ABSTRACT
Until the middle of the 1970s, a series of important films advanced this visual demolition of the romantic image of the noble Middle Ages. The highly exact sets and costumes, the realism in the depiction of everyday life among knights and peasants, the epic filming techniques form an impressive and serious visual depiction of a ‘different’ Middle Ages. At the same time, this serious depiction is completely demolished on the level of plot. A Morbid Taste for Bones was published in 1977 as a ‘medieval mystery’ under the pen name of Ellis Peters by the English author Edith Pargeter who had made a modest success by writing conventional contemporary crime stories and historical novels in the 1950s and 60s. In the middle of the 1990s, and as an obvious response to the success of British medieval mysteries, a number of writers of historical crime fiction made their appearance in Continental Europe and the USA.
