For over a century now, medieval history and literature has inspired film – starting with the 1900 film, Jeanne d’Arc and continuing all the way up to the present with the 2022 film, Medieval. With such a long-standing tradition pulling from and adapting the same material, it begs the question: how much of our perception of the medieval world is due to the films made in its honor, and how accurate is it? It comes as no surprise that creative liberties for the sake of entertainment or artistic vision come at the expense of “historical accuracy,” but in many of these choices, there lies a kernel of truth that can be unpacked by turning to the very texts that inspired these movies. In this course, we will be watching the movies A Knight’s Tale, The Green Knight, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail while pairing them with their source texts, The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory’s grail quest to better understand the medieval world and how we think about it. We will be exploring gender, sexuality, female agency, and race both in the texts and the movies to see where changes are made and how they are significant – whether that be casting decisions in the movies, characterizations in the texts, or the historical context surrounding either of these two mediums.