The Politics of Stuart Medievalism

Abstract

When Ruskin coined the term 'Mediaevalism', he did so as a way of contrasting what he saw as a distinctive visual style with two other historical styles, 'Classicalism' and 'Modernism'. Ruskin's terms have since been broadened to include much more than visual style, but his aesthetic preoccupation still clings to 'medievalism'.1 As a consequence, comparatively little has been said about the political implications of turning to the Middle Ages as a model of style or behaviour. On the face of it, those implications would seem to be conservative and authoritarian. Divine right monarchy, theocracy, social and cosmic hierarchy, theological descriptions of authority, all are political ideas that originated in the Middle Ages or achieved dominance then, and all belong to the decidedly conservative end of the political spectrum. One immediately thinks, for example, of how medievalism flourished in the reactionary political atmosphere of nineteenth-century England, when a theological definition of authoritarian order from the past appealed to those with power and privilege as they confronted the threat of political revolution and rapid social change. But while a nostalgic perception of the medieval authority undoubtedly characterizes the nineteenth century, that understanding did not arise then for the first time. Every river has a source, and what might well be thought of as the river of nineteenth-century medievalism is no exception. Just as the conception of the 'middle ages' itself had to arise some time after what we think of as the Middle Ages, so medievalism as a nostalgically conceived repository of political conservatism had to arise at some point after the thing itself had passed, or at least was perceived to have passed. What I want to suggest here is that the key ingredients of what would eventually emerge as nineteenth-century medievalism can be found in the seventeenth century and specifically in the rise of Stuart absolutism under James I. To be sure, in laying down the foundations of centralized power, the Tudors had consciously preserved and in some cases revived certain symbols and rituals of power that had arisen much earlier and were essentially neo-medieval, for they had been rendered obsolete in practice by Tudor policy itself. Court rituals such as the tournament or the disguising, for