1 - The Academy and the Making of Neomedievalism

Summary

CAROLYN DINSHAW, in her now famous essay “Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Gawain, Foucault,” explains how she was drawn to what she saw as an unsettling use of “medieval” in contemporary popular film. Her analysis addresses the utterance a character from the film Pulp Fiction makes as a promise of retributive physical violence: “I’m gonna git Medieval on your ass.” Dinshaw's interest goes beyond the utterance per se and extends to how the words themselves, completely divorced of the context of the film, made their way into popular culture. She notes:

The phrase has entered American public culture. Why has it proved so popular? What exactly makes it so useful? To get a clue, I want to look first at what it means in this film: why this word here? What function does it perform other than to inflict a slight sting on the medievalist, buried in the past but finally getting out to see a movie?

As Dinshaw makes a gentle, comic jab at her own profession, she clearly identifies herself as a medievalist. She then goes on to draw connections between the structure and action of the film and trends in medieval texts, and also compares her film analysis to a more traditionally medievalist reading of the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight before bringing in theory via the work of Michel Foucault. Notably, a revised version of the essay that appears as the “Coda” to her book Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern drops the section on Gawain altogether (a section which always seemed superfluous to me), suggesting that it may have been there to help legitimate the initial incarnation of the argument with a direct dash of canonical medieval studies material: a dash that proves unnecessary in the later incarnation, possibly due to the book's treatment of medieval material elsewhere and/or the increased professional footprint of the author.

The terms used above – medievalist and medieval studies – may seem straightforward to academics working within medieval studies; however, both the changing nature of academic fields and the ongoing fascination in popular culture with the Middle Ages and medievalism warrant a closer look at these concepts. Before it addresses neomedievalism, then, this chapter begins with an effort to clarify (or at least more precisely complicate) two pairs of terms: (1) medievalists and medieval studies, and (2) medievalism and the Middle Ages.