Women's and Gender Studies

This essay explores the environmental agendas and ambitions that motivate John Timothy Rothwell, 'a mad biker chieftain wielding an axe,' who, claiming to be a 'post-Thatcher' King Arthur, changes his name and links his political struggles against the state to myths that mourn the lost original purity of ancient Britain. This article looks backward to authoritarian values his ecocriticism should interrogate. (LAP and MBS)

In Raising a Modem-Day Knight: A Father's Role in Guiding His Son to Authentic Manhood, Robert Lewis, Pastor-at-Large for the Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, incorporates a New Age mythopoetic analysis of castrated masculinity doused with buckets of non-denominational Christianity to argue that, by following the childrearing
examples of medieval knights, twenty-first century fathers can
prepare their sons for clear, inspiring, biblically grounded lives. This article interrogates the absences around which such medieval fantasies of knighthood cohere. (LF and MBS)

Moving between Edwin Austin Abbey's 1901 series of murals "The Quest of the Holy Grail" and images of the Round Table from other media, including a late fourteenth-century copy of Wirnt von Graven­berg's Arthurian romance W􀀁alois (Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, ms. Ltk. 537) and John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur, this essay considers representations of the Round Table as a means of charting the ascen­dency of the visual over the discursive in political representation during the twentieth century. The images we examine - a painting, a manu­script illumination, and a film shot - register, in a single glance at the Round Table, ideologies of hierarchy, power, and submission to author­ity that by the middle of the European twentieth century tum particu­larly dark, reaching their apotheosis in the Nazi state.

Some might argue that when Nazis fantasize themselves as medieval knights, they debase a beautiful, noble and innocent past. They might insist that this fantasy, which feeds a desire to see the male body as larger than life, this fetishizing of the body as armor and muscle, may be perverse, but the ideal - the chivalrous knight who pledged himself to honor, loyalty and brotherhood - should not be tarnished by that perversion. This essay, however, explores the possibility that there is, in all imaginings of the knight, always the potential for fascist desire. It suggests that there may be an unsavory kinship between the armored warriors of medieval Europe - even the
romanticized armored warriors of King Arthur's court - and the armored divisions of Nazi blitzkrieg. A fascist aesthetic is the darkness at the heart of Arthurian history, especially as it celebrates aggressive hypermasculinity mobilized in the service of a persecuting society intent upon domination.

This chapter, rather than offering a synoptic survey of Arthurian legends in different media, articulates a theory and method for investigating the mediating role of media in perpetuating and adapting Arthurian narrative. We explore the relevance
for the Arthurian legend of recent work in media studies, particularly Jay Bolter's and Richard Grusin's concept of "remediation," paying attention not only to the
"formal logic by which new media refashion prior media" and their contents (1999: 27 3 ), but also the ways in which that refashioning causes us to revisit older media,
asking of them new kinds of questions. We investigate the mechanisms through which the cinematic apparatus mediates (and indeed remediates) our experience of
medievalism, complicating the reception of the original medieval text, the intermedial intertexts, and the films themselves.

Although studies of Middle English literature normally traffic in textuality, this essay interrogates medievalism by taking as its object one of the great material remnants of the English Middle Ages, Glastonbury Abbey, examining this magnificent ruin both as tourist site and object of scholarly interest. We believe this is a significant intervention because, for readers of Middle English literature, acquaintance with England's heritage-its ancient
monuments and historic buildings-subtends their reading. And, unlike other forms of medievalism-literary, cinematic, artistic-that depend upon reproduction, heritage tourism brings the Middle Ages into the present through its claims to offer spectators the "real" Middle Ages rather than mere fabrication. Exploring Glastonbury Abbey as a form of public memory, we trouble this claim of authenticity by investigating the temporal dislocations,
the "imbricated succession" (Austin 2011: 129), that interleaves the past with the present in physical relics that survive in England as ruin, restoration, and re-creation. For tourists
(including scholars of medieval studies) who flock to England's medieval heritage sites, the cultural nostalgia produced by medieval tourism becomes a form of telepathy, a means of
touching the dead.