Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840

Abstract

For scholars of the Gothic, thinking about buildings and books together is an ingrained habit. Not only did Gothic fiction emerge alongside the Gothic architectural revival, but the author of the first self-proclaimed “Gothic tale” was also the builder of what he called a “little Gothic castle.” Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill, the villa he transformed into an ersatz relic of the architectural past, is thus permanently linked in the critical memory with the ghost-ridden medieval structure he conjured up in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The many later romances that followed in the footsteps of Otranto often also wore their architectural features on their sleeves—or, rather, on their title pages, where “castles,” “ruins,” and “abbeys” proliferated for decades after Walpole's pioneering experiment. Among the pleasures of Townshend's formidably erudite book is the thoroughness with which it revitalizes this by now automatic coupling. Townshend shows that Gothic structures and Gothic romances were linked by the same heated arguments over the valence of what he calls “Gothic antiquity”—a “mythical, vague, and somewhat nebulous sense of the national British past” that spanned the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For some, this was a dark epoch of barbarity and benighted Catholicism, while others saw it as the wellspring of British political liberties and the source of a native artistic tradition epitomized by Shakespeare. The crumbling medieval edifices that fill the period's popular romances—Ann Radcliffe's Castle of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's Convent of St. Clare, even Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey—are thus more than formulaic settings for eerie adventure or (in Austen's case) didactic parody. They are expressions of an uneasy fascination that Townshend tracks across eight decades of controversy. As Townshend shows, the eventual deflation of the debate over the Gothic legacy in the modern age was foreshadowed by a seemingly mundane linguistic innovation: the coinage of the word medieval. Its first recorded usage dated by the Oxford English Dictionary to 1817, this more neutral historical marker pointed ahead to the Victorians’ taming of the “Gothic” past into an unthreatening subject of historical and aesthetic inquiry.