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The ArtsJune 2021Medieval film
by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer
Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in inexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval Film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.
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Promoted Content
The ArtsJanuary 2019Medieval film
by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer
Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in unexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, art history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.
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The ArtsJune 2017Contemporary Australian cinema
An introduction
by Jonathan Rayner
Provides an introduction to the products and context of the new Australian film industry which arose toward the end of the 1960s. Traces the development of Australian film, in terms of prominent directors and stars, consistent themes, styles and evolving genres. The evolution of the film genres peculiar to Australia, and the adaptation of conventional Hollywood forms (such as the musical and the road movie) are examined in detail through textual readings of landmark films. Films and trends discussed include: the period film and Picnic at Hanging Rock; the Gothic film and the Mad Max trilogy; camp and kitsch comedy and the Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert. The key issue of the revival (the definition, representation and propagation of a national image) is woven through analysis of the new Australian cinema.
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Literature & Literary StudiesSeptember 2025Love and anti-Judaism in medieval English romance
Typologies of violence and desire
by Hope Doherty-Harrison
Love and anti-Judaism is a new examination of medieval romance for the questions it poses of the most significant events in Christian history. Providing new readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gowther and Sir Amadace, the book argues that romance explores depictions of love-and the sacrifices it may necessitate-in the Hebrew Bible, especially where they do not easily fit into interpretations asserting that this history must prefigure Christ and the crucifixion. An examination of anti-Judaism as a discourse of violence and desire that could be turned inwardly to expose the irresolution in Christianity, this book will provoke new investigations into the religious crises of medieval romance.
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2025Serfdom in medieval England
Theory and practice 1200 to 1500
by Mark Bailey
Serfdom was a coercive relationship between a landowner and peasant, which was widespread across medieval and early modern Europe. Itfeatures prominently in major historical debates, such as the origins of capitalism and the divergent pathways of western and eastern Europe to modernity. Scholars have paid particular attention to English serfdom, which is usually portrayed as highly oppressive and a major cause of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. This comprehensive survey draws on a vast scholarship and new research to show how, in reality, English serfdom was weak, casting new light on the nature of its society and economy when the Black Death struck in 1348-9. The pandemicnow assumesa central role in the rapid decline of serfdom, as illustrated in a case study of the estate of one of England's harshest landowners, St Albans abbey.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2023The gift of narrative in medieval England
by Nicholas Perkins
This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2023Medieval women and urban justice
Commerce, crime and community in England, 1300–1500
by Teresa Phipps
This book provides a detailed analysis of women's involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns - Nottingham, Chester and Winchester - and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women's roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women's legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women's status was malleable, making each woman's experience of justice unique.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMay 2024Medieval afterlives
Transforming traditions in Shakespeare and early English drama
by Daisy Black, Katharine Goodland
A collection of essays which show how early drama traditions were transformed, recycled, re-used and reformed across time to form new relationships with their audiences. Medieval afterlives brings new insight to the ways in which peoples in the sixteenth century understood, manipulated and responded to the history of their performance spaces, stage technologies, characterisation and popular dramatic tropes. In doing so, this volume advocates for a new understanding of sixteenth-seventeenth century theatre makers as highly aware of the medieval traditions that formed their performance practices, and audiences who recognised and appreciated the recycling of these practices between plays.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2013Popular protest in late-medieval Europe
Italy, France and Flanders
by Samuel Kline Cohn
The documents in this stimulating volume span from 1245 to 1424 but focus on the 'contagion of rebellion' from 1355 to 1382 that followed in the wake of the plague. They comprise a diversity of sources and cover a variety of forms of popular protest in different social, political and economic settings. Their authors range across a wide political and intellectual horizon and include revolutionaries, the artistocracy, merchants and representatives from the church. They tell gripping and often gruesome stories of personal and collective violence, anguish, anger, terror, bravery, and foolishness. Of over 200 documents presented here, most have been translated into English for the first time, providing students and scholars with a new opportunity to compare social movements across Europe over two centuries, allowing a re-evaluation of pre-industrial revolts, the Black Death and its consequences for political culture and action. This book will be essential reading for those seeking to better understand popular attitudes and protest in medieval Europe.
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The ArtsDecember 2025New Basque Gothic
Trauma, screen media and transnationalism
by Rebecca Wynne-Walsh
This monograph addresses the twenty-first century upsurge in Gothic screen media emanating from the Autonomous Basque Community, Euskadi, in Northern Spain. The book focuses on online video sharing, streaming and social media platforms, demonstrating the impact of multi-national co-production and distribution on the development of Basque film production; looking to the future of regional production in the digital era. This monograph fills a critical gap, presenting Basque Gothic screen media as a regionalist challenge to national models of cinema and identity. Wynne-Walsh establishes Basque Gothic as an expression of transgenerational trauma engendered by a history of state-suppression and socio-political violence. This regional iteration of the mode is addressed as a window into community perception and projection. While this project centres a Basque case study, it establishes a model for the reimagination of critical approaches to global, twenty-first century screen cultures.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019The films of Luc Besson
Master of spectacle
by Susan Hayward, Philip Powrie
This fascinating collection looks at the career and films of Luc Besson, one of the most acclaimed figures in international cinema. Contributions have been assembled from all over the world, and their different approaches reflect this geographical diversity. Films covered range from Besson's first feature, La Dernier Combat, to the international blockbusters The Fifth Element and Joan of Arc. The essays range from looking at costume design to musical scores, and the final chapter offers a transcript of a previously unpublished interview with the man himself. He is the only French director to have crossed over successfully during the 1990s into the blockbuster spectacular we associate with Hollywood cinema and yet this is only the second book in English on this major international director. The films of Luc Besson will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the career and films of the 'master of spectacle'.
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The ArtsJune 2017Terry Gilliam
by Peter Marks
Terry Gilliam presents a sustained examination of one of cinema's most challenging and lauded auteurs, proposing fresh ways of seeing Gilliam that go beyond reductive readings of him as a gifted but manic fantasist. Analysing Gilliam's work over nearly four decades, from the brilliant anarchy of his Monty Python animations through the nightmarish masterpiece Brazil to the provocative Gothic horror of Tideland, it critically examines the variety and richness of Gilliam's sometimes troubled but always provocative output. The book situates Gilliam within the competing cultural contexts of the British, European and American film industries, examining his regular struggles against aesthetic and commercial pressures. He emerges as a passionate, immensely creative director, whose work encompasses a dizzying array of material: anarchic satire, childhood and adult fantasy, dystopia, romantic comedy, surrealism, road movie, fairy tale and the Gothic. The book charts how Gilliam interweaves these genres and forms to create magical interfaces between reality and the illuminating, frightening but liberating worlds of the imagination. Scrutinising the neglected importance of literature and adaptation in Gilliam's career, this study also observes him through the lenses of auteurism, genre, performance, design and national culture, explaining how someone born in Minnesota and raised in California came to be one of British television and film's most compelling figures.
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Literature & Literary StudiesDecember 2025The Gothic in times of crisis
by John Whatley
The Gothic in times of crisis reflects contemporary society, showing how the Gothic modes continually resets its own forms to encompass each new reality, each new apocalypse, each new plague or crisis. This collection expands oncurrent scholarship to show how the Gothic challenges our understanding of both older and recent crises and, in turn, disturbs all genre complacencies to expose and confront the problems and contradictions in what our world has been, has become, or is in danger of becoming. This collection explores Gothic's current relevance to the contestations of ideas and the underlying and visible conflicts it dramatizes across a wide range of media. In various ways, it reveals what happens to Gothic modes now they confront the increasingly Gothic realities of our times, sometimesby recalling earlier crises and ideological contestations leading up to them.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2010Sanctity and pornography in medieval culture
On the verge
by Bill Burgwinkle, Cary Howie, Anke Bernau
Sanctity and pornography in medieval culture exposes the complexity of bodily exposure in medieval devotion and contemporary pornographic cultures. Through readings of texts and images, sacred and profane, from preimodern France and Italy as well as Anglo-American modernity, the book makes a case for paying closer attention to the surfaces of our bodies and the desires that those surfaces can articulate and arouse. From the Old French life of Saint Alexis to the work of writer-filmmaker Miranda July, from Wakefield Poole to Pietro Aretino, these are texts and images that diminish the distance between premodern Europe and contemporary California, between the sacred and the profane, as they demonstrate how, in the end as in the beginning, the surface of things is never simple. ;
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The ArtsDecember 2025The films of Bigas Luna
by Santiago Fouz-Hernández
The films of Bigas Luna is the first comprehensive English-language study of the complete filmography of Spanish filmmaker Bigas Luna, spanning from Tatuaje (1976) to DiDi Hollywood (2010). Engaging with theoretical frameworks such as haptic cinema, erotic cinema, auteur theory, and studies of gender, sexuality, and national identity, the book situates close readings of Bigas Luna's films within broader discussions of production and marketing. Fouz Hernández draws on extensive archival research-including original screenplays, press materials, and interviews with industry professionals-while engaging with previous scholarship in multiple languages. Structured into five thematic chapters, the book explores key concerns in Bigas Luna's work, including genre, gender representation, Iberian and Mediterranean identities, and meta-cinematic narratives. It can be read as a cohesive study of his oeuvre or as a reference for specific films.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJuly 2022Nordic Gothic
by Maria Holmgren Troy, Johan Hõglund, Yvonne Leffler, Sofia Wijkmark
Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMay 2026Women’s Agency and the Gothic in Spain and the Americas
by Megan DeVirgilis, Sandra García Gutiérrez
This volume has emerged to fulfill two main purposes: Primarily, to constitute the first collaborative work that traces the relationship between the Gothic and Women in Spain and the Americas, but also, to surpass the term 'Female Gothic,' coined by Ellen Moers, by transferring the focus towards women and their agency as writers, readers and characters. This volume functions as a manifesto per se to open new avenues into understanding how women have interacted with the Gothic between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in Spain and the Americas. The question, we determine, is not simply about identity, but rather about agency. We define women's agency as the total capacity of characters, authors and readers to act freely within a social framework in relation to gothic texts. In our exploration of authorship, we reject the claim that the Gothic is a simplistic literary genre, instead sustaining that the plasticity of the Gothic has enabled it to survive for centuries; by shifting from a genre to a mode, it has surpassed literary forms and invaded all kinds of media: from film to music and merchandise such as clothing and pop culture collectables, fostering an authentic goth fandom.
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Literature & Literary StudiesFebruary 2010Essays in later medieval French literature
The legacy of Jane H. M. Taylor
by Mike Thompson, Rebecca Dixon
Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Jane Taylor has shown a commitment to the rehabilitation of the more neglected aspects of later medieval French literature. This volume brings together original contributions from scholars who have worked alongside Taylor and directly or indirectly benefitted from her example. The chapters demonstrate their authors' link to this legacy, and concomitantly underline the vibrancy and breadth of approach which is the hallmark of current later medieval studies. The essays in the collection centre on a number of key issues in the field: notions of literary self-consciousness and what it means to come after an avatar; issues of intertextuality and the appeal to past models in the creation of a new literary aesthetic (or a new literary criticism); and interdisciplinary questions of translation, reworking, and continuation. Essays in later medieval French literature seeks not only to illustrate the buoyant state of later medieval French literary studies but also, in so doing, to show how in broader terms responding to the legacy of an illustrious predecessor has not pejorative but positive consequences. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2006Political culture in later medieval England
Essays by Simon Walker
by Mike Braddick
This is an important collection of pioneering essays penned by the late Simon Walker, a highly respected historian of late medieval England. One of the finest scholars of his generation, Walker's writing is lucid, inspirational, and has permanently enriched our understanding of the period. The eleven essays featured here examine themes such as kingship, lordship, warfare and sanctity. There are specific studies on subjects such as the changing fortunes of the family of Sir Richard Abberbury; Yorkshire's Justices of the Peace; the service of medieval man-at-arms, Janico Dartasso; Richard II's views on kingship, political saints, and an investigation of rumour, sedition and popular protest in the reign of Henry IV. An introduction by G.L. Harriss looks back across Walker's career, and discusses the historiographical context of his work. Both the new and previously published pieces here will be essential reading for those working on the late medieval period. ;
