Dracula, Batman, Princesses at the Loom and Princesses with Swords: How Has the Middle Ages Changed?

As Umberto Eco argues in his essay Dreaming of the Middle Ages in Ten Ways, the Middle Ages are not just a historical period but also an imaginary world that is constantly being reinterpreted and reinvented. How have different forms of media, from literature and comics to film and fairy tales, helped shape our many visions of the medieval world? And what does each reinterpretation of the Middle Ages reveal about our own society?  We asked Francesca Roversi Monaco, Professor of Medieval History at the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna.

A dark age or the age of knights and cathedrals? A barbaric and superstitious Middle Ages, or a bright and fairy-tale one? Which is the real Middle Ages?

In reality, the “real” Middle Ages may not exist at all. Rather, there are many Middle Ages. It is important to distinguish between the historical Middle Ages, the period conventionally spanning the mid-fifth to the mid-fifteenth century (roughly from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to either the fall of Constantinople in 1453 or the discovery of the Americas in 1492), identified and named as the “Middle Age” by humanist scholars between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the metahistorical Middle Ages: a world imagined, dreamed, continually recreated and reshaped by later and contemporary culture. The historical Middle Ages were not a dark age, or at least no more so than any other period in human history. Darkness, barbarism and superstition, as well as magic and fairy tales, are instead the result of the constant reworking of the Middle Ages in our society. They reflect the ways in which later eras have used and misused the medieval past. It is no coincidence that Umberto Eco identified as many as ten different ways of dreaming about the Middle Ages. These uses and abuses are the subject of a specific field of study known as medievalism, which focuses on the Middle Ages after the Middle Ages and examines the many “medievalisms”: the political, literary and identity-based ways through which each era has reinvented its own Middle Ages.

What is media medievalism?

Media medievalism encompasses the ways in which the Middle Ages are represented and, before that, imagined by contemporary culture through the channels of mass communication. It starts from a simple assumption: narratives intended for a broad audience reflect the cultural, political and educational values of the society that produces them. Since much of the storytelling created by Western culture over the last two centuries has revolved around settings, images and characters inspired not so much by the historical Middle Ages as by the imagined Middle Ages of medievalism, this imaginary world has become one of modernity’s most important narrative reservoirs. Media medievalism therefore consists of all the narratives about the Middle Ages that are disseminated on a large scale through media, traditional and digital publishing, the internet, cinema and television, as well as through a wide variety of textual products, including textbooks, children’s books, edutainment content, encyclopaedias, comics and magazines. It is a subject that requires a strongly interdisciplinary approach, attentive both to content and to the ways and channels through which that content circulates. It is precisely through the medium that images of the Middle Ages are shaped, transformed and ultimately embedded in popular understanding.  Media medievalism exists within this space. Studying it means learning to recognise which “Middle Ages” a particular cultural product is putting on stage. This is also the guiding principle behind the podcast Multimedioevo, which explores the many ways in which the Middle Ages continue to speak to us through the media.

How have the media helped shape our image of the Middle Ages over time, and how do they continue to do so today?

From literature and art to film, television and digital media, the media has profoundly influenced the way we imagine the Middle Ages. The turning point came in the nineteenth century, when Romanticism established the medieval canon that still dominates popular culture today. We find it in the arches of the Gothic Revival, in the fascination with ruins, in the female figures painted by the Pre-Raphaelites, and in the imagery of castles, armour, ladies and knights. It was during this period that European peoples began looking to the Middle Ages for the distant roots of their national identities. This was a fascinating process, but not always a harmless one, because those same roots could also give rise to the most extreme and dangerous identity-based uses of the medieval myth. The Middle Ages came to be seen as the era in which national characteristics were formed, the moment when the “spirit of a people”, the creative force of a community, first found expression. Because its origins were linked to the encounter between the Germanic peoples and the Roman world, the Middle Ages came to be seen as a northern, Gothic and barbarian age. Romanticism helped cement this image, creating a canon that would long outlive the nineteenth century and establishing a shared neo-medieval culture and visual language. This process of reinvention is still ongoing today, to the point that medievalism functions as a kind of cultural lingua franca, produced in international contexts and capable of speaking to a global audience, not least through digital media and their new formats.

Dracula and Batman, or even Donald Duck the Paladin: what makes the Middle Ages such fertile ground for characters as different as these?

As I mentioned, there is no single Middle Ages, and that is precisely what makes it so welcoming. The imagined Middle Ages are a reservoir of images and atmospheres that can even be contradictory, and every story draws from whichever elements it needs. These three characters illustrate this perfectly, as each draws on a different version of the Middle Ages. Dracula belongs to the “dark” and Gothic Middle Ages: the world of castles, superstition and the supernatural. The vampire embodies an aristocratic and feudal archaism that threatens modernity. Batman is the heir to the chivalric Middle Ages; after all, he is known as the “Dark Knight”. He is a vigilante with a code of honour, a heraldic emblem and a fortress, operating within a Gotham City marked by neo-Gothic architecture. Donald Duck the Paladin, by contrast, evokes a comic Middle Ages, rooted in the Italian chivalric tradition reinterpreted through humour. What makes the Middle Ages so accommodating is their modular nature. They provide a vocabulary of signs that can be dismantled and recombined: the castle, the sword, the coat of arms, the oath, the quest for the Holy Grail, all elements capable of moving from horror to superhero comics to parody while retaining their evocative power. This is where Umberto Eco’s insight becomes clear. He described the Middle Ages as the repository in which the West has deposited many of its founding myths. Precisely because it is not constrained by historical accuracy, the Middle Ages of medievalism remain infinitely malleable. They can be invoked to frighten, to celebrate heroism or to make us smile, and they work every time. This extraordinary adaptability tells us little about the historical Middle Ages, but a great deal about our need to keep reinventing them.

Princesses and knights are among the most familiar figures in fairy tales. How have they changed over the years, and how do they reflect evolving ideas about gender roles?

From the nineteenth century onwards, the Middle Ages became the age of fairy tales. It is difficult to imagine a fairy tale without a castle, a princess, a tower or a dark forest in the background. Here again, the roots lie in the Romantic rediscovery of folk narratives, exemplified by the Brothers Grimm, and in the search for the medieval and supposedly “barbarian” origins of European culture that we discussed earlier. Yet fairy tales are not merely entertainment. They have a pedagogical function and are therefore also ideological and political, because they transmit the dominant behavioural models of the society that produces them. This is especially significant in discussions of gender roles, since fairy tales are mainly addressed to children and adolescents, whose views of these models are still taking shape. If fairy tales present patterns that serve the society from which they emerge, they become valuable sources for tracing the evolution of women’s roles through their many reinterpretations. The princess is the quintessential “medieval” female model, especially when confined to a castle and waiting to be rescued. Yet over recent decades this figure has undergone a remarkable transformation. In literature, cinema and television series with medieval settings, princesses increasingly put aside the loom and the waiting and instead take up the sword, deciding that they are capable of saving themselves. That said, female fighters are nothing new. Fantasy literature and comics have long featured strong warrior heroines. The difference is that these characters were not princesses. They were women portrayed from the outset as unconventional, often through traits traditionally coded as masculine. The novelty lies in the fact that the princess who once waited to be rescued has now awakened from centuries of passivity and acquired full agency. This shift is no coincidence. Every representation is shaped by the social and cultural context in which it is produced. The changing portrayal of these characters reflects broader transformations in the role of women in society and, in turn, in the stories societies choose to tell about themselves.. The same fairy tales, set against the same medieval backdrop, are now being used to challenge one set of values and promote another.

Despite the complexity of the Middle Ages, is it possible today to provide a single, definitive definition to pass on to future generations?

I do not think so. And I believe that is a good thing. The richness of the Middle Ages as a cultural category lies precisely in their plurality: in their capacity to inspire endless reinterpretations, infinite ways of dreaming them, seeking them out and using them as a mirror for our own society. A single definition would betray that nature. What future generations should inherit is not a specific image of the Middle Ages, but a method: the ability to dream of the Middle Ages, as Umberto Eco suggested, while continuing to ask which Middle Ages, and why. In this regard, it is worth recalling the conclusion of Eco’s famous essay on the ten ways of dreaming the Middle Ages: “What our age perhaps truly shares with the Middle Ages is its voracious encyclopaedic pluralism, its hunger for accumulated and disorderly knowledge. We may well prefer, like Goethe, the Gothic cathedral of Strasbourg to the classical temple: the medieval dream has every right to fascinate us. As Eco reminds us, however, this is only possible if we do not allow that dream to turn into a suspension of critical thought. Long live the Middle Ages, then, and long live their dream. As the twentieth century taught us all too well, we have generated more than enough monsters of our own.”