Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (review)

Michael Alexander's Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England makes a timely contribution to a growing field of interest. It offers a clear and useful definition of medievalism as 'having some historical reference to a set of medieval ideas or facts' (p. 264) and posits it against 'gothic fantasy' which imagines rather than genuinely makes such reference. As Alexander points out, studies of the Medieval Revival in public culture in England have hitherto commonly focused on architecture. Alexander makes sufficient mention of this, and of the visual arts, but he argues that it is actually in literature that medievalism had most impact on English culture during his period, from the 1760s to the 1970s. The literature is well contextualised in its social and political background as Alexander forms a coherent historical overview. The other major area of significance to scholars of medievalism concerns the academic interest in, and study of, the Middle Ages, but Alexander examines its more literary manifestations.

The antiquarianism of men such as Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton laid the foundations of the study of medieval English literature. It is placed alongside the forgeries of James Macpherson and the imaginative imitations of Thomas Gray and others to demonstrate the nationalistic interests and underlying ideologies that accompanied the beginnings of the Medieval Revival. From this time forward, Alexander convincingly argues, exposure to medieval ideas and material significantly shaped English literary output. He draws attention, for example, to Wordsworth's acknowledgement that the Romantics owed a great deal to Percy's publications. It is in this kind of detail – the connections between those works which are conventionally and easily recognised as medievalist and those where the influence of such ideas is not so widely acknowledged – that this book is at its most interesting.

The careers of key figures, such as Sir Walter Scott, are discussed in some detail. Scott, although known in the modern era for his historical novels, also wrote a great deal of verse romance in imitation of what he considered to be medieval themes and styles. Such works are compared with poems by, for example, Coleridge and Keats, further demonstrating the medievalism of the Romantics. Scott's writing receives detailed attention covering several chapters, as does Tennyson's, as is deserved by major and well-recognised figures of English medievalism.

Where Scott and Tennyson are reasonably often conceived of in the light of their medievalism, important figures of modernism such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are discussed at some length and the depth of their medievalism explored. This is important because, although medieval references abound in the work of both, they are not commonly understood as being medievalists themselves or as playing a part in two centuries of modern engagement with the Middle Ages.

The two-century time span of this book is another significantly useful element as it demonstrates the changing, yet enduring, interest in the Middle Ages that occurred throughout it. Popular knowledge of medievalism in the modern period is often limited to the Victorian era of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and while Alexander devotes some three chapters to the period, it is bracketed by the times and ideas that came before and after it, contextualising a period which is at times examined as though it had occurred in a temporal and ideological vacuum with regards to its medievalism.

The argument of this book is an important one for medieval studies as contemporary scholars often question the relevance of the Middle Ages to the present. Alexander demonstrates that medieval material and ideas did, in fact, have considerable impact on the modern era, and study of them can thus shed better light on more recent times. Alexander does not extend his argument past the 1970s, and suggests that the removal of medieval texts from secondary and tertiary education has led to a loss of knowledge of, and interest in, medieval material and ideas...