Medieval History and Cinema

Harvard FAS

This course deals with the challenges of representing medieval history by focusing on selected films, which will be viewed at two levels at once, as films and as history. What are the uses of cinema as a vehicle for thinking about the past? What qualities, other than accuracy, make for good history in films? What are the advantages, if any, of cinematic representation of the premodern past with its different sense of intimacy with the supernatural?