Over the last decade, depending what projects were in drafts or edits in a given year, I’ve bounced from century to century, often overlapping (in the last year, for example, I’ve worked in the 19th century for Assassin’s Creed, in the 5th century for The Valkyrie, and the 20th century for the forthcoming novel, plus a bit of short fiction in the 16th century, plus some research in other periods for future work…) So sometimes I’ll watch TV or movies set in a period, not as research, exactly, but just to help get my head in the vibes for a particular project. (The research tends to take the form of a large stack of books and articles.)

My next novel takes me to the 13th century, a bit earlier than my novel The Chatelaine, and it’s been a reminder that from what I can tell, there is not a wealth of really great medieval movies, in English anyway. (There are some! I’ll get to them!) The paucity is very odd, because the late Middle Ages in Europe looms so large in the western storytelling tradition, but frankly it’s an odd period in historical fiction too, despite some standouts — most people struggle to know what to do with it, somehow.

I suspect one problem is that audience expectations tend to be somewhat disconnected from the actual history, which is a self-fulfilling process. What I mean is that if audiences expect white English people in beige clothing and hair that looks unwashed, eating a lot of stew, it can be tricky to tell a story that shows people from many cultures and languages eating tangy salads in bright clothing, even though the latter is probably a closer approximation to medieval life in the main. So stories perpetuate what people are used to — or they don’t, and one way to help audience make that leap is to just lean into anachronism.

Medieval anachronism is something I dearly love, in fact, and sometimes it can be more “true” than attempts to create Ye Olden Days. The classic example of this is A Knight’s Tale, which is gloriously anachronistic in everything from the music to the costumes, but because of that, manages to capture the energy of its story in a way that transports the audience. The Little Hours is a movie that feels anachronistic, largely because of the modern speech patterns and the (gasp!) American accents, but the bawdiness of the humour is straight out of its source material (Boccaccio) and the historical setting seems pretty accurately captured to me. (As for the dialogue: all dialogue in historical movies is “translated” from what it would have been at the time, and all accents have shifted dramatically, so I laugh at the idea that a medieval Italian speaking in 20th centuryish RP with Walter Scott sentence structure would be somehow more “authentic”.)

One of the reasons I love The Green Knight is because it doesn’t try to situate the story in a real historical setting; this place isn’t really any part of what became England, or Logres, or Brittany, or any place that you can pin to a map — just as we can’t pin King Arthur to the historical record, at least not comfortably. It’s a tale told as a tale. There’s a certain swing in the dialogue from olde-timey to not, and that can be a bit disorienting, but that’s a quibble, and maybe it’s intentional. (The Northman is another A24 movie that feels like it’s telling the story that storytellers of its time period would tell, if they had access to our technology, and I love that.)

Even The Lion in Winter (1968), which doesn’t wear its anachronism on its sleeve, is not always accurate to history — probably the biggest example is that the depiction of Christmas looks a lot more like what we do than what Henry and Eleanor would have done. But who cares? Not me. It’s my favourite movie, and it gets at the truth of its story, and its time period, by inviting us in so wholeheartedly that we’re inclined to believe in whatever it shows us. I’ve been meaning to rewatch Becket (the other Peter O’Toole portrayal of Henry II) as it’s been years since I saw it.

Of all the medieval movies I’ve seen, The Name of the Rose is the one that comes the closest to feeling like someone just turned a camera on in the actual Middle Ages. This is not to say there are no inaccuracies, but they’re minor, and the movie was made with respect for the themes of the book, which are grounded in the time period. This feeling of immersion is a bit paradoxical, as The Name of the Rose is a self-conscious novel and film on several levels (it’s a text that refers to other texts and acknowledges its artificiality — through such things as the homage to Sherlock Holmes in William of Baskerville, and the mystery-novel structure — but acknowledging artificiality and building texts out of texts is itself an extremely medieval point of view.)

I recently watched Catherine Called Birdy, and I’m a bit divided about it. (I haven’t read the book it’s based on.) The performances were fantastic, and I appreciated the way it punctured some (although not all) typical Hollywood tropes about the Middle Ages. For example, it is built around a medieval woman writing about her own life — something that was far more common than received wisdom would have us believe. I thought the depiction of the manor house and the interaction of servants and nobility within it was refreshingly distinct from the usual Hollywood versions. I appreciated that it focused on the economics of marriage for women.

But the entire premise is that Birdy’s father is trying to marry her off so he can solve his cash flow crisis, by getting a dowry in exchange for her. This is baffling to me! Medieval dowries, in the main, were paid by the bride’s family, not the other way around. Sure, marrying your daughter well could result in social connections to powerful, wealthy men, and other economic gains, but in terms of money or land ownership, having a daughter usually represented a cost on the ledger. The boys in the family were the ones who should have been dowry-hunting. As I said above, I am extremely tolerant of anachronism — and even if it’s not on-the-sleeve anachronism, if you make a medieval movie that has people eating with forks or using fireplaces at the wrong time, I’m not going to fuss. (Also, as a historical fiction writer, I know all too painfully well that everyone makes mistakes, and I’ve made many despite my best efforts.) But the big picture, the reason for looking backward in the first place, has to land for me. I don’t really understand the point of making a movie that explores the history of female agency in marriage bargains and then fundamentally (and not transparently) altering the whole economic system that the movie’s apparently commenting on. There’s even a storyline in the movie about the position of widows in society, but the dowry system was one of the reasons for the freedom of widows! Hmm. Maybe I’m missing something. But I’m glad the movie exists. More like it, please!

All fiction is ultimately about the time it’s made in, but if it’s set in the past, there’s an opportunity to examine the present by asking how we got here from there. I’d love to see some more truly great medieval movies that send us away thinking hard about the present while being in a state of wonder at the journey we just took to the past. The fact is, though, I’d also settle for more so-so movies with medieval vibes. I’d really love to find a movie set on a European galley in the Middle Ages — European ships in Hollywood movies seem to go from the ancient world to Vikings to a smidge of Shakespeare to the Age of Sail, skipping over entire periods of history. I don’t know why! I’m sure cost has a lot to do with it — and with the struggles of medieval storytelling on film in general. Period-accurate costumes and sets are very expensive, which is one reason on-the-sleeve anachronism is such a frequent approach.

I haven’t talked about Shakespeare movies here, even though many of them are set in the Middle Ages, as Shakespeare wrote them as historical fiction. They’re their own little genre with their own expectations and sometimes very particular ways of approaching sets and costumes.

And I’m sure there are films I’ve loved or appreciated that I’ve forgotten to mention. There are a few Hollywood films, such as The Last Duel, that I haven’t seen yet. I’m also going to expand my search to non-English-language films, so please tell me your favourites. Small productions too!