Books by Chris Bishop
The comic book has become an essential icon of the American Century, an era defined by optimism i... more The comic book has become an essential icon of the American Century, an era defined by optimism in the face of change and by recognition of the intrinsic value of democracy and modernization. For many, the Middle Ages stand as an antithesis to these ideals, and yet medievalist comics have emerged and endured, even thrived alongside their superhero counterparts. Chris Bishop presents a reception history of medievalist comics, setting them against a greater backdrop of modern American history.
From its genesis in the 1930s to the present, Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it was to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant. In the narrative of Red Sonja, we can trace a parallel history of feminism. Bishop regards these comics as not merely happenchance, but each success (Prince Valiant and The Mighty Thor) or failure (Beowulf: Dragon Slayer) as a result and an indicator of certain American preoccupations amid a larger cultural context.
Intrinsically modernist paragons of pop-culture ephemera, American comics have ironically continued to engage with the European Middle Ages. Bishop illuminates some of the ways in which we use an imagined past to navigate the present and plots some possible futures as we valiantly shape a new century.
Publications by Chris Bishop
Antiquity in Progress: Intermedial Presences of Ancient Mediterranean Cultures in the Modern World (Heidelberg: Propylaeum), 2024
In his chapter on Marvel’s Silver Surfer, Chris Bishop suggests that in a culture saturated by a ... more In his chapter on Marvel’s Silver Surfer, Chris Bishop suggests that in a culture saturated by a multitude of receptions, creators of new artworks are often unaware of their ancient predecessors and the mere presence of classical ideas can lead to ‘unconscious reception’.
Visual Studies, 2022
Contemplating the “charitable snares of nostalgia”, Gabriel García Márquez wrote that “the memory... more Contemplating the “charitable snares of nostalgia”, Gabriel García Márquez wrote that “the memory of the heart eliminates bad recollections and magnifies the good” so that we might “endure the burden of the past”. But the opposite is also true, for to endure the burden of the present sometimes it becomes necessary to amplify the darkness of our history. The Dancing Plague, a graphic novel by Gareth Brookes, is one such amplification — a meditation on superstition, mysticism, and female agency in the European Middle Ages. As such, it has much to tell us about ourselves, about our often-unexpressed hopes and fears, and about the ontological ways we have sought to navigate our own plague-years.
Drawing the Past: Comics and the Historical Imagination , 2022
The Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 2021
It has become commonplace for scholars to imagine, in the epithets of the Christian Madonna, a ve... more It has become commonplace for scholars to imagine, in the epithets of the Christian Madonna, a vector for the survival of earlier cultic ontologies. This paper argues that in the honorifics associated with Mary during late antiquity we witness, not the survival of earlier cultic identities but, rather, their deliberate erasure. The paper explores representations of the Madonna Stella Maris and the extent to which such representations might have served as a vector for the erasure of pre-existing goddess worship.
Memories of Utopia: The Revision of Histories and Landscapes in Late Antiquity, 2020
The Mosella of Decimus Magnus Ausonius, a poem in widespread distribution by 371, describes the l... more The Mosella of Decimus Magnus Ausonius, a poem in widespread distribution by 371, describes the landscape of the Moselle valley in some detail. Two centuries later, another visitor to that valley, Venantius Fortunatus, depicted the same landscape in his own poetry, but where Ausonius’ vision was one of bucolic splendour, Fortunatus’ countryside had begun to decay — the lofty villas had disappeared, the town walls were broken, the high places bristled with fortifications and weapons of war. Building on recent work re-analysing Ausonius’ Mosella, together with an established corpus of work on the imagery of the Waste Land in early-medieval poetry, this chapter explores the links between the work of these two late-Roman poets and their demonstrated ontologies of the constructed landscape.
Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World, 2020
The numerous drafts of Canto XXI now housed in the Beinecke Library, Yale, demonstrate the signif... more The numerous drafts of Canto XXI now housed in the Beinecke Library, Yale, demonstrate the significance of the empress and her centrality (in the mind of the poet) to a meeting in Verona, at a café near the Roman arena, where Pound met T.S. Eliot in the summer of 1922. That year, Pound was in Verona with both his wife, Dorothy, and his lover, Bride Scratton, and the latter had a strong recollection of Eliot placing a manuscript of The Waste Land on the table before Pound. Pound had just finished his revisions of that poem and found himself both in awe of Eliot’s genius, and dismayed by what he saw as his own inability to achieve the same level of brilliance. Eliot, on leave from his position at Lloyds Bank, was becoming increasingly critical of Pound’s Bel Esprit venture, and feared that the public-funding promised by it would see him lose his job. And so, they met, Pound and Eliot (and, apparently, Galla Placidia) in a café beside the Veronese arena.
Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 2019
Of all the negative associations commonly made with medieval Europe, the subterranean world of th... more Of all the negative associations commonly made with medieval Europe, the subterranean world of the dungeon is one the darkest, and also one of the strongest. The dungeon serves as a physical locus for the metaphorical darkness of the Middle Ages. Just as the castle has come to signify what is best and brightest in the imagined world of the medieval (knighthood, chivalry, honor), the dungeon underlying the castle has become the repository of all that is worst (injustice, cruelty, the Inquisition). And yet, even though the dungeon should repulse us, we are still drawn towards it, both emotionally and physically.
Games and Culture, 2018
4A Games’s Metro Redux (2014) plays at the intersection of literature and video games. The suite ... more 4A Games’s Metro Redux (2014) plays at the intersection of literature and video games. The suite consists of two games, the first of which (Metro 2033) was based on the self-published novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky: Mempo 2033 (2005) and Mempo 2034 (2009). The games, like the novels, are set in the metro system of Moscow some 20 years after a nuclear apocalypse. Remnant communities, forced underground, congregate in stations that function as nascent city-states. Some stations are independent and unaligned, while others have formed factions (the mercantile “Hanza,” the communist “Red Line,” and the fascist “Fourth Reich”). A powerful central coalition, “Polis,” through the agency of its “Spartan” field agents, seems alone in its attempts to bring order to the metro and recolonize the ruined city above. But Polis and the Spartans are not the only such elements in Metro Redux, and players are quickly immersed in a landscape of Soviet neoclassicism, itself a polyvalent and highly politicized 20th-century Reception. This article will begin to explore what such receptions of Reception might mean. Does the Classical pulse, transmitted across multiple media, degrade to a point of white noise, meaningless and unintelligible? Or can we still find significance in the variation of reflection and transmission?
Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 2017
It seems that few poems of Late Antiquity have received the level of attention that has been heap... more It seems that few poems of Late Antiquity have received the level of attention that has been heaped upon the Mosella of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Characterized (some might say stigmatized) as an hodoeporikon from at least the 1930s, the poem is commonly believed to describe Ausonius' return to Trier with the emperor Valentinian I, following a campaign against encroaching Germanic warbands. The earliest commentators on Ausonius' Mosella tended to concentrate on the structure of the poem itself, but, from the 1960s, there was a shift in academic focus towards an analysis of the specific language used in the poem and, in particular, its intertextuality. In 1984 Michael Roberts identified one of the dominant themes of the poem as the " violation of boundaries " and elucidated Ausonius' " negative evaluation of the products of culture as opposed to nature ". It is in this vein that this paper will precede, but arguing also that we see in Ausonius the beginning of a Christian and late antique rejection of the man made.
Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 2016
In the final years of the sixth century, the Gothic chieftain, Reccared, wrote a letter to Pope G... more In the final years of the sixth century, the Gothic chieftain, Reccared, wrote a letter to Pope Gregory the Great—a letter that offers a unique insight into that generation of Visigoths who abandoned their native tongue, embraced Catholicism, and established the kingdom of Spain. The letter demonstrates that Reccared was reasonably fluent in Latin, although commentators have, for some centuries now, felt compelled to point out just how many mistakes the warlord made and how egregious these mistakes were. These errors are particularly troubling given that, at the Third Synod of Toledo conducted in 589, Reccared had purportedly addressed the assembly in perfect, even slightly archaised, Latin. This article compares Reccared's letter with a selection of other early Germanic literature, especially those elements of the corpus that seek to translate Greek or Latin predecessors, in order to contextualise his errors and to offer some opinions as to why those mistakes might have been made.
Encyclopedia of Conflict in Ancient Greece and Rome, 2015
Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism in Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2015
If Tolkien had his way, he would never have been a successful author. After years of procrastina... more If Tolkien had his way, he would never have been a successful author. After years of procrastination and compulsive convolution, the publishing houses that had asked the Oxford Don for a sequel to "The Hobbit" rejected the manuscript of "The Lord of the Rings". It was not until 1954 that George Allen and Unwin eventually agreed to a modest run of a revised, and much reduced, version of the High-Fantasy epic. The 3000 British copies of "The Fellowship of the Ring" were followed within a few months by an even smaller run (1500 copies) produced by the Boston-based Houghton Mifflin company. By way of comparison, that same year the US edition of William Golding’s first novel, "Lord of the Flies", had a print run more than twice this size and the popular best seller, Morton Thompson’s "Not As A Stranger", sold close to 1.5 million copies. Tolkien had produced an unfathomable book for an unrecognized niche — and there he might have stayed, had it not been for the intrusion of the low-culture of the American campus.
In 1965, Donald Wollheim, editor of the pulp-publisher Ace Books, claimed that Houghton Mifflin had neglected to copyright "The Lord of the Rings" in America and produced a staggering 150,000 copies of an unauthorized edition of Tolkien’s novel. On the insistence of Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien worked quickly to produce a new version that was soon copyrighted in the United States and printed by Ballantine Books. By October of 1965 Ballantine had produced some 125,000 copies of this authorized edition and printed another 10,000 for sale in Canada. Within ten months Tolkien, who had been previously intransigent about ever allowing his work to appear in paperback, had sold some 250,000 copies of his Ring trilogy and by December 4, 1966, "The Lord of the Rings" was at the top of the New York Times bestsellers’ list.
Tolkien’s new readership, much to his chagrin, was predominantly drawn from American campuses. The very appearance of Tolkien’s novel in paperback was seen as an indicator of its counter-culture status. Moreover, Tolkien’s nostalgic medievalism and his focus on rustic simplicity paralleled the Hippy ethos of rejecting technology and returning to nature. "The Lord of the Rings" also fed a powerful American appetite for medievalism that was soon manifesting itself not only through a new wave of pulp-fiction fantasy, but also through the emergence of adult-audience comicbooks, “historical” re-enactment, and immersive role-playing games.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, May 8, 2014
This paper examines the historical truth of the ‘pear of anguish’ — a common exhibit in European ... more This paper examines the historical truth of the ‘pear of anguish’ — a common exhibit in European dungeon museums that has recently made its way into the popular imagination by way of TV shows and Internet sites. Like the ‘chastity belt’ before it, the ‘pear of anguish’ evidences the ‘dark medievalism’ of the modern consciousness, a dystopian view of the Middle Ages that imagines pre-Reformation Europe as a nexus of cruelty and sexual perversion. The historical reality, however, traced here through commentaries and catalogues from the past few centuries, would seem to indicate that, just like the 'chastity belt', both the device itself and its imagined function are creations of the modern world.
Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, Jan 1, 2013
The conceived history of the torture rack delineates a clear line of descent from classical Greec... more The conceived history of the torture rack delineates a clear line of descent from classical Greece, through ancient Rome, and into the Middle Ages where it becomes synonymous in the modern popular imagination with the dungeon and the Inquisition. This paper questions that history. There is little proof that the rack was used in Greece and strong evidence that it was not used in Rome. Moreover, an examination of the translation practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would seem to illuminate a critical moment at which these facts were obscured. The specific focus of this paper is on the ways in which this translational shift affected Anglo-Saxon studies, although there is also a considerable discussion of sources from the classical period and from late antiquity.
The Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, Jan 1, 2011
The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf has steadfastly resisted efforts to popularise it or translate it in... more The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf has steadfastly resisted efforts to popularise it or translate it into an easily dispersible medium. One of the least successful attempts to do so was the mid-70s comic-book Beowulf Dragon Slayer that lasted only six issues. Close reading of this comic, however, reveals a number of salient convergences between the graphic novel and the poem. The modern Grendel would still be recognisable to a 10th century audience, as would the pre-occupation with fate. More interestingly, though, the failure of the comic-book series parallels the transmission history of the poem itself.
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Books by Chris Bishop
From its genesis in the 1930s to the present, Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it was to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant. In the narrative of Red Sonja, we can trace a parallel history of feminism. Bishop regards these comics as not merely happenchance, but each success (Prince Valiant and The Mighty Thor) or failure (Beowulf: Dragon Slayer) as a result and an indicator of certain American preoccupations amid a larger cultural context.
Intrinsically modernist paragons of pop-culture ephemera, American comics have ironically continued to engage with the European Middle Ages. Bishop illuminates some of the ways in which we use an imagined past to navigate the present and plots some possible futures as we valiantly shape a new century.
Publications by Chris Bishop
In 1965, Donald Wollheim, editor of the pulp-publisher Ace Books, claimed that Houghton Mifflin had neglected to copyright "The Lord of the Rings" in America and produced a staggering 150,000 copies of an unauthorized edition of Tolkien’s novel. On the insistence of Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien worked quickly to produce a new version that was soon copyrighted in the United States and printed by Ballantine Books. By October of 1965 Ballantine had produced some 125,000 copies of this authorized edition and printed another 10,000 for sale in Canada. Within ten months Tolkien, who had been previously intransigent about ever allowing his work to appear in paperback, had sold some 250,000 copies of his Ring trilogy and by December 4, 1966, "The Lord of the Rings" was at the top of the New York Times bestsellers’ list.
Tolkien’s new readership, much to his chagrin, was predominantly drawn from American campuses. The very appearance of Tolkien’s novel in paperback was seen as an indicator of its counter-culture status. Moreover, Tolkien’s nostalgic medievalism and his focus on rustic simplicity paralleled the Hippy ethos of rejecting technology and returning to nature. "The Lord of the Rings" also fed a powerful American appetite for medievalism that was soon manifesting itself not only through a new wave of pulp-fiction fantasy, but also through the emergence of adult-audience comicbooks, “historical” re-enactment, and immersive role-playing games.
From its genesis in the 1930s to the present, Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it was to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant. In the narrative of Red Sonja, we can trace a parallel history of feminism. Bishop regards these comics as not merely happenchance, but each success (Prince Valiant and The Mighty Thor) or failure (Beowulf: Dragon Slayer) as a result and an indicator of certain American preoccupations amid a larger cultural context.
Intrinsically modernist paragons of pop-culture ephemera, American comics have ironically continued to engage with the European Middle Ages. Bishop illuminates some of the ways in which we use an imagined past to navigate the present and plots some possible futures as we valiantly shape a new century.
In 1965, Donald Wollheim, editor of the pulp-publisher Ace Books, claimed that Houghton Mifflin had neglected to copyright "The Lord of the Rings" in America and produced a staggering 150,000 copies of an unauthorized edition of Tolkien’s novel. On the insistence of Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien worked quickly to produce a new version that was soon copyrighted in the United States and printed by Ballantine Books. By October of 1965 Ballantine had produced some 125,000 copies of this authorized edition and printed another 10,000 for sale in Canada. Within ten months Tolkien, who had been previously intransigent about ever allowing his work to appear in paperback, had sold some 250,000 copies of his Ring trilogy and by December 4, 1966, "The Lord of the Rings" was at the top of the New York Times bestsellers’ list.
Tolkien’s new readership, much to his chagrin, was predominantly drawn from American campuses. The very appearance of Tolkien’s novel in paperback was seen as an indicator of its counter-culture status. Moreover, Tolkien’s nostalgic medievalism and his focus on rustic simplicity paralleled the Hippy ethos of rejecting technology and returning to nature. "The Lord of the Rings" also fed a powerful American appetite for medievalism that was soon manifesting itself not only through a new wave of pulp-fiction fantasy, but also through the emergence of adult-audience comicbooks, “historical” re-enactment, and immersive role-playing games.
The linguistic proclivities of Reccared and his clan, of course, would not have been so significant in European history, had not his court also included Isidore of Seville. Reckoned the greatest thinker of his day, Isidore's Etymologiae summarised and collated a wealth of knowledge from classical sources, bringing together an extremely diverse range of subject matter, from grammar and rhetoric to the earth and the cosmos, the elements, history, architecture, humans, animals, medicine, law, religion. His Etymologiae became so popular in the centuries after Isidore that it was read in place of many of the original classical texts that it summarised, which then ceased to be copied and were subsequently lost.
It might be possible to argue, therefore, that the classical inheritance of medieval Europe relied, to some extent, on the quality of Visigoth Latinity
How important were these mass-produced pieces of disposable literature? Do they reflect any greater truths about the society that created them? And, more importantly, what effect did their mass consumption have upon the society that produced them?