{"id":1767,"date":"2018-02-21T19:58:12","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T00:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/?p=1767"},"modified":"2018-02-21T19:59:01","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T00:59:01","slug":"lioninwinter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/21\/lioninwinter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lioness in Winter: Thinking About A Medieval Woman on Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month, many people trekked across a snowy campus to take in the first instalment of this semester’s Alan Lutkus International Film Series<\/a>: the iconic The Lion in Winter<\/em> (1968). Afterwards, I asked some of my students who were there what they’d made of it. One of them thought for a moment, and then said, “I was surprised it was funny. You never think of them as being funny.”<\/p>\n

Pretty much every history teacher is aware of how helpful film can be in the classroom: how it can confront students with the humanity of others across great distances of space and time, how it can convey with immediacy the different ways in which people in the past spoke and lived and thought. We’ve likely all had conversations like the one I had with my students. But as I mulled over the movie on my way home, I thought that we forget sometimes that historical film can help us to think through our own emotional relationship to the research topics that we’re steeped in: in my case, the history of women in the High Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

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The Cha\u0302teau de Chinon, setting for the action of\u00a0The Lion in Winter<\/em>, as it appears today following an extensive programme of restoration. [Link<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let’s be clear: The Lion in Winter<\/em> isn’t particularly interested in rigorous historical accuracy. Playwright James Goldman wanted to tell a story of a power struggle in a royal family, complete with melodramatic rivalries and biting dialogue, not to conjure up a photo-realistic recreation of the Middle Ages or to delve into historians’ competing takes on the Angevin Empire. Decades of dynastic disputes between Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their children, are compressed into a single, imagined, heated meeting at Christmas in the castle of Chinon. In other words, it’s a bit of a soap opera. Goldman clearly did just enough research to help him set the scene, but Goldman presents many things as fact which are almost certainly post-medieval fictions\u2014like Eleanor’s recounting of how she rode bare-breasted, dressed as an Amazon<\/a>, while taking part in the Second Crusade. That’s even setting to one side the question of the anachronisms, Christmas trees and poison oak references being equally unlikely to crop up in twelfth-century northwestern Europe.<\/p>\n

But what the movie does have is a powerhouse central performance in Katharine Hepburn’s Oscar-winning turn as Eleanor of Aquitaine. (The Lion in Winter<\/em> was remade in 2003 with Glenn Close as Eleanor, and has also inspired other works like the TV show Empire<\/em><\/a>, with Taraji P. Henson as the Eleanor-equivalent, but Hepburn’s version is the definitive one for me.) Hepburn portrays her\u2014this queen of England, duchess of Aquitaine, and erstwhile queen of France\u2014as engaging, demanding, and mercurial in turn. In doing so, she creates yet another aspect of the myth of Eleanor which has grown up in the centuries after her death.<\/p>\n