Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (review)

–After fire destroyed St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1666, it was rebuilt in a style modelled on classical antiquity. By contrast, after the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1833 it was replaced by a neo-Gothic building. Michael Alexander’s book examines the nature of the cultural revolution which occurred in the interval between these events, and which continues into the present day.

His survey of the Medieval Revival is presented chronologically, ranging widely over architecture, art, historical scholarship, religion, and politics, though finding its focus in literature, particularly poetry, from Thomas Gray to Geoffrey Hill. Resolute for ‘high culture’ he excludes cinema except for a cursory mention in the Epilogue. He does not explain why his title confines his subject to England (why not Scotland or Britain?) even though Walter Scott is a major player in his account. Nor does he say why he suddenly stops at 1971.

In brief he outlines four periods of Medievalism. From 1760 to the 1830s, a process involving antiquarianism and the creation of neo-medieval texts culminated in Scott’s historical romances—a permanent alteration in the cultural landscape. Between then and 1870 medieval ideals were at their peak, and even proposed as practical solutions to the social problems created by contemporary capitalism. The next thirty years saw this ethical impetus diffused into legend and symbolism. Finally the twentieth century has witnessed a revival by a confrontational minority (led by Chesterton) aiming to recreate a medieval social ideal.

What emerges is how very Catholic the ambience, intents, and consequences of Medievalism were. It rehabilitated nuns, friars, aves and rosaries; provided an alternative model to Enlightenment rationalism and laissez-faire economics; encouraged the Tractarians; brought painting and architecture close to pre-Reformation styles; and nurtured the diverse [Anglo-] Catholic interests of Hopkins, Chesterton, David Jones, Eric Gill, Eliot, Auden, and Waugh.

Most of this is, of course, comparatively well known, and Alexander duly cites previous research by Arthur Johnston, Kenneth Clark, and Mark Girouard. Strangely, though, he does not acknowledge Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order (1970), an authoritative analysis of the roots of Medievalism and its nineteenth-century application to social theory. What is new is Alexander’s breadth of coverage, and his following the topic deep into the twentieth century to refute the popular notion that chivalry could not survive trench warfare on the Western Front. In fact he shows his exceptional strengths best in these later chapters: in a fine evaluation of how, despite suffering and the unintelligibility of the human waste, Jones’s In Parenthesis portrays heroic continuity with the chivalry of the medieval past; or in teasing out Auden’s verbal and ethical debts to Old English verse.

However, there are minor imperfections. Some of Alexander’s details are rather shaky. For example, there is uncertainty over dates: he gives Stansby’s Malory variously as 1634, 1643 and 1648; and states that Idylls of the King was completed in 1869 (whereas Tennyson added idylls until 1885). More grievously, he repeats Kathleen Tillotson’s claim that the Arthurian subject was ‘new’ for readers in 1842. I thought this claim was exploded long ago. Tennyson’s manner may have been new, but his subject certainly was not: Sterling’s comments on the legend of Excalibur in the ‘Morte’ are misinterpreted—he disliked the treatment not the topic, and even incorporated the same sword into a poem of his own in 1843. Nor is Alexander’s touch surer with the Pre-Raphaelites. Du Maurier’s A Legend of Camelot is not a parody of Morris’s ‘verse sagas’ (he hadn’t published them at this stage) but of Morris’s short poems in The Defence of Guenevere, Tennyson’s early work, and the art of D.G. Rossetti. The stained-glass design in Alexander’s plate 64 is of Rossetti’s Music, not Brown’s Architecture. Millais did not paint Bubbles as an...