Naomi Allen is a PhD researcher in the Department of Archaeology and History, working on the English Cluniac congregation after the Black Death. Standing in the north cloister walk of Benedictine Muchelney Abbey, Somerset on a perfect June day – skylarks and swallows overhead, sunshine turning the standing remains of the south cloister a dusty […]
Writing in 1879, the great Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins bemoaned the recent felling of the poplars at Binsey near Oxford: ‘All felled, felled, are all felled’. To him, those trees represented something precious, a ‘sweet especial rural scene’. Had he been alive in 1615, he might have felt similarly outraged about what had taken […]
The late medieval English cleric gets a pretty raw deal in film, TV and in popular histories. Where they appear at all, they are often ciphers, materialising merely to fulfil some dramatic function such as crowning a usurping monarch, or conducting the marriage of a pair of love-struck aristos. Those priests, bishops, nuns or friars […]
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Very readable post, Des. I greatly enjoyed it. How would someone like Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986) fit? I know it is set in Italy rather than England but I believe he is quite a cinematic icon as far as medieval monks go!
Thank you, Ciaran. Yes, the sleuthing cleric is one category that does rather better. Connery plays William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar with an incisive mind, and in that he is not unlike Cadfael, the hero of all those Ellis Peters novels. In such stories the sleuth aspect is paramount, and the authors enjoy using the clerical status of the hero to good effect. Note however that even in the The Name of the Rose, many of the other clerics are pretty weird!
Very readable post, Des. I greatly enjoyed it. How would someone like Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986) fit? I know it is set in Italy rather than England but I believe he is quite a cinematic icon as far as medieval monks go!
Thank you, Ciaran. Yes, the sleuthing cleric is one category that does rather better. Connery plays William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar with an incisive mind, and in that he is not unlike Cadfael, the hero of all those Ellis Peters novels. In such stories the sleuth aspect is paramount, and the authors enjoy using the clerical status of the hero to good effect. Note however that even in the The Name of the Rose, many of the other clerics are pretty weird!
4 responses to “Stay Silent or be Damned! Modern Portrayals of the Medieval Cleric”
Very readable post, Des. I greatly enjoyed it. How would someone like Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986) fit? I know it is set in Italy rather than England but I believe he is quite a cinematic icon as far as medieval monks go!
Thank you, Ciaran. Yes, the sleuthing cleric is one category that does rather better. Connery plays William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar with an incisive mind, and in that he is not unlike Cadfael, the hero of all those Ellis Peters novels. In such stories the sleuth aspect is paramount, and the authors enjoy using the clerical status of the hero to good effect. Note however that even in the The Name of the Rose, many of the other clerics are pretty weird!
Very readable post, Des. I greatly enjoyed it. How would someone like Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986) fit? I know it is set in Italy rather than England but I believe he is quite a cinematic icon as far as medieval monks go!
Thank you, Ciaran. Yes, the sleuthing cleric is one category that does rather better. Connery plays William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar with an incisive mind, and in that he is not unlike Cadfael, the hero of all those Ellis Peters novels. In such stories the sleuth aspect is paramount, and the authors enjoy using the clerical status of the hero to good effect. Note however that even in the The Name of the Rose, many of the other clerics are pretty weird!