ABSTRACT
As any casual viewing of a film featuring a medieval setting attests, anachronisms appear throughout this cinematic genre in terms of the costumes, props, dialogues, and outlooks that are intended to convey historical authenticity yet fail to denote the factual contours of medieval life. As historiographers have long observed, history is written not simply to record the past but to create a narrative of the past for consumption in the present, and the same is true for “medieval” films and their frequent use of anachronisms to impart messages about the past through the present. The humor of the Connecticut Yankee narrative and its descendants arises in large part from the comic disjunctions of transposing elements from the present to the medieval past, and Black Knight revels in such naive anachronisms for the sheer pleasure of disrupting linear temporality.
