A wonderful resource for lovers of medieval history and cinema alike, this book offers analysis of the last century of film and its representation of legal practice and ideals of justice in medieval Europe. Each chapter offers incisive analysis of a particular film, coupled with a relevant primary source and questions for further thought. The result is an illuminating meditation on the relationship between medieval history and the various contexts and sensibilities that shape its modern portrayal. This book is not only for educators, medieval scholars, and students of history, it is also for all of those who watch a film and then wonder. Is that really how it was?---Ada Maria Kuskowski, Associate Professor at University of Pennsylvania and author of Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France What a refreshing and lively collection of essays! Each one invites us to read film as an interpretive genre that, like traditional historiography, responds to shifts in our understanding of the Middle Ages. Analyzing medieval law and justice through the lens of global film inspires readers to see these fields anew and rethink the place of art in historical inquiry.---Kristina Richardson, Professor of History and Midde Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia This groundbreaking collection is designed to support the teaching of medieval history through film. Its twenty highly accessible chapters concern a century''s worth of medievalist films (produced 1928 - 2021) set all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, addressing both the contemporary contexts of the films and the medieval milieux that the films reference.

Appended to each chapter are relevant medieval sources and reading questions. Aimed at instructors utilizing medievalist films to teach both the realities of the period and the dynamics of cinematic representation to undergraduates, the collection doesn''t so much fill a gap as create a new paradigm.---Felice Lifshitz, author of Reading Gender: Studies in Medieval Manuscripts and Medievalist Films Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World is a sophisticated and accessible collection of essays that puts medieval history and medievalist films into productive conversation with each other. It will be an excellent resource for anyone who wants to better understand the historical contexts for medievalist films and as a model for how to take medievalist film seriously as part of the ongoing project of better understanding medieval history and its reception. The essays are engaging, the variety of topics is excellent and timely without feeling trendy, and the appendices provide the concrete and complex historical context we all need in order to avoid oversimplifying the medieval world.---Usha Vishnuvajjala, author of Feminist Medievalisms: Embodiment and Vulnerability in Literature and Film These diverse and penetrating essays on medieval films show us the Middle Ages as a collection of legal communities. Legal documents and narratives of justice vividly recreate the lives of everyday medieval people, focusing intimately on their courtroom trials, codes of conduct and religious practices. A powerful teaching tool for a variety of medieval courses.

---William F. Woods, MV Hughes Professor of English, emeritus, Wichita State University, and author of Chaucerian Spaces: Spatial Poetics in Chaucer''s Opening Tales This book is a lively and erudite collection of essays addressing the complex relationship between the Middle Ages and their cinematic representation since the beginning of the twentieth century. Certain of the films are well known, classics even; others have fallen into obscurity over the years, but all of them under the skillful scrutiny of the scholars represented in the collection testify powerfully to the benefits--and dangers--of mobilizing imagined medieval histories in the cultural and ideological controversies of modernity.---William Chester Jordan, Princeton University.