Reviewed by: Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, and: William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality Ruth Livesey (bio) Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, by Michael Alexander; pp. xxviii + 306. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $45.00, €25.00. William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, by Marcus Waithe; pp. xvi + 218. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2006, €50.00, $95.00. The book beautiful and a revived interest in the quality of printing were later offshoots of the Victorian interest in things medieval. It was clearly a sign that I had been spending too much time with such aesthetes when I decided to read first Michael Alexanders expansive work, beautifully produced by Yale, with copious colour illustrations and handsome bindings. Marcus Waithes book, on the other hand, is the result of a new initiative by the UKs English Association, working with the independent academic press Boydell & Brewer, to support specialist monographs: such earnest intentions dont extend to dust jackets; the cover itself seemed to be the emblem of plain living and high thinking, with the author and title pasted on a label, and so it came second. [End Page 740] In addition to its very material advantage of colour reproductions, Alexander's study offers three refreshing differences to a standard monograph on modern medievalism. First, the chronological range of the work, from the 1760s up to the work of Geoffrey Hill and W. H. Auden in the mid-twentieth century, extends beyond anything else written on the subject. Second, the author is not a specialist scholar of Victorian literature or cultural history but has published a number of translations of Old and Middle English texts and hence possesses an increasingly unusual authority on the matter of medievalism in modernity. Third, Alexander himself is robust in dismissing the "evil" directive that "rewards research, not teaching" in British universities: his work is aimed at liberating "the common inheritance of English literature" from the enclosures of "fields of academic research" (xiii). This is a work written to give a piece of native earth to the endangered common reader, dispossessed by the lairds of academe. The greater part of the book reads—unsurprisingly—as a set of engaging public lectures (with colour slides) by a well-respected emeritus professor. Alexander claims that the study was an offshoot of his work on literary history for A History of English Literature (2000), and despite some assertion that this work is a cultural history, its chief mode is rather to move from author to author, assessing his or her significance in a traditional canon. Walter Scott, whose role in reviving medieval romance is very usefully mapped throughout the book, is relegated to a subordinate position: he is, apparently, "today regarded as a second-division British Romantic" (48). The poetic "tact" (147) and "moral seriousness" (142) of Christina Rossetti puts her a point or two ahead of her brother, Dante Gabriel, for his stubborn immaturity in confusing, rather than combining, the "sensuous with the spiritual" (120) in "The Blessed Damozel" (1847, 1881); Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842) pips John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1820) to the top spot on similar grounds. That these Leavisite pronouncements are not worked through with detailed textual analysis would make me hesitate before recommending the book to undergraduates, despite helpful accounts of the sources of nineteenth-century medievalism, such as Thomas Malory's Le morte d'Arthur. There is a cheerful sense of liberation at first in Alexander's assertion that the work is the result of "reading primary sources" (xv) and that he has read very little in the way of critical studies on his subject (he notes that what he has examined "was not very encouraging" [xiv]). On reflection, however, a book hostile to current scholarship in toto but redolent of donnish authority makes for a strangely unstable text. The first seven chapters of Alexander's book cover familiar territory: Scott, Keats, Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Benjamin Disraeli, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Augustus Welby Pugin, and the Oxford Movement are all identified...
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Oct 1, 2010
Arthur E Stamps 
Open Access