Were the Peasants Really So Clean? The Middle Ages in FilmAuthor(s): Greta AustinReviewed work(s):Source: Film History, Vol. 14, No. 2, Film and Religion (2002), pp. 136-141Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815616 .Accessed: 08/03/2012 15:15

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Film History, Volume 14, pp. 136-141, 2002. Copyright © John Libbey ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in Malaysia

were the peasants really so

clean?

The Middle Ages in film

Greta Austin

ovies about the European Middle Ages are profoundly modern creations. They tend to reflect the anxieties and preoccupations of their modern creators rather than those of

people who lived a thousand years ago. All the same, medieval films enable medievalists today to imagine the past, and are useful because they enabled the historical imagination. How can this be? Although medieval films may have the redeeming feature of being fun, do they have any value beyond entertain- ment? Is it not a paradox to criticise medieval films for their ahistoricity, their failure to recreate faithfully a historical past, but also to praise them for their usefulness in allowing those who study the Middle Ages to imagine the past?

The problem with films about the Middle Ages There are essentially two types of films about the Middle Ages. One type of film purports to represent a medieval reality. Whether fictional or historical drama, it claims explicitly or implicitly to show us how things were back then. Recent examples of such films would include Braveheart (1995) and The Name of the Rose (1986), as well as the many films about Joan of Arc. The other type of medieval film is the ironic film which makes no pretenses to depicting the Middle Ages as they 'really were'. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1991), for instance, the knights do not ride horses, but pretend to ride horses as one bangs coconut shells to imitate the sounds of hooves. Similarly, in First Knight (1995), the crowd at the jousting tournament does 'the wave', like crowds at American football games today.

For the medievalist, the first type of medieval films - ones which aim at some type of historical

realism - are flawed in three ways, as compared to scholarly monographs. One, it is more difficult to tell whether a film is historically true to the extant sources. Films do not have footnotes, and they do not tell us where they got their information. They are less 'trans- parent' than are monographs. Whereas medievalists will often contextualise their arguments in terms of current debates, and also may make explicit their own biases, films are frequently more imprecise and unclear about their sources - they are historical stud- ies with the footnotes omitted. As a result, it is often difficult to ascertain the reliability of films.

To this objection, however, it can be countered that the curious medievalist can check up on the film. What do we actually know about Joan of Arc from the extant records? Did she have visions of Jesus as a small child? Was her town ransacked by the English as a child, and did she witness a rape? You might not trust the version of the story in The Messenger (1999) but you can fact-check that film quite easily.

There is a second problem with films which try to represent medieval life and culture: they tend to be less historically accurate. In other words, they often make fewer efforts than do scholarly works to

represent medieval life in ways consistent with the existing visual and written sources for the period. For instance, Mel Gibson in Braveheart has remarkably

Greta Austin is Assistant Professor in the Religion Department at Bucknell Uniersity in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. with distinction in the history of Christianity from Columbia University in 2000. She is a medievalist who studis Catholic canon law. With the assistance of a National Endow- ment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2003 she is finishing a book on two canon lawyers of the 11th century. Correspondence to gaustin@bucknell.edu.

Were the peasants really so clean?- Th Midl A in f i l1 3

clean and shiny long hair for someone living without indoor plumbing. Medieval films also take liberties with historical sequence, or do not reproduce events in the same order or manner as the textual historical records present them. As Robert Rosenstone notes, most historical films 'are almost guaranteed to leave the historian of the period crying foul'.1

In addition, they might add events which may or may not have occurred, since the written records simply do not tell us. For instance, in the Name of the Rose the unsavoury Inquisitor, Bernardo Gui, meets his Maker when a mob pushes his carriage over a cliff. Although the 14th century was unlucky enough to have an inquisitor named Bernardo Gui, who wrote a manual for inquisitors, we do not know for certain how he died. True, The Name of the Rose is fictional. Yet other films, such as the many ones about Joan of Arc, are based on historical records,2 and even these movies compress or alter in some ways the historical sequences of events recorded in a written text, or add further details. We do not know whether Joan witnessed a rape - perhaps she did - but the available records do not tell us.3

Needless to say, written records and modern narrative accounts also elide, compress and alter that unknowable, what really happened, history as it really was. Each medium, visual and written, is inevi- tably limited in 'its efforts to represent the past'.4 Yet it cannot be denied that many films about the Middle Ages are not as historically reliable - not as true to the extant sources - as are most scholarly mono- graphs. At the most basic level, the peasants in medieval films tend to be remarkably clean.

The third problem with medieval films is that they usually tell stories not about the Middle Ages, but about modern Western life in a period dress. A film about the Middle Ages can never be truly faithful to the extant sources - not just because we know relatively little about the period, but also because we, the makers and consumers of the film, live in such an alien world to the Middle Ages. Accustomed to the conventions of the novel and of modern narrative, we have considerably different expectations of a story than did people in the Middle Ages. To put it another way: if Europeans in the year 1100 had the ability to make movies, they would not make the same movie as Stephen Spielberg would make about life in the year 1100. Chaucer, too, probably would have filmed a great movie, but its inside jokes - such as about good-old-boy clerics who like to hunt - would not necessarily make sense to us today.

Consequently, the Middle Ages in the movies are often modernity in drag, Sean Connery got up in a hood and cloak (as in the Name of the Rose and First Knight). Apart from evoking a certain medieval mood, medieval films usually do not concern them- selves with 'reconstructing the past at all, at least not in the detailed, this-is-what-they-had-for-lunch-and- this-is-the-actual-china-they-had-it on way of, say Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993)', as Arthur Lindley comments. Rather, the stories and the con- cerns of medieval films are often distinctly modern. The subject of medieval films is 'the present, not the past'.5 Lindley provides an excellent example of this: in the opening sequence of The Seventh Seal (1957), the returning Crusader Antonio plays chess on a stormy beach with a white-faced allegorical figure of Death. Although the date is purportedly 1349, the concerns of the film, Lindley suggests, are those of 'the sub-atomic early 1950s, with universal death looming out of the northern sky'.

Should movies about the Middle Ages be dis- missed because they play out modern concerns? Should we understand The Seventh Seal only as an allegory, and dismiss its portrayal of the Black Death, of the flagellants, and of the effects of the Crusades? Perhaps, but we should then have to throw out many carefully-researched monographs as well. In all fair- ness, scholarly works about the Middle Ages, as much as popular films, are also products of their own particular historical time and place. In his book about medieval scholars of the 20th century (Inventing the

Fig. 1. Sean Connery and F. Murray Abraham don cloaks and hoods in Name of the Rose (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1986).

Were the peasants really so clean? The Middle Ages in film 137

138 Greta Austin

Fi. 2. RBennt : I . A - -.- --.. - . '

Ekerot and Max von Sydow play

for stakes in Ingmar

Bergman's The Seventh Seal (Det

Sjunde Inseglet, Svensk

Filmindustri, 1957).

Middle Ages), Norman Cantor drives home the point that these medievalists have 'fashioned their inter- pretations of the Middle Ages out of the emotional wellsprings of their lives, and these lives were in turn conditioned by the vast social and political upheav- als of the twentieth century, especially during the dark times from 1914 to 1945'.6 If medievalists are to criticise medieval films for reflecting modern con- cerns, they should also be critical of their own work. At the same time, scholarly monographs generally go to greater efforts to understand the past on its own terms, and to be aware of their own modern biases. They are also, as noted above, generally more faithful to the extant sources.

The advantages of films about the Middle Ages So why bother with films about the Middle Ages? Why not rely exclusively upon the written and visual re- cords and medievalists' interpretation of these, since scholarly monographs tend to be more careful about understanding their biases and more true to the

original primary sources than are films? I would ar- gue, however, that films about the Middle Ages are valuable for the medievalist - and the non-medieval- ist - as a supplement to scholarly monographs and primary sources, and that films are important for different reasons than are these other sources of history.

I will address first the more problematic cate- gory, those films which purport to represent the me- dieval past unironically, and then turn to the ironic films, which also, I believe, can potentially have con- siderable value.

First, representational films are useful to the medievalist - even if they bungle all the evidence, and get events in the wrong order - for an important reason. A film about the Middle Ages can inspire its viewers to ask questions about history. By entertain- ing its viewers a film can interest them in the subject, and then prompt them to ask questions, to correct and question both the facts and the story told by the film. Herlihy contends that historical films are more seductive than historical monographs because films

Were the peasants really so clean? The Middle Ages in film

draw in their viewers and make them 'eyewitnesses of the events portrayed'. Because viewers 'pretend that they directly observe the historic happenings ... the historical film not only creates illusion but also extends its domain to include its audience'.7 Yet this critique can be made of historical novels as well as many historical monographs, which may also se- duce their readers.8 It does not necessarily followthat the viewer or the reader will uncritically accept every- thing represented in the film or book. Instead, the film may inspire viewers to ask questions about what really happened. Herlihy gives, I believe, too little credit to the critical capabilities of viewers. Viewers may leave the film wondering about medieval war, about Robin Hood as a historical figure, or about the Arthurian legends, and they may even be inspired to check the facts represented in the film. Furthermore, the medieval film may inspire viewers also to investi- gate how the facts fit together. Did events really occur in the order as they did in the film? What actually happened? Was that what it was really like? Was there in fact an inquisitor name Gui? Did he die at the hands of a mob? The great strength of films for the non-specialist is that they may intrigue the viewers to the point where they ask further questions and do some footwork on their own. For the specialist or the student, medieval films can also serve the same purpose, even if they are historically inaccurate. The medieval film can inspire them to double-check their interpretation of the existing evidence, and to ask, 'Is my vision of the past correct'?

Nevertheless, some films do take pains to represent the Middle Ages in ways that are faithful to the existing sources. These films are extremely use- ful, particularly to the medievalist, because they en- courage us to imagine the past. For medievalists it is extremely important to consider the broader picture, the world of the Middle Ages, because the Middle Ages in particular survive only in fragments, as a ruined castle here, a charter there, a music manu- script there. For instance, the Brother Cadfael TV series and The Name of the Rose depict life in a Benedictine monastery: how the brothers ate to- gether, chanted the Psalms together, fell asleep while chanting, and worked at different tasks. The fragments of medieval culture are put together in a way that allows watchers to visualise the past as a living, breathing reality, rather than as fragments of the past, the surviving illuminations or manuscripts or stone walls or tapestries.9

Medieval films - at last some of them, the

historically careful ones - encourage us to make a leap of imagination. For the specialist working on very specific issues and problems, the medieval film can serve as a reminder that Europe during the Middle Ages was not a 'problem', not a historical question posed by historians, but rather an entire universe, populated by living, breathing human be- ings. In his essay 'Learning and Imagination', Peter Brown has written of the need, 'in the middle of an exacting history course ... to take time off; to let the

imagination run; to give serious attention to reading books that widen our sympathies, that train us to imagine with greater precision what it is like to be human in situations very different from our own'.°1 The film about the Middle Ages allows us to imagine a world quite different from our own, in its entirety, and to imagine what it was like to be human in a situation very different from our own.

The film The Sorceress (1988) is an excellent example of the accurate historical film which encour- ages us to make such a leap of imagination. This film brings alive the world of medieval Catholic belief in the countryside - 'folk' belief, some might call it - and the workings of the Inquisition. The film tells the story of a Dominican friar's efforts to stop French villagers from worshiping a greyhound as a saint. It begins with the story of the dog-saint, Saint Guinefort. In the opening scenes, a baby lies in a cradle, where it is guarded by a greyhound. When a snake creeps up behind the baby, the dog attacks the snake and saves the baby's life. But when the baby's nurse and parents discover the dog, they assume that the dog has injured the baby, and they kill it - only then to realise that the dog saved the baby's life. Cut to peasants venerating the site of the dog's grave. When a zealous Dominican friar comes to town, he hears confessions from the village-folk, and learns about this dog-saint. Unlike the calm, kindly village priest, he sets out to eradicate belief in the dog-saint. This crusade brings him headlong into a conflict with the local herbalist, who happens to be extremely attractive as well as to perform healing rituals over ill children at the dog-saint's grave. The friar, who seems to have a crush on the beautiful herbalist, has her arrested as a witch. All ends for the best, how- ever, with the herbalist released, the friar dispatched, and the village-people free again to worship their dog-saint, St. Guinefort.

The Sorceress is a remarkably historically ac- curate movie. It is based on an account by a 13th century Dominican friar named Stephen of Bourbon,

139

Greta Austin

and probably inspired by a book called Le saint Ievrier: Guinefort, guerisseur d'enfants depuis le Xllle siecle, by Jean-Claude Schmitt.11 Schmitt examines the story told by Stephen and then the archaeological and textual evidence for worship of the dog-saint persisting up through the 19th century. Some of this film is based on historical evidence (the legend of St. Guinefort, the friar); some of it (the sexual tension between the friar and the herbalist, her imprison- ment, and some of the sub-plots) is not. One might quibble that Stephen describes the herbalist as an old woman (vetula) and that there is no evidence of any sexual tension between them. But so what? If the filmmakers introduced a sexual subplot to keep the movie more interesting, does it really change the story? The essential conflict - between the folk relig- ious practices of the countryside and the official Catholicism of the rapidly-growing institutional Church - remains the same. Furthermore, the film shows how the inquisition probably worked in prac- tice, with a friar coming to a town, eager to find heresy, and with the townspeople engaging in their own idiosyncratic form of religious worship.

We should ask all of these questions in read- ing, but sometimes the film forces us to re-read the texts in new ways. What were the anxieties and con- cerns of the inquisitor? What gave him authority? How did the local priest react? What would the towns- people tell the inquisitor? For instance, although Stephen says nothing of a village priest, The Sorcer- ess has one, a deeply sympathetic figure who medi- ates between the zealous inquisitor and the townspeople. The village priest probably existed, but Stephen is silent on the matter. Although The Sorcer- ess presents only one interpretation rather than al- lowing a variety of interpretations, it does fulfill a valuable function: it encourages us to reconsider our readings of the historical sources, as well as of Schmitt's monograph. At a broader level, it compels us to imagine what the Inquisition was really like, and what it meant to live under the Inquisition. In this way, accurate and inaccurate films which purport to rep- resent medieval life can both have value, either by inspiring viewers to question the facts and the repre- sentation of the facts, or by allowing us- in the case of reliable films - to imagine a very different world.

Finally, even the second type of film, the ironic films which do not try to be realistic in any way, can sometimes be useful to the medievalist. Although they make no pretenses whatsoever to creating an illusion of historical reality, they can succeed at never

letting the viewer forget that the Middle Ages can only be imagined, inadequately, by us today. Monty Py- thon and the Holy Grail, for instance, goes out of its way to remind you that it is a modern film with a modern perspective on a fictitious England of 932 CE. In it the stock figure of the documentary, the academic historian, appears in the middle of the story, only to be struck down by Lancelot. We are reminded that the Middle Ages must always, to some extent, be modernity in drag, even for the most seri- ous scholars.

Furthermore, some of these ironic films in- clude modern commentary, which call attention to larger structures in medieval society and the fictions of narrative itself. In Monty Python, for instance, a peasant labouring with a cart unleashes a Marxist tirade upon the oblivious Arthur. When Arthur re- minds the peasant, 'Well, I am the king', the peasant sharply retorts, 'How'd you get to be king, eh? By exploiting the workers, hanging onto outdated impe- rialist dogma, and perpetuating the economic and social differences in our society!' After Arthur strikes an ineffective blow in frustration, the peasant retorts sharply: 'Now we see the violence inherent in the system!' The historian's attention to deeply-embed- ded structures and 'mentalites', the historian's mod- ern perspective on lordship, and the historian's Achilles' heel, his desire to stand in the middle of the film and provide narrative structure: it is all there in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

In this way, medieval films can be profoundly useful to the medievalist. Films may not have foot- notes, they may be historically unreliable, and they may be irrevocably modern in their perspective and sensibilities. Yet, at the end of the day, most are enjoyable, and, if truth be told, they are often more engaging than reading a scholarly monograph. And, if films about the Middle Ages are enjoyable, they can accomplish several things. Even if a film is historically unreliable, it can encourage us to ask questions about how we know about what happened. It can awaken a historical curiosity about times which might seem very distant from ours. Films which are gener- ally historically reliable serve another, valuable func- tion: they allow us to make the historical leap of imagination, and to begin to imagine a world pro- foundly different from ours, one which usually exists only in fragmentary pieces. Even some ironic films which make few efforts to recreate another world view can provide modern perspectives onto medieval problems - the peasant ranting about the injustices

140

Were the peasants really so clean? The Middle Ages in film -ww, ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ s! /?M

of medieval society. In this way, films about the Middle Ages, a time very alien from our own, can

accomplish a number of ends: to awaken our sym- pathies and our historical curiosity, to make us aware

of our profoundly modern perspective, to allow us to

imagine the past - and, perhaps above all, to enjoy history.

NotesI

1. Robert Rosenstone, 'History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the possibility of really putting history onto film', American Historical Review 93 (1988), 1178.

2. See, for example, Kevin J. Harty, 'Jeanne au Cin6ma', in Bonnie Wheeler and Charles Wood (eds.) Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc (New York, 1996), 237-264, and Nadia Margolis, 'Trial by Passion: Philology, film and ideology in the portrayal of Joan of Arc, 1900-1930', Journal of Medieval and Early Moder Studies 27 (1997), 445-493.

3. As David Herlilhy points out, we know that Charle- magne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christ- mas, 800, but the chronicles do not tell us 'what the interior of old St. Peter's - a church not now standing - looked like on that evening, what the courtiers were wearing, what music was heard'. See 'Am I a Cam- era? Other reflections on films and history', American Historical Review 93 (1988), 1189.

4. Hayden White comments, 'No history, visual or ver- bal, "mirrors" all or even the greater part of the events or scenes of which it purports to be an account, and this is true even of the most narrowly restricted "micro-history". Every written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbol- isation and qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation', 'Histori- ography aand Historiophoty', American Historical Review 93 (1988), 1194.

5. Arthur Lindley, 'The ahistoricism of medieval film', Screening the Past 3 (1998), published on the Web at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/fir- strelease/fi r598/Alfr3a. htm.

6. Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1991), 43.

7. Herlihy, 1187.

8.

9.

On this point, see White, 1195.

Herlihy notes that historical films 'can convey very effectively a sense of style, tastes and customs ... Films undoubtedly can aid historians to make the past visually alive, tactile even, to the present'. Her- lihy, 1191.

10. Peter Brown, 'Learning and Imagination', Inaugural Lecture, Royal Holloway College, 1977; repr. In So- ciety and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982), 4.

11. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le saint levrier: Guinefort, gu6risseur d'enfants depuis le Xllle siecle (Paris 1979); translated into English as The Holy Grey- hound: Guinefort, healer of children since the thir- teenth century (trans. Martin Thom) (Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 6, Cambridge, 1983).

141