Medievalism: A Critical History by David Matthews (review)

In his recent book on medievalism, David Matthews traces the history of medievalism from its first appearance in the sixteenth century down to modern times. He provides examples from literature, art, film, music, and from trends in architecture, identifying the grotesque and the romantic, and explaining the rise of medievalism both in England and in Germany. Matthews considers medievalism to be an influential field, but still in a minority form, especially beside medieval studies, with its rich tradition of scholarship. He shows great diversity in his choice of sources, ranging over nearly a hundred years of literature, architecture, and medievalist films.

Matthews divides his book, rather repetitively, into seven sections: ‘Taxonomies, how many Middle Ages?’; ‘Time, space, self, society: Welcome to the current Middle Ages – asynchronous medievalism’; ‘This way to the Middle Ages: the spaces of medievalism’; ‘On being medieval: medievalist selves and societies’; ‘History and discipline: Wemmick’s castle; the limits of medievalism’; ‘Realism in the crypt: the reach of medievalism’; and ‘Conclusion; Against a synthesis: medievalism, cultural studies, and antidisciplinarity’. In his Afterword, Matthews describes a stage performance, at London’s Southbank Centre, of Lavinia Greenlaws’s ‘A Double Sorrow’, her version of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ending his text with ‘As Troilus’s laughter echoed, there was some future in all of this, some future for the Middle Ages’.

Appendix I is based on sixty-seven responses to a Middle Ages survey, giving the ages, countries, employment, education, and periods chosen, while Appendix II gives a very useful list of data and dates relating to religion, literature, and art, from 1534 to 1906. A bibliography follows and an index of names. There are a few illustrations, including a barely relevant picture of the interior of Sydney’s Opera House, and six on Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop – depicting Quilp and Nell and the grim sexton in the crypt – which are all very medieval.

Matthews notes Studies in Medievalism, started in 1970 by Leslie Workman, which has attracted eminent contributors and he sees the acceptance of medievalism at Kalamazoo in the 1970s and in Leeds in 1994 as a possible breakthrough for the field. But the lack of scholarship in the journal, with only modern authors, provides an obstacle to his contention, and he fails to stress the irony in the ten different Middle Ages described by Umberto Eco. The brilliant Scot, George Buchanan, is not mentioned, although author of the first history of Scotland and tutor to Mary Queen of Scots. Nor does Matthews mention the Inquisition, all too active in its operations, with its brutal variety of tortures to break the spirits, or bodies, of the most brilliant of men and women, which serves as a grim symbol of horror in the Middle Ages.

Even so, Matthew’s studies of works by Walter Scott, Dante, Rosetti, John Ruskin, Jane Austen, Chaucer, Tennyson, Hilaire Belloc, Charlotte Bronte, Dan Brown, Norman Cantor, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, and many other authors from England, and Germany, attest to his very wide reading of primarily English literature, for which anyone reading his book should be grateful. As a major new work on medievalism, it deserves to be studied by students or scholars interested in this latest period of a medieval revival.