Medievalism: A Critical History by David Matthews (review)

David Matthews’s Medievalism: A Critical History is a stimulating and authoritative analysis not just of medievalism as a cultural phenomenon, but also of medievalism studies as an intellectual and disciplinary endeavor. Through examining where the study of medievalism has been, and where it is now, Matthews offers suggestions about where it could go in the future.

Matthews is recognized as a knowledgeable and articulate commentator on both the creative and scholarly practices of medievalism. He has unsettled the self-evidence of many of the field’s key terms by engaging in meticulous yet lively excavations of their emergence and development. Those familiar with his published work on the history of medievalism will have encountered his genealogies of the key anglophone terms “medieval” and “medievalism.”

These genealogical analyses are reprised and further developed throughout this book (which is predominantly anglophone in emphasis with some well-chosen European examples), as Matthews demonstrates how “medieval” and “medievalism” came respectively to refer to a particular time in the past and to a range of dispositions toward that past and the practices aimed at reviving it. A critical point on which Matthews’s account turns is the evaluative discrepancy between the two terms: while “medieval” was initially coined as a neutral replacement for the more tarnished term “Gothic” (this neutrality has, of course, long since been lost in everyday parlance), “medievalism” was, from the outset, a pejorative term that marked a predilection for the medieval past that was not only untimely, but also unsavory in its flight from modernity. By carefully tracking the differing careers of these two terms, Matthews offers an illuminating historical explanation for the ambivalence that medievalism attracts, including within the modern academy.

Matthews proposes that medievalism’s two dominant and opposing Middle Ages are the “grotesque” and the “romantic.” This opposition will perhaps not surprise those familiar with the dominant tropes of medievalism. However, as a heuristic, the grotesque-romantic pairing is supple and serviceable; it is stark enough in its oppositions to draw attention to the contradictory valencies of the modern medieval, yet capacious enough to enable nuanced discussion of phenomena that are not easily reduced to either category. Matthews points out the way these two Middle Ages mutually implicate one another, illustrating this through numerous readings, including one of John Everett Millais’s 1870 painting The Knight Errant, which also features on the book’s striking cover. In this painting, Matthews points out, the knight’s chivalrous (or “romantic”) unbinding of a naked kidnapped maiden takes place against the shadowy background of the grotesque Middle Ages that has brought her there.

Matthews’s other key taxonomic constellation—which distinguishes among medievalisms that offer a Middle Ages “as it was,” a middle Ages “as it might have been,” and a Middle Ages “as it never was”—is similarly serviceable, and is explored throughout the book in a range of analyses of literature, reenactment practices, artworks, and architecture. Some of the study’s most accomplished readings are of architecture as the expression of spatial medievalism—historical time’s transmutation into spatial dimensions. Exploring the reach of medievalism as well as its limits, Matthews uses (mostly nineteenth-century) medievalist utopianism to ask how the Middle Ages has been mobilized as social critique and as reenactment—to ask, among other things, what practices of the self are implicated in the physical embodiments of the medieval past.

The book is studded with nuanced and sometimes arresting interpretations that illustrate Matthews’s key theses. Highlights include: a deft reading of the layered temporality of Proust’s Combray Cathedral, in order to query how the deep multi-temporality of architectural spaces comes to be compressed under the sign of the “medieval”; an elegant tracing of Alan Hollinghurst’s intertwining of the Gothic and the queer in the 2011 novel The Stranger’s Child; and a compelling account of the modernist Gothicism, both latent and obvious, of the Sydney Opera House. As a life-long resident of Sydney and a long-term student of...