Thoughts about King Alice

The cover of the book
Image taken from Macmillan, used for commentary

Read the previous piece in the series here.
Read the next piece in the series here.

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𝔒ne of the things I try to do when I travel to the International Congress on Medieval Studies is come back with a gift for my daughter. Some years, it has been a piece of jewelry of one sort or another. This year, I picked up the gift not at the Congress itself, but on a sort of side-excursion on which I went after the formal events wrapped up. Part of it was Matthew Cordell's 2018 King Alice, a book that follows the adventures of Alice and her family as they make good use of a snow day (putting together a short story-book) that has them all--Alice, her younger sibling, and their parents--at home.
The book works well, or it did for my daughter; she enjoyed getting it and looking at it, and she has asked me to read it to her several times since I first gave it to her when I got back to the Texas Hill Country from Kalamazoo. The narrative action reads authentically to my eyes (the paternal reactions in the book line up with what has happened for me with my own daughter, for example), and the illustrations blend the consistency of mastery with the raw quality of childhood work--entirely appropriately for the genre, and not unexpectedly for a Caldecott winner.
My interest in the book is not only as a father looking for something to read to and share with his daughter, though. Even with me largely out of academia, with the Society being one of my few continuing engagements with that community, I remain interested in how the medieval is portrayed, how it is accurately and inaccurately presented. And there are things King Alice gets wrong, though many of them inhere in presenting materials as understood by a younger child to an audience of younger children (Macmillan reports that the expected target audience of the book is three- to five-year-olds). In the event, I am less concerned about what the book gets wrong than I am in what it gets right, and it gets some things surprisingly right.

One of the two-page spreads in the book, featuring a two-page spread in the making.
Image taken from Macmillan, used for commentary

To give one example, the opening of the story-book Alice and her father compile centers on King Alice and her knights gathered at a meal. Many chivalric romances center on such meals; the opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight comes to mind, when Arthur and his court are assembled before a waiting feast, and there are no few instances of the same in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, when the Round Table sits to dinner before an adventure begins. Indeed, a strange thing happens shortly after, with pirates intruding upon the whole affair. Aside from the prevailing association of pirates with the medievalist (about which I've commented here and here), the interruption reads as very much in keeping with the chivalric works from which the book works, however removed in practice it is from them. (The fart joke that intrudes into the narrative is also far from unknown to the medieval, as Chaucer's Miller's Tale and any number of other works attest.)
Something else that ends up reading as authentic or accurate to chilvaric forebears is the relative brevity of the chapters in the story-book Alice and her father work on. No few of Malory's chapters are short, indeed, and while it is a minor point of correspondence, it remains one.
Even the title of the book itself, King Alice, hearkens back to medieval antecedents. Early in the book, Alice introduces herself as "King Alice," and she rejects utterly the title of queen about which her father inquires. Both Tamar of Georgia and, to a lesser extent, Empress Matilda come to mind as antecedents; a less medieval example, but a neomedieval or proto-medievalist one, comes to mind in Elizabeth I. It is a somewhat subversive correspondence, particularly given the typical depiction of medieval monarchs as not only masculine but male, and it is a welcome corrective to at least some of the many, many misguided and wrongheaded assumptions about the medieval that populate popular culture and the misuses of the medieval by execrable groups towards despicable ends.