Pop culture portrayals of medieval and early modern monarchs are rife with tension between authenticity and modern mores, producing anachronisms such as a feminist Queen Isabel (in RTVE s
Isabel
) and a lesbian Queen Christina (in
The Girl King
). This book examines these anachronisms as a dialogue between premodern and postmodern ideas about gender and sexuality, raising questions of intertemporality, the interpretation of history, and the dangers of presentism. Covering a range of famous and lesser-known European monarchs on screen, from Elizabeth I to Muhammad XII of Granada, this book addresses how the lives of powerful women and men have been mythologized in order to appeal to today s audiences. The contributors interrogate exactly what is at stake in these portrayals; namely, our understanding of premodern rulers, the gender and sexual ideologies they navigated, and those that we navigate today.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Introduction: Getting Modern: Depicting Premodern Power and Sexuality in Popular Media. - I. Reappraising female rulers in the light of modern feminism(s). - 2. Early Modern Queens on Screen: Victors, Victims, Villains, Virgins, and Viragoes. - 3. Silencing Queens: The Dominated Discourse of Historical Queens in Film. - 4. Feminism, Fiction, and the Empress Matilda. - 5. " She is my Eleanor" : The Character of Isabella of Angoulême on Film A Medieval Queen in Modern Media. - 6. Women' s Weapons in
The White Queen
. - 7. " Men go to battle, women wage war" : Gender Politics in
The White Queen
and its Fandom. - II. Questions of adaptation: Bringing premodern queens to the page and screen. - 8. Religious Medievalisms in RTVE' s
Isabel
. - 9. " The Queen of Time" : Isabel I in
The Ministry of Time
(2015) and
The Queen of Spain
(2016). - 10. From Mad Love to Mad Lust: The Dangers of Female Desire in Twenty-First Century Representations of Juana I of Castile in Film and Television. - 11. The Filmic Legacy of Queen Christina: Mika Kaurimäski s
Girl King
(2015) and Bernard Tavernier s Cinematic " Amazons" in
D Artagnan s Daughter
(1994) and
The Princess of Monpensier
(2010). - 12. Thomas Imbach s Marian Biopic: Postmodern Period Drama or Old-Fashioned Psychogram? - III. Undermining authority: Rulers with conflicted gender and sexual identities. - 13. Queering Isabella: The " She-Wolf of France" in Film and Television. - 14. Seeing Him for What He Was: Reimagining King Olaf II Haraldsson in Post-War Popular Culture. - 15. Televising Boabdil, Last Muslim King of Granada. - 16. A man? A woman? A lesbian? A whore? : Queen Elizabeth I and the Cinematic Subversion of Gender.
