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Edited
by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner
Oxford Handbooks Series Oxford: University
Press, 2020 Hardcover. xx + 688 pages.
ISBN 978-0199669509. £110
Reviewed by Jacqueline Banerjee The Victorian Web
Nothing says more about the continual
intersection of past and present than the Victorians’ fascination with the medieval.
Here were people at the very hub of empire, in the midst of making the modern
world, utterly beguiled by the distant past. Victorian artworks, architecture
and poetry drew on it most obviously, with, for example, hundreds of new
Gothic-style churches (or extensions to churches) springing up to cater to the
spiritual needs of a growing population. But the attraction of the Middle Ages was
felt across the cultural board. Charlotte Yonge’s novel, The Heir of
Redclyffe (1853), held up chivalrous ideals to a whole generation of
readers, while the more fun-loving enjoyed medieval bawdyism and trumpet
fanfares at the music halls. Every aspect of the medieval had its adherents,
including early church music, societies for which were founded at both Oxford
and Cambridge Universities. Side by side with technological advance and
empire-building went this constant retrieval and reworking of cultural capital,
and, inevitably, it was both affected and spread by Britain’s wider reach into
every corner of the globe. Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner’s introduction to the Oxford
Handbook of Victorian Medievalism sets an unusually celebratory tone for
such a weighty academic project, preparing readers to see the Victorians’ interest
in this past not as a form of nostalgia, but as a means to promote “happiness,
truth and beauty” [19]. Parts I and II launch the handbook by dealing, respectively,
with medievalism before 1750, and the medievalism of the Romantics. This is
partly context, establishing lines of continuity to the nineteenth century. The
revival of interest in ballads, and in the Gothic, provide useful background. Sir
Walter Scott naturally features here, but philological studies and other topics
also prove to be important. Also included is a chapter about the Diggers, the
“communal experiment” of the mid-seventeenth century [77]. Why? As Clare A. Simmons
explains, the Diggers’ bid to assert farming rights over common land found its
justification in the freedoms of pre-Norman times – and echoes of their campaign
can be found as late as 1890, in William Morris’s News from Nowhere.
“Morris’s combination of medievalism and communism clearly partakes of the
Digger tradition”, says Simmons. “The Digger movement thus provides a
significant bridge between the recreation of a vision of a historical medieval
past and the dream of an earthly paradise” [81]. This is just the sort of connection
for which Parker and Wagner have prepared us. In
such ways, the early sections provide entries to, as well as contexts for, the
later ones. Part III, on sources, is particularly illuminating. There is no
proof that Morris actually read the work of Gerrard Winstanley, spokesman of
the Diggers, but plenty of educated Victorians did read Chaucer and Boccaccio. No
prizes for guessing that Chaucer’s sorely tried wife, the patient Griselda, was
a particular favourite. But fewer people might recognise tributes to the Decameron:
Eleanora Sasso has a revealing if sometimes challenging discussion of
“Boccaccio’s Fiamatta in Rossetti’s Double Works of Art”, which explores the
extraordinary richness of the Pre-Raphaelite artist’s vision. Sasso’s
discussions of Morris and Swinburne in this part are equally informative, especially
when it comes to Swinburne’s “perverted rewritings” of Boccaccio [262]: not
even the sunflower escapes this poet’s characteristic injection of pain. Irish,
Welsh and Scottish backgrounds are also examined in this part, as are French
and German trends. Elizabeth Emery and Janet T. Marquardt, for example, discuss
“The Conservation Mentality : Vandalism, Preservation, and Restoration”, giving
attention to such influential figures as the French architectural historian and
restoration architect Viollet-le-Duc. Morris and Edward Burne-Jones viewed the
French architect’s work on Notre Dame in Paris with dismay, and Morris’s
feelings in particular would help to put a brake on insensitive restoration
projects in Britain. As so often with exposure to the medieval, lessons were
being learned.
Medievalism
also played a role in society at large: Part IV, on “Social, Political, and
Religious Praxis”, examines the important ways in which it infiltrated movements
like Young England Toryism and the Oxford Movement. Here as elsewhere, the Handbook
presents some welcome reassessments, updating the scholarship in this area to
good effect. Ian Haywood’s chapter on “Illuminating Propaganda : Radical
Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era”, for instance, puts the spotlight
on William James Linton’s little-known anti-Poor Law poem, Bob Thin
(1846), with its brilliant parodies of medieval illuminated letters. There are
appropriate greyscale illustrations throughout, but, with good reason, this is one
of the most fully illustrated pieces in the Handbook.
Such
an enterprise requires a galaxy of scholars, and the next (and final) two
parts, which range over arts, architecture and literature, bring together, for
example, William Whyte on “Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism”, G.A. Bremner on
“The Gothic Revival beyond Europe”, Jim Cheshire on “Victorian Medievalism and Secular
Design”, Ayla Lepine on “The Pre-Raphaelites : Medievalism and Victorian
Visual Culture” and Jan Marsh on “William Morris and Medievalism”. Their topics
are the ones which most readers would expect to find in the Handbook,
but there are still some surprises. Whyte, for example, provides a corrective
to the familiar emphasis on “the” Gothic Revival of this period, concurring
with recent opinion that Gothic had never really gone away. This, together with
his Catholicism, might seem to diminish the importance of arch-Gothicist A.W.N.
Pugin. But Pugin has already had some attention in Corrina Wagner’s chapter on
“Bodies and Building : Materialist Medievalism” in Part IV, and, along
with George Gilbert Scott and John Ruskin, Pugin receives more in Bremner’s
lively chapter on the Gothic in British territories abroad. Whyte himself
includes Pugin in his discussion of secular rather than ecclesiastical design. So
he is not short-changed. On the contrary, what comes out here is the range of
his influence. As the editors suggest at the beginning, it was remarkably
pervasive, and not only geographically: “the very principles forwarded by Pugin
motivated designers and collector to identify good design in Greek, Roman, or
Renaissance styles” [13].
Similar
correctives to or nuancing of conventional views can be found in Lepine’s chapter
on “The Pre-Raphaelites : Visual Culture”, in which, for example, she includes
the less-studied embroidery of the Morrises and Georgina and Edward
Burne-Jones: the panels they designed for the Red House dining room depict
characters from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women [see p. 498]. Lepine also
briefly discusses Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography. After all, Cameron took
photographs illustrating Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry. But women put in their
most substantial appearance in Clare Broome Sanders’s “Women Writers and the
Medieval” in Part VI. Here, the poets Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning are among those discussed, and Sanders directs us to
Judith Johnston’s George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (2006),
which sees Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda as a “disrupted Guinevere
figure” [577]. In this part too, Anthony H. Harrison takes up Tennyson’s
Guinevere in the Idylls, and contrasts her with Morris’s in his “Defence
of Guenevere,” showing how these authors all found scope in medieval legends to
express the conflicting contemporary views of womanhood. Harrison’s “Mid-to-late Victorian
Medievalist Poetry” in Part VI is complemented by Inga Bryden’s closing
discussion of “Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur”, which establishes
topical relevance in a different way. Bryden shows how Arthurian objects like his
sword Excalibur help to recreate, substantiate and exoticise the medieval world,
but at the same time embody the Victorians’ anxieties about their burgeoning
material culture. On the one hand, “imitation ‘ancient’ objects, such as
jewellery” were all the rage in Victorian Britain (657); on the other hand, how
many times are swords shattered in Idylls of the King? Between them, therefore,
the first and last chapters of the Handbook draw its rich contents
together cleverly: Philip Schwyzer’s “King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty” opens
the proceedings with the eclipse of the historical Arthur, while Bryden closes
them with proof of what Schwyzer affirms, the continuing relevance of the legendary
Arthur. And, remembering the penultimate
chapter here, Parker’s on “Anglo-Saxonism in the Victorian Novel”, with its
remarks about the currently popular Netflix adaptations of Bernard Cornwall’s Saxon
Stories (rechristened The Last Kingdom), we might extend that
assertion to include medievalism in general. There
are forty chapters here in all, counting the introduction – too many to mention
in one short review. But, despite the Handbook’s enormous range, some
readers might notice a few inadequacies. John Ruskin's appearances in it are
not commensurate with his influence, despite Cheshire's conclusion, in his own
short section on him, that it promoted the "kind of work ... strongly
associated with medievalism" [453]. Christina Rossetti is mentioned only
in passing: Helsinger's point, that her poetry was influenced by the revived medieval
liturgy, appears in a useful footnote [556, n. 2], but this has to send us
outside the book for more information. Evelyn De Morgan, whose exquisite and
well-known painting, Flora (1894), draws its inspiration and even method of
composition from medieval Italian altarpieces, is not mentioned at all. De
Morgan's later painting of a supplicating knight in anxious prayer, Our Lady
of Peace, was inspired by the Boer War, but dated 1907, so comes too late for
consideration here, but is further proof that medievalism remained and remains
an intimate part of our cultural landscape. Can we draw any general conclusions from all this? Although
the book is pre-eminently a guide, a thesis does emerge. Writing about the
Pre-Raphaelites, Helsinger explains that they “disrupted what they experienced
as a stale present in both painting and poetry by returning to a primitivism of
the visual, the musical and the poetic arts” [556]. She adds later that bringing
this past into the present opens a “productive gap” through which “something
new might one day emerge” [566]. As Parker and Wagner remind us so appositely
in their introduction, the title of one of Morris’s essays is “How we live and
how we might live” [18; emphasis added]. The point is that medievalism is woven not
only into our material and remembered past but also into our cultural and
spiritual present, and that there is much there to stimulate change for the
better. The past may feel like another country, but, if so, it is the one we
inherited, and what we make of it and do with it will affect the future. We
cannot be reminded of this too often. ☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web :
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