Premodern Rulers and Postmodern Viewers

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Introduction—Getting Modern: Depicting Premodern Power and Sexuality in Popular Media

   • Janice North, Elena Woodacre, Karl C. Alvestad

   Pages 1-19

3. Reappraising Female Rulers in the Light of Modern Feminism(s)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 21-25

      PDF

   2. Early Modern Queens on Screen: Victors, Victims, Villains, Virgins, and Viragoes

      • Elena Woodacre

      Pages 27-50

   3. Silencing Queens: The Dominated Discourse of Historical Queens in Film

      • April Harper

      Pages 51-68

   4. Feminism, Fiction, and the Empress Matilda

      • Katherine Weikert

      Pages 69-89

   5. ‘She Is My Eleanor’: The Character of Isabella of Angoulême on Film—A Medieval Queen in Modern Media

      • Carey Fleiner

      Pages 91-110

   6. Women’s Weapons in The White Queen

      • Misty Urban

      Pages 111-129

   7. ‘Men Go to Battle, Women Wage War’: Gender Politics in The White Queen and Its Fandom

      • Kavita Mudan Finn

      Pages 131-151

4. Questions of Adaptation: Bringing Premodern Queens to the Page and Screen

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 153-158

      PDF

   2. Religious Medievalisms in RTVE’s Isabel

      • Emily S. Beck

      Pages 159-178

   3. ‘The Queen of Time’: Isabel I in The Ministry of Time (2015) and The Queen of Spain (2016)

      • Emily C. Francomano

      Pages 179-194

   4. 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

      • Janice North

      Pages 195-214

   5. The Filmic Legacy of ‘Queen Christina’: Mika Kaurismäki’s Girl King (2015) and Bertrand Tavernier’s Cinematic ‘Amazons’ in D’Artagnan’s Daughter (1994) and The Princess of Monpensier (2010)

      • Séverine Genieys-Kirk

      Pages 215-237

   6. Thomas Imbach’s Marian Biopic: Postmodern Period Drama or Old-Fashioned Psychogram?

      • Armel Dubois-Nayt

      Pages 239-256

5. Undermining Authority: Rulers with Conflicted Gender and Sexual Identities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 257-262

      PDF

   2. Queering Isabella: The ‘She-Wolf of France’ in Film and Television

      • Michael R. Evans

      Pages 263-282

   3. Seeing Him for What He Was: Reimagining King Olaf II Haraldsson in Post-War Popular Culture

      • Karl C. Alvestad

      Pages 283-301

   4. Televising Boabdil, Last Muslim King of Granada

      • Elizabeth Drayson

      Pages 303-317

   5. A Man? A Woman? A Lesbian? A Whore?: Queen Elizabeth I and the Cinematic Subversion of Gender

      • Aidan Norrie

      Pages 319-340

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. 

• Medievalism
• Women's history
• presentism
• medieval film and television
• premodern rulers in popular culture
• early modern queenship
• Empress Matilda
• Isabella of Angoulême
• medievalism and feminist ideology
• gender in The White Queen
• Juana I
• Queen Christina
• Elizabeth I in film
• Muhammad XI
• Olaf II Haraldsson
• gender and sexuality

“Premodern Rulers, Postmodern Viewers is an important collection given the boon of period pieces and exciting, new visions of the relationship between history and ‘truth.’ The essays will be of interest to those of us working on early modern rulers but also to those interested in theorizing these adaptations of historical figures. … I imagine teachers of premodern texts and histories will appreciate a clear point of entry into discussing premodern history with students.” (Alicia Andrzejewski, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 16 (2), 2022)

“Premodern Rulers and Postmodern Viewers is a timely and important collection of essays. Throughout the book, its authors deliver a wide range of essays and methodologies (including transmedia, fandom, feminism, and visual culture); the resulting book offers thoughtful, insightful, and much-needed analysis of premodern women in modern representations. This will be an excellent book for both students and their teachers, offering both rigorous, cutting-edge scholarship as well as critical analysis which fills an important gap in existing scholarship.” (Andrew Elliott, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Lincoln, UK)

“This original and innovative collection of essays sheds new light on enduring questions and on the relationship between media and the history of queenship.” (Núria Silleras-Fernández, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)

• Altoona, USA

  Janice North

• Department of History, University of Winchester, Winchester, United Kingdom

  Karl C. Alvestad, Elena Woodacre

Janice North is an independent scholar and specialist in medieval and Golden Age Iberian literature.


Karl C. Alvestad is Lecturer in History at the University of Winchester, UK. 


Elena Woodacre is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Winchester, UK. 

Policies and ethics