Medievalisms and Others: Exploring Knights and Vikings at the Movies

By Marvin Lee Dupree

Master’s Thesis, University of Utrecht, 2014

Abstract: This thesis deals with medievalism within medieval cinema and how certain social groups are represented within these cultural productions. In my thesis I explore how and what medievalism is, especially in comparison to historical film. By utilizing the terminology, I analyze Arthurian films and Arthurian inspired films, as well as films dealing with Vikings. Because, medieval cinema has often been used for propaganda purposes how I explore how these films function, and in what manner they convey nationalistic sentiments, while also highlighting the alterity of other social groups not belonging to the normative core.

Introduction: One of the great problems when dealing with the Middle Ages is the fundamental dilemma: the epistemological problem of conceptualizing and reconstructing the period with the aid of sources. How much can be reconstructed is the eternal gnawing question for all medievalists, not to mention historians in general. Sir Philip Sidney in his treatise “Defense of Poesy” argues that a “historian, bound to tell things as things were, cannot be liberal … the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things”. In fact this theoretical question can be juxtaposed with the mimetic question of representation that began with Ancient Greek philosophy and still reverberates today.


This particular problem is quite significant since Rankean positivism within historiography and within the interpretive community subscribes to this theoretical stance. Depicting history within film is always subjective because the mere act of editing and the choice of subject material create an ideological stance. Indeed, the cinematic topics that deal with the Middle Ages are often analyzed under the rubrics of historical inaccuracies and in this introduction I would like to demarcate how the problematic nature of interpretation among historians can be a crucial issue within medieval studies, by emphasizing this methodological issue to medievalisms within film. Finally, in subchapter 1.4, the outline of my thesis is then revealed.

Click here to read this thesis from the University of Utrecht