This chapter shows that all films have been considered medieval by a surprisingly large number of influential film theorists. It argues that the conceptualisation of film as medieval in its production, transmission, aesthetics or reception originates with the earliest attempts to come to terms with the new medium and underlies many influential film theories of the twentieth century and even the most recent media theories. The chapter shows the ways in which preconceived notions of the Middle Ages filtered into and were influenced by film theory throughout the twentieth century; and to what extent film theory relies on knowledge about the Middle Ages for its basic principles. The reliance of film theory on medievalism has never been acknowledged by film scholars. This is symptomatic of the traditional divide between medieval and modern studies, where the continuities and influences of medieval thought, art and culture on modernity are rarely researched.

This chapter discusses the problems posed to film, since the advent of sound film, by foreign language - problems which relate as much to questions of mimesis and representation as to the international circulation of film. It explores to what extent medieval film engages with questions of language, and to what extent these engagements may be distinctive. Three principal sites of activity are identified: extra-diegetically speaking, subtitles constitute a key authenticity-effect. Diegetically speaking, in its representations of situations of language contact and translation, it is argued here that popular medieval film shares contemporary cinematic concerns about intercultural communication in a global society. In films aimed at monolingual audiences, diegetic interpreting or subtitles are likely to be required. Rather than having a supplemental function, these subtitles constitute an integral element of filmic medievalism. Subtitles may also be pressed into service in films that portray themselves as 'rewriting' the medieval past.

This chapter highlights the music of four medieval films: the folk-inspired melodies of Brother Sun Sister Moon, the synthesised keyboards of Ladyhawke, the sweeping orchestration of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the rock-and-roll soundtrack of A Knight's Tale. These films use music to bridge a gap between the postmodern and medieval and to add new narrative information that is not present in the films' visual story. Films that are set within the medieval era are examples of medievalisms - post-medieval refashionings of the medieval age, posing as the real thing. Disphasure, then, can be a useful term to describe the ways in which film music plays a unique role in films that endeavour to represent the medieval period. Symphonic music continues to be a popular option for historical films' scores, but today a film's soundtrack is a critical component in the marketing schemes, and music videos for the film.

This chapter argues that certain films with medieval themes and settings, mostly dating from the 1940s to the 1960s, demonstrate a surprising affinity with the themes and techniques associated with film noir. The romanticism of medieval films may be regarded as a virtual antidote to the cynicism and nihilism of film noir. Film theory has also drawn some implicit parallels between medieval films and noir. Medieval historical movies and crime films share a certain generic status in cinematic taxonomies. Film noir historians have always attempted to distinguish between earlier crime films and the unique characteristics of films noir. German expressionism is one of the most widely cited sources for film noir, especially given the exile of so many fugitive film-makers from Nazi Germany in Hollywood. But German expressionist film is also one of the tributaries of high-art medieval movies.

The Bayeux Tapestry appears most often in historical fiction cinema as a prologue integrated into an opening title sequence, and, less frequently, in scenes of it being embroidered and assembled by women: Chimene in El Cid; Ophelia and other women in Hamlet; and Marian Dubois in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. This chapter discusses the ways in which the Bayeux Tapestry in cinema clarifies the limits of the dominant ways in which literary and film historicism has been thought in terms of mimetic matching between film and history or in terms of a framing effect. A close reading of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves's opening title sequence, which condenses and recuts panels of the Tapestry as a montage, helps explain how the film fails to deliver both on its ostensibly liberal politics of multicultural tolerance and as a narrative film of any consequence.

The importance of the body – in its own right and as a political, cosmic, and metapoetic symbol – in Attic and Senecan tragedy has long been recognized in scholarship, as has the significance of contemporary medical theories for these plays, but this motif has not been discussed in relation to the surviving fragments of Ennian tragedy. Yet those fragments – frustratingly exiguous though they are – feature substantial depictions of Alcmeo’s mental and physical pathology, the war-wounds of Eurypylus, and Thyestes’ verbal dissection of his brother Atreus, alongside numerous briefer references to disease, injury, and the body. This chapter explores these Ennian engagements with the body and medical theory through various historicizing lenses; with due caution, moreover, it explores the ways in which these lenses can be used to build a provisional picture of the role of the medical and the corporeal in the poet’s tragedies.

Considering Ennius’ Hedyphagetica in its contexts of sympotic celebration, this chapter contends that some later Roman authors – namely, Lucilius, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, and Persius – think of Ennius as a seafood specialist. They have, it suggests, an eye on his Hedyphagetica’s relationship with his Annales as one whereby both poems come packaged together in the reception of the older mainland Italian poet.

If we go by editions of the Annales, Ennius included a series of striking self-references in his epic. These lines’ nature, number (or rate of survival), and their proximity to self-referential comments made by prose historians make them extraordinary in the context of epic. Thus, they shape our sense of the ambitions the Annales housed and the sorts of generic experimentation its author was prepared to engage in. Ennius’ reference to his advanced age, unparalleled in the epic tradition as we know it, is securely attested for one of the later books of the epic. But often, Ennian self-referential lines are not attributed to a specific work by their sources. Like other lines now conventionally assigned to the Annales, these lines could plausibly have originated in a different Ennian work. In particular, the Saturae present themselves as the most likely candidate. This chapter explores the range of possibilities allowable for Ennian self-references beyond the Annales and sketches the difference that reading this subset of lines in non-epic Ennian contexts would make.

The importance of music is conspicuously evident in Cicero’s responses to Ennian tragedy: he refers to connoisseurs who could identify characters from single notes played in the tibia and to accompanied performance. The metres used in the fragments of Ennius’ tragedies reveal that Ennius made the Greek tragedies he adapted considerably more musical, and that music contributed significantly to the plots and emotional tone of the plays and to Ennius’ portrayal of character. In his Medea, for example, Ennius appears to have added music to Medea’s initial address to the chorus (90 TrRF II), to the agon between Jason and Medea (92 TrRF II), and to Medea’s final farewell to her children (97 TrRF II).

The treatment of Rome and its history in Ennius’ Annales has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. This work has shown well that the epic sets the city at the centre of a widening Roman world, thereby making it a cosmic hub of space and time. Such epic transformations also transform perspectives on the past and the present. What of Rome in the rest of Ennius’ wide-ranging literary output? How does the tri- or quadrilingual former Rudian approach his new unelected home and its socio-cultural practices in genres beyond epic? Taking into consideration the representation of (urban) space, monuments, social practices (especially ritual acts, praise, and elite self-presentation), and intersectional conceptions of Roman identity, this chapter examines the ways in which Ennius’ writings construct and reflect Rome qua city and set of cultural values and perspectives. The Scipio, Ambracia, and Sabinae anchor the chapter, but the contribution also uncovers key themes in less expected places, with some comment on the epigrams, Hedyphagetica, and philosophical works.

Against received opinion, this chapter argues that Ennius does not primarily figure as a stalwart of ancient Roman values within Varro’s Menippean Satires: the Ennius of these understudied late-republican texts is rather a boldly experimental and multiform poet, a model for Varro’s own modernist project. Particular attention is paid to Varro’s Bimarcus, in which a “new” fragment of Ennius’ Saturae is tentatively discovered.

This chapter investigates the diction of the fragments attributed to Ennius’ Saturae by ancient sources and conjecturally by modern editors. While thirty or so transmitted lines naturally do not permit one to paint a conclusive picture of Ennius’ experiment, a little more can be said about the relationship between his Saturae and those of Lucilius, and ultimately about Ennius’ role in the introduction of personal poetry at Rome. Monologic and dialogic utterances and the mixture of metres (iambo-trochaic, hexameter, Sotadean) and registers (comic, informal, mock-epic) will be discussed, using Lucilius as a comparandum. Attention is paid to “early” features of language and style, with reference to Ennius’ diction in his epic and dramatic works.