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Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture ed. by David W. Marshall

2007; Scriptoriun Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/art.2007.0011

1934-1539

Laurie Finke,

Historical and Archaeological Studies

REVIEWS105 david w. Marshall, ed., Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 800-253-2187. Pp. x, 205. isbn: 978-0-7864-2922-6. $35. Mass Market Medieval is a collection of thirteen original essays that investigate the role ofthe MiddleAges as an object ofconsumption in popular culture. The current popularity of the medieval in popular culture has been fueled, David Marshall notes in his introduction to the volume, by rapid technological innovation and experimentation in cable television, home video, and electronic games. Taking as its point of departure the 'hyper-consumerism' (6) of contemporary mass culture, this volume argues that technological progress has encouraged a commodification of the past that packages the European Middle Ages into 'easily consumable nuggets' in what Marshall calls 'shrink-wrapping time' (6), a process indicated iconically on the book's cover by the bar code, in the shape ofan Alfred E. Neuman grin, peeking out through the visor of a medieval helmet. Marshall links the essays in the volume with recent work on medievalism in popular culture, beginning in 1976 with Leslie Workman's founding of the journal StudiesinMedievalism. However, myown informal surveyofthe table ofcontents of thatjournal suggests that it is really more like 1994 before scholars ofmedievalism turn their attention away from the elite literature and art ofthe nineteenth and twentieth century toward genres ofpopular and even mass culture. Before that, I suspect, the studyofpopularculture was a bit more disreputable. William Morris, CS. Lewis, and Walker Percy were more likely to be found in the pages ofthat journal before 1995 than Monty Python, Rick Wakeman, and Dungeons and Dragons. Even since 1995 most ofthe work on popular culture has been done in film. Marshall's introduction economically sketches this more recent scholarship. The editor has done an admirablejob ofselecting essays that cover different media. There is only one essay on film—the virtually unknown Swedish silent film Häxan. Other essays look at television, rock music, detective fiction, tourism, conspiracy theory, lesson plans, and gaming. Rather than divide the essays up into pre-established sound bites, the editor chose to allow them to affiliate looselywith one another around five 'functions' he argues the medieval serves within popular culture: essays explore the ways in which the medieval exposes contemporary social concerns, the way it engages with contemporary political issues, the question ofhow medieval history is rendered for popular consumption, the pedagogical uses of the medieval, and the ways in which the medieval structures the products ofpopularculture. Sometimes the essays talk to one another in interesting ways. I found especially thought provoking the editor's choice to juxtapose Carl Grindley's essay on the scandal ofinternet lesson plans for school teachers next to Daniel Kline's call to teachers in his essay on the video game The Age ofKings to 'understand video games and account for them in their teaching' (154). Because these essays specifically bring the classroom into the discussion ofpopular medievalism, their differences encapsulate the debate we should be having about popular culture. What is the place ofpopular culture in the study of the Middle Ages (as opposed to its consumption)? What are the relationships between the scholarlystudy ofthe MiddleAges and its packaging for a mass audience? 1?6ARTHURIANA Does mass culture medievalism merely deform history or does it have a role to play in the transmission ofmedieval culture? Are pedagogy and consumption mutually exclusive practices? Can we, as teachers of the Middle Ages, have any control over how the objects ofour study are disseminated culturally? On thewhole, thevolume strikes me as an inauguralwork in popular medievalism. It opens up new media to the field and asks new questions peculiar to those media, but the essays often seem general and introductory rather than theoretically challenging. The field has not been around long enough to accumulate a scholarly tradition, which frees the contributors to take some risks but sometimes leaves him without a clear sense of how to proceed. In some cases the authors needed to invent a method for studying the objects oftheir interests; Benjamin Earl's essay on Arthurian tourist sites is a good example, bringing a kind ofinformal ethnographic criticism to bear on...