Clare A. Simmons. Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 246. $89/54 [pounds sterling] Clare Simmons's Popular Medievalism in the Romantic-Era Britain brings an important perspective to bear on the Romantic rage for the past. Simmons notes that being a Victorian coinage, is usually discussed in the Victorian context and is usually conceived as in Ruskin, where the Romantic zeitgeisty notion of the three great of history takes a cultural and ethical turn to produce Classicalism, Medievalism, and Modernism (2). By going back to before Victorian and its obsession with duty, Simmons recovers other more ways of conceiving period. As she says: subject of this study is popular medievalism, or the imaginative use of the past in creating a vision of what Britain should be in the future by looking back to the origins--as always, real or imagined--of British rights as conceived by those who did not have full political rights at a time when the right to participate actively in the political process depended on property and gender. In the Romantic era, popular uses the Middle Ages as a way to challenge class structures rather than to justify them. (6) The Introduction is mainly about definition. Simmons distinguishes from gothicism and antiquarianism --and from medieval, a term crucially lacking the (Victorian, Ruskinian) ism that denotes ideological and emotional investment (11). Problems begin with the opening etymology (through Washington Irving and others) which reveals why was not an available category in the Romantic era. However, the anachronism is germane to the Simmon's interest in anachronism as such--in how (and all its vague history) operates as the historicizing discourse that underwrites the emergence of modernity. It is also licensed by Simmon's interest in the immemorialist view of law and identity, which takes the first written record not as an innovation but as a record of pre-existing tradition. In this fashion, the apparent self-evidence and assurance with which medieval and enter the written record seems to reflect the preexistence of a recognizable cultural formation of comparativist study of the middle ages. Medieval was coined in 1829 to give Latinate new dignity to the Gentleman's Magazine's long-standing craze for mouldering antiquity, and would-be medievalism named an already elicited reinvention of tradition by 1865 (1-2).(Perhaps significantly, Simmons shows that the first attestation of the term, from 1849, is American: a vision of old-world literature drowning the young republic in toryism, feudalism, medievalism, all manners of retrogradism and rottenness in opinion [qtd. 2].) Medievalism was a state of mind before it had a name. Indeed, Simmons claims that [m]edievalist works can be found almost as soon as writers and readers are able to identify themselves as not part of the middle ages (6), citing Caxton's edition of Malory in the 1480s. The first chapter looks at the 18th century reinvention of Druidism, especially Stukeley's, and its reception in Blake and Wordsworth. Unlike Stukeley's view of archbishops as arch-druids, Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poems expressed hostility to Druidism and priesthood generally and shifts towards a view of Druids as prehistoric lawgivers in continuity with the present. Chapter two pivots towards as such, and considers Percy, Scott, Burns, Moore, and Hemans in opposition against (elite) antiquarianism and (popular) national melody. Simmons here shows clearly the paradox at the heart of the antiquarian ballad-collection project, at least in its Percy/Scott form of creative antiquarianism, since the people and oral tradition were constructed by scholarly discourse as the medium for the preservation of a lost elite culture--indeed an ideal medium inasmuch as their supposed inability to invent allowed transmission rather than reinvention (64-5). …