<i>Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England Stephanie Barczewski Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. By Michael Alexander. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xxviii + 306; 106 illustrations. $45. Michael Alexander begins his new study of the impact of medievalism on English culture from the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries with the claim that he is tracing "the evolution of a neglected movement in English cultural history" (p. xviii). This assertion may be slightly exaggerated, given the number of previously published studies of English medievalism, but there is certainly room for another survey as insightful as Alexander's. Most previous scholarship on the medieval revival has focused on a specific aspect or author; Alexander's work proves the value of breadth. His only real competitor is Mark Girouard's Return to Camelot, now over a quarter-century old. Alexander proceeds for the most part chronologically, beginning with the "Gothic Decade" of the 1760s and concluding with recent expressions of medievalism in the late twentieth century. His focus is on individual, representative works; he makes no attempt to provide a comprehensive listing of every product of the medievalist impulse. This allows him the scope to do what he does best, which is to discuss in depth and detail the evolution and meaning of various literary, artistic, and architectural works. In age of ever-increasing academic specialization, Alexander's range of knowledge and interpretive ability is impressive indeed. His analyses are sophisticated but delightfully free of jargon; his writing style is characterized by a finely honed sense of academic detachment that occasionally engenders humorous phrases such as "Rossetti was fond of wombats" (p. 142). Much of this is well-trodden turf: the medievalist aspects of the works of Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, and John Ruskin have been thoroughly discussed and dissected by numerous previous scholars. The originality of Alexander's study emanates from his command of the canon-medievalist and non-medievalist-and ability to derive fresh insights from his analysis of it. For example, the medievalist artist Edward Burne-Jones is revealed by comparisons to the non-medievalist James MacNeill Whistler. He also points out connections between medievalist literary works and others not often associated with the medieval revival, such as Disraeli's Sybil. The depth of his knowledge, particularly about literary history, is extremely impressive, and allows him to trace evolutionary links between various works with precision and insight. Even more illuminating are his discussions of Edwardian and twentieth-century medievalism, which cover less familiar scholarly ground. Alexander sees the "Edwardian relaunch of medievalism" as "a second Medieval Revival" (p. 212), whereas most previous scholars have seen it as a diminished continuation of its Victorian predecessor whose anachronistic, chivalric romanticism was eventually killed off by the mud and blood of the Great War. Alexander challenges the latter argument, which was most prominently advanced by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory, by making a compelling case that pre-war medievalist authors such G. K. Chesterton were more than mere populist promoters of the kind of romantic pablum that the modernist writers later despised and disparaged. Instead, Chesterton represented an advance on the democratizing impulses of [End Page 239] Morris and the proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement. His intolerance for the pretensions of modernism was less parochial anti-intellectualism than a resolute determination to maintain a lightness of touch that would allow connection with, but not condescension to, a broader audience. In Alexander's eyes, the stark dichotomy created by Fussell and others between modernism and medievalism is a false one: Modernism and medievalism are labels for academic parcels. Labels should be scrutinized, and parcels checked, before they are passed to the young . . . Headline literary history gives the impression that shortly after the accession of King George V in 1910, Georgian poetry (hedgerows, tweed, cider, nostalgia) was overtaken by Modernist Poetry (experimental, intellectual, American) and in 1916 by War Poetry (short, moving, British). But poets do not live in boxes. (pp. 223-24) Certainly, the strand of romantic medievalism that had flourished in late Victorian England was challenged by the horrors of trench warfare, but it is far too simplistic...