Parergon

Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein’s edited collection explores the multiple ways in which the Walt Disney Company’s products, from theme parks to animated films and websites, reimagine the Middle Ages. This contribution to the growing number of explorations of popular culture medievalisms is one of the most targeted to date. As a result, it does justice to the depth and breadth of its subject, one of the largest and most influential entertainment companies in the world.

Like the majority of contemporary scholarship on popular culture medievalism, the aim of the collection is, as Tison Pugh states in his [End Page 246] Introduction, ‘not to lament [Disney’s] exploitation of the Middle Ages for corporate ends, but to examine how and why these medieval visions prove so readily adaptable to themed entertainments’ (p. 2). Pugh lays out terminology that is taken up in the majority of later chapters, arguing that Disney’s medievalisms enable ‘retroprogressive and transtemporal transformations’ of past, present, and future (p. 4).

The volume is divided into three parts. The first, ‘Building a Better Middle Ages: Medievalism in the Parks’, has three chapters which explore cartography, castles, and pilgrimage, and does the most to compare the medieval and the modern directly. In the first, Stephen Yandell reads Disney theme parks alongside medieval mappa mundi, arguing that both present ‘a world that embodies perfection and allows one to be simultaneously lost’ (p. 35). Martha Bayless notes the geographical and conceptual centrality of castles in Disney theme parks, and shows that in films they are gendered, domestic, and transforming spaces that guarantee family life and happiness to the girls who enter them. The final chapter in the section, by Susan Aronstein, considers Disney parks as the sites of modern pilgrimages, putting them in conversation with medieval pilgrimage to explore the place of the material and commercial in what are principally designated as spiritual journeys.

The second part, ‘The Distorical Middle Ages’, has five chapters that examine Disney’s fraught relationship with medieval history. Based on a series of interviews with members of the public, Paul Sturtevant shows that Disney films ‘influence individuals’ understanding of the Middle Ages’ (p. 92), a concerning trend given their clear ideological underpinnings and deliberate transtemporality. Erin Felicia Labbie discusses animation, alchemy, and Disney’s use and representation of technology through its three iterations of the ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ tale. Rob Gossedge examines Disney’s Arthurian animations, considering them as examples of American triumphalism and translatio. Kevin J. Harty offers a comprehensive account of Disney’s multiple iterations of the Robin Hood story, arguing that they all share a general ‘opposition to tyranny and oppression’, but that ‘politics of any kind is soft-pedaled’ (p. 149). Amy Foster turns to Disney’s science fictional, ‘futuristic’ medievalisms, arguing that they support the ‘American way’ of progress, modernity, and technology.

‘Disney Princess Fantasy Faire’, the final section of the volume, has five chapters that explore the varied medievalisms of Disney Princess culture. Clare Bradford’s chapter explores Disney’s Princess website, demonstrating that it ‘positions young girls to regard traditional forms of femininity as preferred modes of being female’ and encourages them to conform to those modes by consuming Disney products. Kathleen Coyne Kelly examines Disney’s construction of nature and ecology as both medievalised past and hoped-for future in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Ilan Mitchell-Smith shows [End Page 247] that Disney’s non-White Princesses are constructed through racial – racist – and cultural stereotypes, but that the movies in which they appear also ‘use racially and culturally specific medieval pasts to offer a fantasy in which irresolvable tensions in contemporary American female identity can somehow coexist’ (p. 222). Kelly’s and Mitchell-Smith’s chapters provide working examples of the kinds of intersectional investigations that are increasingly concerning to feminist scholars. Allison Craven examines Disney’s adaptation of...