Touching the Past

GET MEDIEVAL. This now infamous phrase derives from a scene embedded in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which premiered a few months after Derek Jarman's death in 1994. Raped in a sadomasochistic dungeon and rescued by the man he has been chasing (Butch Coolidge, played by Bruce Willis), the criminal boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) shoots in the groin the individual who had earlier sodomised him at gunpoint, threatens him with a pair of pliers and a blow torch, and declares: “Hear me talkin’ hillbilly boy?! I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'm gonna git Medieval on your ass.” Wallace's announcement that he is going to inflict some medieval-style torment on his attacker-turned-victim calls on the very visceral associations that the word “medieval” popularly evokes: barbaric, brutal, bloody and dark.

Getting Medieval is also the title of an influential book by the medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw. Working against Tarantino's reductive (and implicitly homophobic) sense of medieval as a space of abjection and otherness, Dinshaw looks instead to a series of contemporary writers and thinkers for whom the medieval period offers up desirable alternatives to aspects of modernity: “Getting medieval: not undertaking brutal private vengeance in a triumphal and unregulated bloodbath, as Marsellus Wallace threatens in Pulp Fiction … but using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future.”

This chapter presents an overview of Jarman's encounters with the medieval in his filmmaking, art and writings, bringing his own efforts to “touch” the past into focus. While Jarman's “medieval” occasionally conforms to Tarantino's perception of it as an abject other, my argument is that the way Jarman gets medieval conforms more closely to Dinshaw's definition. By taking a journey into these so-called “Middle Ages” – their art and architecture, their religious and literary cultures, and their portrayals of time and space – Jarman was able to imagine a vision of the future that bypassed some of the straitjackets of modernity. First, I consider Jarman's attitudes to religion, with particular reference to the institutions of medieval Christianity.