Past, Present, Future Perfect: Paradigms of History in Medievalism Studies

Brian Helgeland's film, A Knight Tale, is usually taken to exemplify a paradigm of desire compatible with a capitalist narrative of continuous acquisition and achievement. In the film, another form of desire is evident, however, at odds with the capitalist narrative. Helgeland has introduced elements of that paradigm of desire usually termed courtly love, based on the deferral or renunciation of satisfaction. These elements appear to have been drawn from one of the seminal narratives of courtly love, Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot. Since the study of a medieval or a medievalist text always involves a kind of historiography, a comparison of these two texts, viewed in the light of psychoanalytic understandings of desire and the history of desire, offers a way of investigating theories of history which underpin medievalism studies.