Vaguely Medieval, Genuinely Silly, Wildly Entertaining: New York City Center’s Encore! Concert Production of Once Upon a Mattress (based upon The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen) Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University harty@lasalle.edu Medievalism as stage musical is a small subgenre.  There is Camelot, which may not have aged well given the short run of the recent New York revival at Lincoln Center.  On the other hand, Spamalot’s current Broadway revival is doing well at the box office and has garnered generally positive reviews. Twang—the disastrous ..read more

GEHM: A Post-Mortem Analysis Leandro César Santana Neves  Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra    The rise and fall of GEHM  In early 2020, the Grupo de Estudos em História Medieval (GEHM), also known as the Study Group of Medieval History, emerged as a result of the proactive efforts of undergraduate students from the State University of Montes Claros (Unimontes), Brazil, who were engaged in exploring themes related to the Middle Ages for their bachelor theses. The primary purpose behind the group's establishment was to provide a safe and conducive platform for Unimon ..read more

Historial Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen   Historial Jeanne d’Arc 7 Rue Saint-Romain, 76000 Rouen https://www.historial-jeannedarc.fr/   Reviewed by Scott Manning, Independent Scholar scottmanning13@gmail.com     Among the many historical sites related to Joan of Arc in Rouen, the former English capital of Normandy, visitors can see the tower where Joan was threatened with torture and the old market square where she was executed. Newly enhanced among these sites is the palace of the archbishop of Rouen where portions of both Joan’s condemnation trial (1431) and the nullification pr ..read more

Mrs. Davis and the Search for the Holy Grail; or, Спасибо meiner Herr vamános toute de suite fel y gwynt.  An eight-part miniseries airing on the Peacock Network. 20 April-18 May 2023.   Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University harty@lasalle.edu   Spoiler alert: loads of key plot details in the review below   If, for some reason, you had nothing better to do and wanted to combine Monty Python and the Holy Grail with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Julian of Norwich’s Showings, you’d end up with the Peacock Network’s madly brilliant Mrs. Davis. The series jumps from ti ..read more

Richard Scott Nokes, Beowulf in Comic Books and Graphic Novels. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2023. Pp. xi, 197. ISBN: 978-1-4766-8778-0. $50.    Reviewed by Carl B. Sell University of Pittsburgh   Richard Scott Nokes’s Beowulf in Comic Books and Graphic Novels offers a thorough examination of themes, textual differences, and key similarities in adaptations of the Old English epic poem Beowulf in the contemporary medium of comics and graphic novels. Based in part upon Jason Tondro’s five categories for adaptations of King Arthur from the article “Camelot in Comics” and, later ..read more

CHAUCER’S ALYSON IN LONDON: Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, a transfer of the original 2020 Kiln Theatre/ Brent Borough of Culture production to the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA, and then to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 25 February-16 April 2023. Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty La Salle University harty@lasalle.edu   Chaucer’s Wife of Bath has had more afterlives than she had husbands at the church door and company kept in her youth combined.  Betsy Bowden’s 2017 The Wife of Bath in Afterlife: Ballads to Blake, remains a definitive study, and Marion Turner has just pu ..read more

Obsidian Entertainment, Pentiment (2022). Reviewed by Clint Morrison, Jr (morrison.679@buckeyemail.osu.edu)   Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment is a love letter to medieval manuscripts. From the opening start screen to the sound effects of pen touching parchment (or typeset blocks being pressed), each part of the video game’s presentation shares an admiration and adoration for the materials with the game’s protagonist Andreas and those (more religious) figures around him in an Upper Bavarian Abbey’s scriptorium.   The developers at Obsidian weave an intriguing tale of murder and ..read more

Barbarians, Season 1 Reviewed by Katrin Thier, independent scholar [Contains mild spoilers] The recent release of Barbarians season 2 on Netflix (German: Barbaren; 2020–) invites a rewatch of the first season of this Roman-period historical drama set in northern Germany. At this point, I should probably apologize for sharing my musings in this forum, as the setting appears to disqualify the show from being medieval by the very definition of the European Middle Ages as post-Roman. However, in spite of its early setting, it contains much that is familiar from medievalist drama. Some of this is ..read more

Peredur Glyn, Pumed Gainc y Mabinogi (Talybont, Y Lolfa: 2022). Reviewed by Simon Rodway (syr@aber.ac.uk) The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a collection of four medieval Welsh tales set in an imagined pre-Roman British past, have been a fruitful source of material for modern writers, both in Welsh and in English. They have inspired High Fantasy romps such as American author Lloyd Alexander’s children’s classic Chronicles of Prydain from the 1960s or the recent highly enjoyable Welsh-language Manawydan Jones by Alun Davies, also aimed at children. Other authors have transposed the characters ..read more

  BLOOD, MUD, AND THE CZECH NATIONAL IDENTITY: Petr Jákl’s 2022 film Medieval   Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty La Salle University harty@lasalle.edu   The first word that we hear on the screen is “violence” in a voice over by Michael Caine (yes, that Michael Caine, no less), here cast as Lord Boreš, ambassador extraordinaire for a Holy Roman Empire in political and religious turmoil.  That one word sets the tone for the two hours which follow.  Medieval (released in Europe under the title Jan Žižka) bears no relation to previous examples of cinematic medievalism that were ..read more