French Studies: A Quarterly Review

If, as Umberto Eco once wrote, modernity can be characterized by its dreams of the Middle Ages, then the silver screen — modernity's dream-machine par excellence — must surely play a privileged role in that continuous construction of the medieval Other which scholars term medievalism. Building on Eco's insight, Justine Breton here examines the role of television series in the entangled processes of representing and constructing the Middle Ages. Breton takes a comprehensive and diachronic approach to her subject, offering a survey of eighty-one medievalizing television shows from the late [End Page 364] 1940s to the present day, from the United States and Western Europe to the Middle East and Japan (a full list is given on pp. 379–80). The selected shows use serialized narrative to entertain home audiences with representations of a fictionalized Middle Ages, realist or fantastic. Breton defends the inclusion of fantasy on the grounds that for many it forms an important stimulus to imagining the medieval, while its immense popularity (epitomized for example in the success of Game of Thrones) points to the emblematic role of fantasy in the modern medievalizing imagination. Central to Breton's study is the concept of 'médiévalisme sériel' (p. 15), a form of medievalism which she proposes as specific to the medium of serialized televisual narrative. This medium, Breton argues, is characterized by a kind of chiaroscuro aesthetic. As a cinematic experience designed for the home, series must be at once intimate and spectacular. Moreover, the need for any successful serial to offer variety at the narrative level is particularly well served by the medieval imaginary, which has traditionally been polarized between visions of violence on the one hand and fairy-tale utopias on the other: in other words between visions of darkness and light. Breton is less interested in the extent to which the shows under examination faithfully reproduce facets of a historical culture than in what their individual and cumulative representations of the medieval may tell us about modernity's relationship with this part of its past. To extend the dreaming metaphor, Breton's book may thus be said to investigate what Freud termed the dream-work: the logic of transformation interposed between the referent and its symbolic manifestation. What Breton uncovers is that the fascination modernity exhibits towards the medieval appears to be grounded in the capacity of the medievalizing imagination to legitimize some of our society's most deeply held fantasies. Paradoxically, serial medievalism allows shows both to denigrate the past for those aspects in which it can easily be made to appear regressive (such as a lack of hygiene, absence of democracy) and to celebrate it for embodying supposedly traditional values such as stereotyped gender norms (and correspondingly hypersexualized physiques). Medievalism is thus what it always has been: a discourse of otherness in relation not to an Other in space (ethnic or geographical) but to one in time. With serial medievalism, the medieval Other is ventriloquized and dramatized — exploited, in other words — to reinforce the mainstays of modern identity.