ABSTRACT
Movies can be dangerous for medievalists. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail no sooner has a crusty tweed-jacketed professor of medieval history begun his lecture on the film's lack of historical accuracy than he is cut down by a mounted knight in armour who gallops off. In The Fisher King, the Robin Williams character finds that his obsession with the Middle Ages leads to him living rough on the streets of New York, streets filled with hallucinatory visions of medieval knights. Yet movies remain strangely seductive. No less a figure than Georges Duby hoped to see his book on the battle of Bouvines filmed and fretted on the problems of representing the daily lived reality of the distant past on the big screen. For medievalists, the cross-over between film and medievalism may also have roots in early cinema.
