aryan.”2 Rather than casting troubadourism in an inherently negative light, this chapter considers the ambiguous use of medieval characters and settings in Les Visiteurs du soir and L’Eternel retour, claiming that the recreation of a mythical past performs important cultural work for these filmmakers as well as for the Occupation French audience who viewed the film. While the chapters in this volume ask important questions about how modern directors use medieval settings to infuse their works with modern preoccupations about race, class, and gender, this chapter will address a parallel question in order to better understand filmic medievalism.