The spectatorial afterlife of Robin Hood: intersections of medievalism and surveillance in film and television

Medievalism, which encompasses a range of cultural practices and discourses that engage with the ways in which the medieval has been represented in post-medieval societies, has increasingly become a focus of academic endeavour within the broader field of medieval studies. As a more recently emerging field, medievalism studies has already amassed a rich tradition which has created the foundations of an influential field of research that intersects with, but diverges from, the traditions of medieval studies. This divergence includes a focus on previously neglected areas of study, those 'made medievalisms', which include popular cinematic texts and which inform serious, original, and illuminating studies into medievalism. 

The primary interest in this study is to identify and explore how accepted understandings of medievalism and ideas about surveillance intersect in films and television programs representing the medieval outlaw Robin Hood. Robin Hood, a figure whose post-medieval afterlife is more firmly established than his medieval existence, epitomises the multi-temporal nature of medievalism and is an exemplary figure in which the past and present are both visible. This thesis will examine the intersection of medievalism, technologies of storytelling that are inherently spectatorial, the politics and culture of surveillance, and how Robin Hood the 'medieval outlaw' is fundamental to the illumination and understanding of these intersections. 

Robin Hood has been part of the English cultural landscape for over six centuries. He brings the medieval period into engagement with the postmedieval, starting as a yeoman outlaw in the earliest surviving texts and evolving into a dispossessed nobleman in more contemporary retellings. The romantic and nostalgic Robin Hood that first appeared on the silver screen in 1908 began the spectatorial afterlife of this legend, and he has since been the subject of a motion picture at least once a decade. As technologies evolved, Robin Hood has also been the star of a network television series at least once a decade since 1950s. 

The medievalist resonances of this hero integrate transnational and transtemporal realities into our contemporary experience, such that these medievalist narratives on Robin Hood can disclose more about contemporary society and experience than they do about medieval England. As time and temporality are crucial categories for thinking about the medieval past and the uses we make of that past in post-medieval contemporary culture, popular medieval ism forms an important transtemporal framework, where there is a co-existence of the past and present, for the discussion of contemporary anxieties.