Introduction

The introductory chapter charts the evolution of Victorian medievalism in art and architecture, literature and language, politics and social life in Britain, but also in Europe and the Americas. The introduction compares and contrasts what were often described as the two great cultural movements of the century: medievalism and classicism. It examines the turn toward the Middle Ages in earlier eras, and traces the various nineteenth-century offshoots of this turn, including antiquarian collecting, Romantic poetry, Gothic novels, Pre-Raphaelite painting, church building in New Zealand and Canada, popular music and dance, colonial economic discourse, and in the language of Toryism, radicalism, High Church Anglicanism and even utilitarianism. The introduction describes how Victorian medievalist architecture, art, and literature are finally receiving the attention and appreciation they deserve—far more than they had received throughout much of the twentieth century—from scholars, curators, collectors, conservators, town planners, and members of the general public alike.

The Diggers and the Norman Yoke

During the English Civil War period, the Diggers asserted that social degree was a product of humanity’s fallen nature, rather than part of God’s plan. Such a claim does not require a historical precedent beyond the Bible, yet the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical reformist groups frequently appealed to the Middle Ages, suggesting that the Norman Conquest was England’s own ‘fall’ from a more equitable political and economic system, and that documents such as Magna Carta marked the people’s efforts to reclaim those rights. The Diggers’ distinct contribution to this discussion, taken up in the nineteenth century by radical thinkers such as Thomas Spence, was that property ownership should be communal. This idea of the Middle Ages survived in the radical reformist tradition into the nineteenth century and can be found in the medievalism of William Blake, William Morris, and many others. The theory of the Norman yoke remained a significant influence on social and racial theory in Britain for much of the nineteenth century.

Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers

The nineteenth century was the period during which, at last, the great naturalistic prose literature of medieval Iceland—the saga—was beginning to appear in English translations. The subject of this chapter is the representation or recycling of this saga material in new prose fictions, and the difficulties it presented, whether or not there was an attempt to imitate the style and narrative structures of the original. I will explore Longfellow’s adaptation of Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar as part of ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae as an experiment in saga narrative method, and his representation of part of Eyrbyggja saga as a short ghost story, ‘The Waif Woman’; H. Rider Haggard’s bravura imitation of a saga, Eric Brighteyes; and W. G. Collingwood’s three ‘Lakeland sagas’: Thorstein of the Mere, The Bondwoman, and the short piece ‘The Story of Thurstan of the Thwaite’.

Building Utopia

William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) contains many detailed descriptions of buildings. As products of the utopian society described, most of these buildings are new. Yet their form is evidently ‘medieval’, or ‘medievalist’ (and therefore at odds, in some sense, with our preconceptions of the ‘new’). This chapter asks what such terms mean, or might mean, in the context of a built environment that stands outside the margin of known history. In the process, it describes the structural features to which Morris draws attention, with more historical and conceptual precision than has yet been attempted. At the heart of this discussion is a concern to classify a future architecture that resembles medieval architecture without any conscious effort of stylistic homage on the part of its builders. The problematic implication is that ‘medieval’ architecture will always be the natural, or ‘structural’, style of a happy and liberated people.

Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design

This chapter traces how the arguments used to promote ecclesiastical Gothic became diffused in the context of a wider discourse about taste. Pugin’s arguments for Gothic had been designed to persuade a narrow group of ecclesiastical patrons but this approach became problematic when addressing Victorian consumer culture. Attempts to influence the judgement of the consumer run through the work of other apologists for medievalism such as John Ruskin, G. G. Scott, and Charles Eastlake. Owen Jones appropriated the discourse of medievalism and some of its principles but applied them to a much wider historiography of architecture and ornament, thus dissolving the more partisan hermeneutics promoted by the medievalists. The principles underlying the Gothic Revival were perpetuated through movements such as Aestheticism but these principles no longer pointed to the superiority of the Gothic style.

The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire

The chapter is set in the context of the history of the denominational evolution of monasticism and sainthood within Victorian Catholicism in both its Roman and Anglican forms. It explores, by means of a series of key examples, the battle between the proponents and opponents of medieval and contemporary monasticism and sainthood. The aim of this is to explain the range of views towards religious asceticism within Victorian society and their relationship to contemporary constructions of gender and forms of sexual desire. Examples of key figures, notably John Henry Newman, Charles Kingsley, and Joseph Leycester Lyne, provide instances of some of the ways in which sexual desire became associated with Catholic forms of devotion which, on the face of it, championed celibacy and resistance to fleshly desires.

Scottish Neo-medievalism

The phenomenon of Scottish neo-medievalism in the long nineteenth century is diverse, finding expression in Gothic architecture; paintings and murals; book illustration; fiction, poetry, revivals of ballad and romance; the founding of scholarly and antiquarian societies; and Arts and Crafts-related educational practices. This chapter explores neo-medieval articulations which can be termed ‘vernacular’—in other words, explicitly Scottish or ‘Celtic’ in subject matter. It traces their recurrent ideological, cultural, and political associations (for example, Catholicism, Anglo-Scottish relationships and Wars of Independence, Jacobitism and political rebellion), and the patterns of nostalgia and desire which underpin them. The chapter also discusses turn-of-the century literary and artistic practices which draw on a distinctly Scottish neo-medieval aesthetic.

The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period

This chapter compares how the Irish and Welsh of the Victorian period engaged with their respective medieval cultures and histories. Although medieval Ireland and Wales both produced extensive and varied literatures in Celtic vernaculars and experienced English conquest that had major long-term consequences, they also differed in important respects. The same is true of the post-medieval histories of both countries. These differences in turn help to explain why uses of their medieval legacies by the nineteenth-century Irish and Welsh reveal significant contrasts. After outlining the contexts in which engagement with medieval culture and history took place, the discussion focuses on the significance attached to the Middle Ages in understandings of the Irish and Welsh pasts; idealizations of the medieval Church and secular rulers; medieval influences on art and architecture; and the editing and translating of medieval Irish and Welsh literary texts, together with medieval influences on modern literature.

Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel

This chapter focuses primarily on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and the novels—including Scott’s subsequent crusading fictions—that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period of English history. In the hands of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley, the historical novel after Scott tended to present the Norman invasion as an enduringly formative moment in the making of modern imperial Britain. Popular fictions by Charlotte Yonge and G. A. Henty, composed for child readers, were similarly inspired by Scott, though in their reductive rewriting of Ivanhoe they further contributed to Scott’s ‘descent to the school-room’. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1883), by contrast, I will argue in conclusion, recovers the playfully reflexive scepticism of Ivanhoe and detaches the adolescence of its confused hero from any idea of an analogous national emergence.

The Romantic Gothic Imagination

The French Revolution was famously described by Edmund Burke as proof that ‘the Age of Chivalry is gone’, and the fall of the French monarchy prompted a major controversy over the value of Britain’s remaining ‘Gothic institutions’. As a result, the shifting ideological sympathies of the British Romantics can be tracked through the changing fashion in which they made use of medieval history and symbolism in their poetic works. This chapter maps out the different ways in which the major British Romantics made use of the medievalist discourses that they inherited from their eighteenth-century predecessors, showing how the Romantics variously depicted the Middle Ages as a dark era of Gothic horrors, an age of feudal oppression, or as the wellspring of Britain’s ‘Gothic liberty’.