Alicia Spencer-Hall’s Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience
is a work of impressive breadth and erudition that brings the study of
hagiography in mediaeval scholarship into dialogue with contemporary
issues of media materiality, ontology and embodiment in photography and
film, as well as with the study of spectatorship, celebrity culture,
fandoms and virtual environments. As such it is part of a growing corpus
of recent neo-mediaevalist writings, which ranges from new readings of
representations of gender and sexuality in mediaeval texts to
explorations of a recently renewed and ongoing interest in mediaeval and
early modern culture, evidenced, for instance, in the frequent
mediaeval themes and references of contemporary television shows and
videogame.