The nostalgic moment and the sense of history

Abstract

This essay analyzes acute, individual nostalgia recorded in three examples of nineteenth-century medievalisms. As each example shows, the nostalgic moment involves primary (rather than secondary) and affective (rather than cognitive) memory – a memory of motor-sensory reception. A comparison of the nostalgia in Ann Radcliffe's tour of Hardwick Castle in 1794 and Thomas Carlyle's medieval interlude in Past and Present (1843) reveals the distinctive mnemonic component of depathologized nostalgia and shows why manifestations of it could entail such different affects and emotions. The discourse surrounding the nineteenth-century Gothic revival in architecture led by A.W.N. Pugin and later by Charles Eastlake shows, further, that Radcliffe's proved the more exemplary form of medievalism. Instead of a symbology laden with specific religious content meant to engineer a nostalgic reversion, the gothic revival in Eastlake's history developed into a formalistic mode that would engage an appreciation for a concocted Middle Ages based in primary memory.