Content area
Full text
MARTHA W. DRIVER and SID RAY, eds., The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy. North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2004. Pp. 268. ISBN: 0-7864-1926-1. $35.
In the Medieval Hero on Screen, Martha Driver and Sid Ray have assembled a collection that persuasively 'present(s) medieval film as both a complement to the study of the medieval period and as a field worth studying on its own.' Drawing from sources that range from 'serious' medieval cinema to unabashedly popular offerings, this collection discusses the appropriation of the medieval past as a vehicle for modern ideologies, an appropriation that fabricates a Middle Ages that has, for many viewers, displaced the more historical and philological one of the academy.
Part I examines how this displacement takes place. William Woods asserts that medieval films convince us of their 'authenticity' by first conforming to our preconceptions about the medieval past and then telling tales, focused on a suffering hero, that confirm their audiences' sense of'universal human experience.' While the 'historical' medieval films that Woods discusses seem 'real' because they participate in a larger fantasy about the...