Revisiting the Medievalism of the British Arts and Crafts Movement

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on the British Arts and Crafts Movement, and considers its engagement with the pre-existing but flexible paradigm of medievalism. While accounts of the Arts and Crafts frequently emphasize the influence on the Movement’s designs of material culture from the European ‘Middle Ages’, this research draws out other facets of how this period was reimagined and appropriated. In particular, the chapter emphasizes Arts and Crafts protagonists’ tendency to idealize all things medieval, cultivating a pseudo-historical imaginary that was problematically conceptualised spatially as well as temporally, and was used to legitimize a range of the Movement’s aims and initiatives. A key case study here is the Art Workers’ Guild, a fraternal organization that counted among its members many of the London Arts and Crafts elite, and which contrived a medievalizing organizational aesthetic that rehearsed the group’s exclusivity, and its dismay at contemporary artistic and socio-political conditions.