«Damsel in distress». Medioevo, medievalismo e ruoli di genere nella cultura audiovisiva contemporanea

Each form of narrative reflects, albeit implicitly, the society thatproduces it, since it depicts the prevailing cultural and social networks in a precise historical phase, becoming essential to follow its evolution according to the change of society itself. If the narrative and its products are useful to the representation of human societies, narrative models are subject to continuous processes of rewriting end refashioning, reflecting the evolution of societies and characterizing both the historical scriptures as well as fiction. The reworking of history and stories is, therefore, fundamental to managing every society, depicting its changes, questioning how strategically weak or risky it is. In the last two centuries much of the representation of Western society has been characterized by the omnipresence of contexts, images, characters relating to the imagined Middle Ages, metahistoric and timeless shaped by the Romanticism in a common ‘neomedieval cul- ture and language, so much so that medievalism can defined as a real lingua franca produced in transnational and international contexts to reach a global audience. Within this methodological framework and considering the importance of gender studies in contemporary scientific reflection, an analy- sis of female models and gender roles conveyed in contemporary cul- ture is proposed through literary, iconographic, audiovisual represen- tations that, using the metahistorical Middle Ages defined by medievalism, on the one hand continually renew its essence, on the other hand express a precise and historical interpretation of reality. Starting from the romantic archetype of the damsel distress, and considering that the Middle Ages is also the time of the fairytale, the rewritings of some traditional fairy tales have been analyzed in an interdisciplinary approach to try to understand the role of medievalism in conveying the transformations of gender relations and the female role in contemporary society, while maintaining a solid histori- ographical interpretation of the phenomenon.