The “Editorial Note” to the previous volume of Studies in Medievalism remarked that it contained no contribution directed towards popular, commercial, and contemporary forms of medievalism, but that these would be as welcome in future as studies directed towards the academy or towards medievalisms of the past. It is a pleasure accordingly to note that the balance has been to some extent redressed in the present volume, which contains three essays discussing modern film representations of the Middle Ages.

Nickolas Haydock's analysis of the movies First Knight and A Knight’s Tale indeed challenges common academic views of these mass-market productions, including it must be confessed this editor’s. A standard professional reaction to them, made overt in several reviews, has been to dismiss them as simply erroneous, ignorant, even catchpenny. First Knight delivers a version of the Arthurian story which makes drastic changes to the canonical versions of Malory, or Tennyson, or even John Boorman, and has accordingly been condemned for its lack of fidelity. A Knight’s Tale meanwhile presents the chivalric tournament with all the accoutrements of modern professional sport, including fans, stars, and even hooligans, while Chaucer, “the father of English poetry,” becomes a public relations expert. Deliberate anachronism, or just insolence? Haydock carefully and engagingly presents a perspective from outside traditional scholarship, while exposing and demolishing many of the standard assumptions about how such “historiographic metafictions” should be “read,” or viewed.

Gwendolyn Morgan takes a more aggressive view of the two recent film versions of the story of Joan of Arc, showing how they reject many aspects of what is a well-documented life, arguably out of the triumphalism which is so marked a strain in modern views of “the Middle Ages,” and expressed of course in the very phrase “Middle Ages.” Not dissimilarly from Haydock, though, Morgan concludes that “the more we compare the products of popular culture to current scholarly trends, the more we see that they take different, but equally serious, departures from record.” The 1994 film of The Advocate, discussed in detail by William Woods, was the least commercially successful of the medievalising films grouped together here, as also the most artistically ambitious and deliberately provocative.