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In Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England, Michael Alexander has written a superb study, showing how differing versions of the Middle Ages helped shape the art, architecture, and literature of modern England. This is a subject of enormous scope; yet rather than march his readers through an exhaustive survey, Alexander provides a witty overview of representative painters, architects, and writers whose medievalism helped them negotiate their modernity. Printed on good heavy paper and handsomely illustrated, the book nicely complements Alexander's sprightly commentary.
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The former chair of the English department at St. Andrews, Alexander traces the modern fascination with things medieval to the late 18th century, to the antiquarianism of Horace Walpole and Thomas Percy, Macpherson's Ossian (1760), and Burke's rococo elegy to Marie Antoinette in his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790-91):
Oh! What a revolution! And what a heart I must have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! … little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
This pitting of the present against an exemplary past set the stage for Sir Walter Scott, Pugin, the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, and the Gothic Revival. If the age of chivalry was gone in France, it could be revived in England. As Alexander remarks, "the Medieval Revival was always interested in how people should live now in the present as well as how they had lived in the past." The revival could simply have been an episode in the history of nostalgia—always compounded by the ambivalent legacy of the English Reformation—but, as Alexander deftly shows, it issued in genuinely new art in the work of, among others, Keats, Tennyson, John Everett Millais, Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Jones.
Many English readers agreed with Burke on the revolutionary French but doubted whether he understood their own history. Rockingham's friend exaggerated the achievements of the Whig aristocracy, and glossed over its sins. The English history described by the great constitutional historian William Stubbs rang truer. F.W. Maitland, the greatest of all constitutional historians, realized this later when he wrote:
Dr. Stubbs saw English history and taught others to see it in a manner, which if I am not mistaken, was somewhat new. Somewhere about the year 1307 the strain of the triumphal march must be abandoned; we pass in those well-known words "from the age of chivalry, from an age ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation." It was no small feat for an historian who held this opinion to keep us reading while the decades went from bad to worse, reading of "dynastic faction, bloody conquest, grievous misgovernance, local tyrannies, plagues and famines unhelped and unaverted, hollowness of pomp, disease and dissolution."
Medievalism might have begun as an antidote to unpalatable realities, but along the way it reshaped English history and became a permanent part of English identity. Keats is a good example of an artist who took the prevailing vogue for things medieval—wrought to a certain finish by Coleridge and Scott—and used it for his own original purposes. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (1820) could almost have been written to prove what natural bedfellows genius and pastiche are. Listen to the poem as Sir Ralph Richardson recites it and you will hear a love song of timeless power. In his decidedly unmedievalist poem, "Modern Love" (1817), Keats asked: "And what is love? It is a doll dress'd up / For idleness to cosset, nurse and dandle / A thing of soft misnomers." Well, in what Keats' knight-at-arms relates, alone and palely loitering, on that cold hill's side there are no misnomers.
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