In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Response to David Matthews
  • Bruce Michelson (bio)

David Matthews complicates our thinking about the interaction of medievalism as a broad cultural trend or fixation flourishing for several decades from around the middle of the nineteenth century, and medieval studies as a scholastic enterprise that took shape in and after the 1860s. He observes that two related literary projects had different sorts of luck, with the Early English Text Society (EETS) faring better overall in Britain than the Chaucer Society did; that it was the Yanks, and notably a set of them busy in the precincts of Harvard, who staffed and bankrolled this transatlantic rescue of Chaucer; and that beyond the commonplace New England wish to have crumbling ruins and mossy monuments conveniently about, as motives and cues for elegiac funk, there are real mysteries as to why these processes of conservation and recovery, with regard to Chaucer, unfolded in just that way. Matthews also interrogates “antimodernism” as a term in play now, and also as something of a puzzler, for the category, as Jackson Lears configured and established it in our discourse, has little to do with modernism, but much to do with modernity.

Interconnecting these constructs—medievalism, antimodernism, and medieval studies—Matthews shows a taste for paradox, and because I share it, I want to speculate briefly and irresponsibly outward from his sound and useful insights. Because he centers on a span of about fifteen years, from 1864 to roughly 1880, as crucial in the establishment of the EETS and the wavering rise of the Chaucer Society—1869 for the inception of the Society in England, and the early 1870s for the group in America—I will mention a few other interesting developments right around then as contextual twists and turns that might figure in a broader account of how things went and why. I will glance at a handful of busy personalities in this period, including in England not only Ruskin [End Page 773] and the Pre-Raphaelite painters but also Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and in the US, James Russell Lowell and the aging Longfellow as commanding figures in Gilded Age literary culture. Beyond that, one could wander happily for miles, remembering, for example, the influential taste of the rich people who stocked our museums (Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bertha Palmer, and Samuel Bancroft), what they did and did not bring home, and where they put it for display. For glorifying le Moyen Âge in the middle of the century, and also perhaps for wearing down its vogue in Western Europe, we could think about the long shadow of Viollet-le-Duc, the era’s lavish and fantastical restorer of moat and keep and battlement, the James Cameron of Carcassonne, and many churches and châteaux. Right when the Chaucer Society made its start in the US, a much bigger medievalist project got underway as well, a scholastic enterprise in a very concrete sense, and one that many of us still live with, as it established or altered the look and atmosphere of many American college campuses. This is the matter I will pause with at the end.

However, because medieval outbreaks in the nineteenth century make a funhouse in which we can get blissfully lost, I can scamper down only a few short corridors here. So, to center on those paradoxes: first, there is the great and anomalous importance of steam engines, heavy industry, new railroad systems, and mass tourism to the promotion of British and American medievalism and even the recovery of Chaucer, not because mechanical and coal-fired innovations incited gestures of revulsion, outbreaks of balladry and Morris dancing, but because in Britain and America, loosely Gothic architectural flourishes and cultural and aesthetic excursions could grow into modern industries thanks to those new technologies. In 1870, one key date in the history of the Chaucer Society, the Gothic Revival, as a dominant force in the design of grandiose public buildings and also commercial and middle-class structures, had already boiled along for about thirty years, a long arc of fashion that owed so much to mass production in mills and cheap rapid transport by rail. It really wasn’t all John Ruskin’s fault...

pdf

Share