Francis on Eli Stone!

I was excited to see this piece in the latest issue of SMART. Francis always has interesting things to say about how modern texts use the medieval. Copies of the journal can be purchased from the publisher at http://webs.wichita.edu/?u=smart&p=.

Francis, Christina. “The Usefulness of Eli Stone to Teaching Medieval Narrative.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, vol. 26, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 133-43. 

Details on the Eli Stone series can be found on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Stone.

Ambrisco on Beowulf and Grendel

A recent issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching featured the following essay on the film Beowulf and Grendel. Back issues of the journal can be ordered from the publisher at http://webs.wichita.edu/?u=smart&p=.

Ambrisco, Alan S. “Battling Monstrosity in Beowulf and Grendel (2005): Using a Film Adaptation to Teach Beowulf.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, vol. 23, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 29-40.

Chaucer on Screen Contents

The following contents list for Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh's new book Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales is based on that in WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org/title/chaucer-on-screen-absence-presence-and-adapting-the-canterbury-tales/oclc/945948419). A PDF of the complete contents pages can be accessed from the publisher at https://ohiostatepress.org/books/BookPages/kelly_pugh_chaucer.html.

It looks to be a fairly complete volume. Too bad its priced at $94.95(though a PDF version is offered for $19.95, if you can live without a physical book). 

Foreword / Terry Jones

Introduction / Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh

PART 1: THEORIZING ABSENCE
Naked yet invisible: filming Chaucer's narrator / Elizabeth Scala --
"The play's the thing": the cinematic fortunes of Chaucer and Shakespeare / Susan Aronstein and Peter Parolin --
Chaucer, film, and the desert of the real; or, why Geoffrey Chaucer will never be Jane Austen / Larry Scanlon --
Profit, politics, and prurience; or, why Chaucer is bad box office / Kathleen Forni --






PART  2: LOST AND FOUND
Chaucer and the moving image in pre-World War II America / Lynn Arner --
Lost Chaucer: Natalie Wood's "The deadly riddle" and the golden age of American television / Candace Barrington --



PART 3: PRESENCE
Chaucerian history and cinematic perversions in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury tale / Tison Pugh --
Idols of the marketplace: Chaucer/Pasolini / Kathryn L. Lynch --
"Sorry, Chaucer": mixed feelings and Hyapatia Lee's Ribald tales of Canterbury / George Shuffelton --
The naked truth: Chaucerian spectacle in Brian Helgeland's A knight's tale / Sian Echard --



PART 4: THE BBC CANTERBURY TALES (2003)
Putting the second first: the BBC "Miller's tale" / Steve Ellis --
Midlife sex and the BBC "Wife of Bath" / Sarah Stanbury --
Serving time: the BBC "Knight's tale" in the prison-house of free adaptation / Louise D'Arcens --
The color of money: the BBC "Sea captain's tale" / Kathleen Coyne Kelly --
Sex, plague, and resonance: reflections on the BBC "Pardoner's tale" / Arthur Bahr --
Time, memory, and desire in the BBC "Man of law's tale" / Kathleen Davis --



PART 5: ABSENT PRESENCE
Marketing Chaucer: Mad men and the Wife of Bath / Laurie Finke and Martin B. Shichtman.

Medieval Studies on TV Update

I was remiss in posting notice of the following session in a timely manner. My apologies to the presenters and area chairs.

27th Annual Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association

Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey

3-5 November 2016

Friday, 4 November 2016

Session II (11:00 AM – 12:15 PM)

Medieval Studies on TV (Beowulf to Shakespeare: Popular Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance I) (Bongo 1)

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa

Presider: Diana Vecchio (Widener University)

Paper 1: Game On: The Medievalism of Television Golf Tournaments

Martha Oberle (Independent Scholar)

Paper 2: No Such Thing as Bad Press: Christian Conversion Narrative in the Popular Culture Series Vikings

Jennifer Veronica Agnes MacLellan (Háskóli Íslands)

Paper 3: The Evolving Realism of the Trebuchet from Excalibur to Game of Thrones

Scott Manning (American Military University)

Animating the Medieval Update (September 2016)

I am pleased to announce the slate for our upcoming session at next year's International Congress on Medieval Studies:

Animating the Medieval: Research on Animated Representations of the Middle Ages in Memory of Michael N. Salda

Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Organizer: Michael A. Torregrossa (Independent Scholar)

Presider: Jennie Friedrich (University of California, Riverside)

Paper #1: Reading, Writing, and Sorcery: Education in the Animated Middle Ages

Valentina S. Grub (University of St Andrews)

Valentina S. Grub is in the final year of her PhD at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She graduated with a degree in Medieval & Renaissance Literature and Classical Civilization from Wellesley College, and earned her master's degree in Medieval Studies from St. Andrews. Her dissertation looks at the ritualization of medieval English embroidery between 1250-1350. Her research has been published in Allegorica, The Manuscript Hub, and Sequitur.

Paper #2: History and Stories: The Middle Ages in European Animated Cartoons

Marie-Anne Smith (Independent Scholar)

Marie-Anne Smith is now an independent scholar but worked for more than ten years as assistant curator in French and British museums and as lecturer at the Ecole du Louvre. She obtained a BA in History from the Sorbonne, Paris, an MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art, London and a PhD in Art History from the Ecole du Louvre, Paris in 2004. Although her first works focused on the development of armament in the 15th and 16th century with the publication of Glossaire des termes militaires français du XVIème siècle and Swords and Saucepans: Arms and Armor in Parisian domestic interiors she also reached a wider audience by collaborating on productions such as Les Mots-Clés de la Renaissance and the children book Au Temps des Chevaliers. Convinced that entertainment media such as comic-books or video games can be an ideal link between scholars and the general public, she will show in her paper how animated cartoons, often dismissed as “childish,” have been regularly used in the transmission of historic knowledge.

Paper #3: Teaching the History of the English Language with Comics

Patrick J. Murphy (Miami University)

Patrick J. Murphy is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he has taught medieval literature and the history of the English language since receiving his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. His research has appeared in the journals English Studies, Philological Quarterly, Modern Philology, English Literature in Transition, Review of English Studies, and Studies in Medievalism. His book Unriddling the Exeter Riddles was published in 2011 by Penn State University Press and a new monograph, Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M.R. James, is forthcoming from the same press in May 2017. He has long had an interest in teaching with comics, and his latest project (just now underway) is to develop the "ink talks" he has been illustrating for a course on historical linguistics into a full-length work of graphic nonfiction: A Comics History of the English Language. The current proposed paper is a first attempt to share these materials with, and gain feedback from, an audience outside the classroom.

CFP Animating the Medieval (proposals by 9/15/16)

Animating the Medieval: Research on Animated Representations of the Middle Ages in Memory of Michael N. Salda
Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan
11-14 May 2017
Proposals due by 15 September 2016

Medievalist Michael N. Salda passed away in October 2015. He was, perhaps, best known for his work on Chaucer and Malory, but scholars of the medieval on screen owe him a greater debt for his pioneering work on animated films, television programming, and theatrical shorts based on medieval subjects. Much of his activities in this field focused on the Matter of Britain. He began these efforts in the mid-1990s, and they culminated in his monograph Arthurian Animation: A Study of Cartoon Camelots on Film and Television published in 2013. In addition, Salda’s interests in animated representations of the medieval extended beyond Arthurian subjects; he also contributed an essay on the Vikings in animation for Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages (2011) and was working on a venture devoted to cataloging the more general use of the medieval in animation, a project that now seems unlikely to appear given his untimely death. However, as advocates of the Once and Future King have sustained the ideals of their fallen Arthur, we, too, are able to follow Salda’s model and honor his memory in continuing his work by building upon his scholarship in our own contributions to studies of the medieval on screen and by tracking down and discussing additional representations of the medieval in animation. We believe these efforts both further the mission of The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture (successor to the Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages) in promoting original research on the medieval in popular culture and acknowledge the lasting impact of a colleague that changed the field of Medievalism Studies for the better.

Presentations will be limited to 10-15 minutes depending on panel size, and The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture asks that accepted presenters submit their completed papers for publication on the Medieval Studies on Screen site (https://medievalstudiesonscreen.blogspot.com/) prior to the conference to allow maximum dissemination of their ideas.

Interested individuals should submit, no later than 15 September 2015, (1) an abstract of approximately 500 words, (2) a 500-word biography, and (3) a completed Participant Information Form (accessible at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions) to the organizers at MedievalStudiesonScreen@gmail.com using “Animating the Medieval” as their subject heading.

In planning your proposal, please be aware of the policies of the Congress (available at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/policies).

Game of Thrones Psychology

Game of Thrones Psychology is a new book from Sterling Publishing. The publisher's website is still under construction and there are no previews available online or contents list posted anywhere yet, so do see the scans below for details.

Kalamazoo Update June 2016

I am pleased to report that our session on medievalism and animation has been accepted for next year's International Congress on Medieval Studies. The officifal call for papers will be posted in July, but do contact me as soon as possible if you might be interested in presenting.

The session proposal follows.

Michael Torregrossa
Founder, The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture


Animating the Medieval: Research on Animated Representations of the Middle Ages in Memory of Michael N. Salda
Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Medievalist Michael N. Salda passed away in October 2015. He was, perhaps, best known for his work on Chaucer and Malory, but scholars of the medieval on screen owe him a greater debt for his pioneering work on animated films, television programming, and theatrical shorts based on medieval subjects. Much of his activities in this field focused on the Matter of Britain. He began these efforts in the mid-1990s, and they culminated in his monograph Arthurian Animation: A Study of Cartoon Camelots on Film and Television published in 2013. In addition, Salda’s interests in animated representations of the medieval extended beyond Arthurian subjects; he also contributed an essay on the Vikings in animation for Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages (2011) and was working on a venture devoted to cataloging the more general use of the medieval in animation, a project that now seems unlikely to appear given his untimely death. However, as advocates of the Once and Future King have sustained the ideals of their fallen Arthur, we, too, are able to follow Salda’s model and honor his memory in continuing his work by building upon his scholarship in our own contributions to studies of the medieval on screen and by tracking down and discussing additional representations of the medieval in animation. We believe these efforts both further the mission of the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture (successor to the Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages) in promoting original research on the medieval in popular culture and acknowledge the lasting impact of a colleague that changed the field of Medievalism Studies for the better.