from Medieval Academy News (Winter 2003)

Medieval Studies and Popular Culture
by Angela Jane Weisl

In Star Trek IV: The Journey Home, Dr. McCoy must rescue Commander Chekov from a twentieth–century hospital where he is being treated for injuries sustained trying to escape from the Navy, who has caught him stealing radioactive material from a submarine. Hearing patients talking about being treated with dialysis and doctors discussing chemotherapy and fundascopic examination, McCoy declares, “My God, man, that’s medieval!” The irony of his comment doesn’t escape a modern audience, yet McCoy may make more sense than he thinks. If the “real” Middle Ages are divided from us by time, distance, and language, popular culture provides us a contemporary Middle Ages from which we are not separated, to which we respond in all the immediacy of the present. Thus “The New Middle Ages” may not be what or how we study, but where we live.

My most recent scholarship has dealt with intersections of the Middle Ages and contemporary popular culture, by which I do not mean all mass-produced forms, but those which embody a distinct productive relationship between text and audience. A look at the 2003 program of the International Congress at Kalamazoo suggests that I’m hardly alone in my fascination with this nexus. Just look at Session 199, “Arthurian Comedy,” in which all the papers are on contemporary films, or Session 260, “Picturing the Codex in Pop Culture: Medieval Books in Modern Contexts.” However, my particular interest lies somewhat outside the areas that these sessions take up; the value of examining modern manifestations of medievalism, such as Tolkein’s novels and the subsequent films, is enormous, but perhaps equally exciting is an examination of the modern phenomena that wear their medieval origins and expressions more covertly.

In “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco asks, “Are there any connections between the Heroic Fantasy of Frank Frazetta, the new Satanism, Excalibur, the Avalon sagas, and Jacques LeGoff? If they met aboard some unidentified flying object near Montaillou, would Darth Vader, Jacques Fournier, and Parsifal speak the same language? If so, would it be a galactic pidgin or the Latin of the Gospel according to St. Luke Skywalker?” (Travels in Hyperreality).

Imagine Eco’s figurative UFO. First, chaos. Then, in the usual “point and smile” method of communication, the passengers would admire Le Roy Ladurie’s pens and paper, test the various merits of the light-saber versus the sword, and puzzle a bit over each other’s vestments, admiring the potential of Darth Vader’s helmet as jousting-wear and teasing Parsifal about his operatic get-up. Once they worked out some oral means of communication, however, they would discover their great connection. They all know the same stories. Parsifal’s and Luke Skywalker’s exploits would sound familiar to each other as they compared tales about Yoda and Merlin, Han Solo and Lancelot; Jacques Fournier, despite certain objections, would certainly know the drill. Darth Vader might well wheeze, but he would see his own type in various dark figures of the past. Eco notes an “avalanche of pseudo-medieval pulp” which he calls “wash and wear sorcery and Holy Grail frappe,” creating a tension he calls “a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination.”

The contemporary presence of medievalism has the surprising result of calling into question the assumption that between our age and the Middle Ages lies an “unpassable abyss” (Paul Zumthor’s term in Toward a Medieval Poetics), a divide of time, distance, and often language. Catherine Brown claims that “everyone who has ever read a medieval book cold or taught one cold to undergraduates has felt this foreignness intimately in his or her suddenly awkward flesh. All those quotations, all that Catholicism, all those arguments and counterarguments; not to mention those old words, weird verb forms, erratic spelling, and all that damn Latin” (in “In the Middle,” JMEMS, 2000). This familiar and humorous formulation may speak for the medieval text; however, her concomitant assumption that “there is no question that the Middle Ages is an other, perhaps even a foreign place, someplace, as the etymology indicates, beyond our own doors” may not seem so cut and dried in the face of the prominent persistence of medievalism in contemporary culture.

A series of questions arise for Brown in her reading of the Middle Ages: “What are we doing when we go there? What happens to ‘here’ and ‘there’ when we go? The question isn’t whether medieval people did things differently than we do now; the question is what we as putative non-medievals are going to do with the difference. What stories do we tell ourselves about it? What do they do to and for us?” Her Middle Ages is constructed primarily from literary texts, and her relationship to the past is as a reader or audience, and she attempts to get at the medieval experience by understanding their methods of reading and consuming texts. The value of her discussion for understanding contemporary expressions of medievalism is its focus on text and audience, for it is in these two loci that this medievalism occurs.

If contemporary medievalism often blurs the difference between then and now, it suggests one method of dealing with that difference. Medievalism in popular culture is found in the appropriation of medieval narrative assumptions and modes of story telling, yet it is also present in the relationships of audience and culture in its nostalgia for a culture more-popularly-than-mass-produced and more-actively-than-passively-consumed. In a sense, as Brown again notes, “the Middle Ages is less a foreign country than ‘a living past with claims upon the present.’ [quoting Lee Patterson] And those claims call us to . . . learn to live in the middle, between familiar categories of past and present, subject and object, ‘self’ and ‘other.’” Indeed, it is this efflorescence of medievalism in popular assumptions that makes that call, showing the Middle Ages not just with us but with significant claims upon what we think is inherently modern, on the time we think most different from the past.

Contemporary culture that is truly popular—that rises out of a rich combination of oral and textual production, driven by both the forces of mass-production and “grass-roots” fandom—shares a great deal with medieval culture and reaches back past the cultural divide of modernism for its inspirations and resources. Some examples which I have chosen to engage are drawn from science fiction, which shows a profound relationship between its “official” forms and fan response, both of which produce parts of the overall “text.” The rise of the Harlequin Romance and other kinds of formula fiction fulfill Eco’s sense that if our ideas of tragedy and beauty were acquired from ancient Greece and Rome, “from the Middle Ages we learned how to use them” (Eco, Travels). This use of medieval ideas is the flip side to audience response in what produces the persistence of medievalism, for the old forms themselves are exceptionally functional and flexible.

Because of their pre-modern nature, medieval narrative genres are detached from the specifics of purely written forms; if high culture is primarily textual (including art, of course, within the body of texts), a medievalizing popular culture reflects the intersections of literature and “orature” in its multiple manifestations. Just as much medieval literature shows an overt consciousness of its oral sources and backgrounds, so, too, in contemporary popular culture do oral and “literary” interact; television and film are textual in that they are preserved in a set form, but also oral both in their form and in the conversation that rises around them and becomes a part of their overall effect.

Thus the study of contemporary popular culture in a medieval context illuminates both forms; it draws the past closer and enriches what often seems reductive in the present. In a practical sense, it can enliven the medieval classroom, making what students often see as irredeemably past and other more contemporary and accessible. Establishing what Carolyn Dinshaw calls “affective relationships across time” through the intersection of “materials that are not usually associated with each other” does indeed require a heterogeneous and post-modern sense of history and textual analysis, yet it allows contemporary scholars to “make relations with the past, relations that form parts of our subjectivities and communities” now (Getting Medieval), to play out complex connections between new times and old stories, new stories and old times.

In the process, we can come to penetrate the function of narrative as a structure of desire—a desire in the present that longs both for the certainties and the heterogeneities of the past, for particular kinds of generation of the symbolic, and for particular relationships to culture that printing removed and current media forms have allowed to live again.