English | 2022 | ISBN: 178914552X | 256 pages | True PDF | 11.2 MB

This book will entertain and intrigue historians and film buffs alike . . . Bartlett shows how twentieth-century cinema's variously imagined Middle Ages speak as much to modern sensibilities as to any reconstructed past.' - Christopher Tyerman, author of The World of the Crusades

'Rich in anecdotes, this well-written and beautifully illustrated volume is chockablock with film, literary and cultural references, not only to those in the past but to other historical periods right up to the present.' - Martha W. Driver, co-editor of The Medieval Hero on Screen and Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

In The Middle Ages and the Movies ent historian Robert Bartlett takes a fresh, cogent look at how our view of medieval history has been shaped by eight significant films of the twentieth century. The book ranges from the concoction of sex and nationalism in Mel Gibson's Braveheart, to Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece Siegfried, the art-house classic The Seventh Seal to Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and the epic historical drama El Cid. The historical accuracy of these films is examined, as well as other salient aspects - how was Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose translated from page to screen? Why is Monty Python and the Holy Grail funny? And how was Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky shaped by the Stalinist tyranny under which it was filmed?