Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism ed. by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner Ann F. Howey (bio) The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, edited by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner; pp. xx + 688. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, £110.00, $145.00. Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner, in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, clearly articulate the goal for this ambitious collection of essays: “to demonstrate that medievalism was as influential a cultural force in Britain . . . as was classical culture” throughout the nineteenth century (2). To accomplish that goal, the collection seeks to illustrate the “broad-ranging and diverse” nature of Victorian medievalism by examining “every major aspect” of the phenomenon “from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant today” (2, 4). Essays are therefore organized into six sections: Medievalism Before 1750 (4 chapters); Romantic Period Medievalism (6 chapters); Sources (9 chapters); Social, Political, and Religious Praxis (6 chapters); Arts and Architecture (7 chapters); and Literature (7 chapters). The chosen organization results in a number of strengths for the collection. As the section headings suggest, the collection is temporally diverse, beginning its study with texts and practices from long before the 1830s. Thus, although its title might signal the narrower temporal window of Victoria’s reign, the collection explores medievalisms throughout the long nineteenth century, and even earlier in its opening section. The book as a whole communicates a sense of the evolution of medievalism—that is, how later eras (re)constructed and engaged with the medieval era (variously defined) as soon as that era ended; charting an evolution of attitudes and tastes in the use of medieval materials is often a focus of individual chapters as well. Some chapters extend that evolution past the Victorian period, with reference to the continuing appearances of the medieval today. For example, John Haines’s “Medievalist Music and Dance” gestures to the legacy of Victorian music-hall in post-Victorian cinema; Parker’s “Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel” ends by considering these novels as the “roots of our contemporary culture” and citing twenty-first-century fiction and television (652); Inga Bryden’s “Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur” references the ongoing vogue for Arthurian objects. The Handbook’s evolutionary focus usefully debunks any notion that [End Page 681] the Victorians were doing something completely new in their recourse to the medieval past for literary, artistic, architectural, religious, and political inspiration, while simultaneously recognizing the importance of their scholarly, creative, theological, and political engagements with that past. The collection also traces evolutions across geographies. For example, the Sources section contains essays on Anglo-Saxon poetry (M. J. Toswell) and Anglo-Saxon sculpture (Jane Hawkes), Geoffrey Chaucer (Richard Utz), Irish and Welsh sources (Huw Pryce), Scottish literature and Arts and Crafts (Sarah Dunnigan and Gerard Carruthers), Italian influences such as Giovanni Boccaccio (Eleonora Sasso), and Old Norse-Icelandic texts (Carl Phelpstead). Geographical diversity goes further than the diverse objects of British medievalist study in the period, however. Chapters such as Francis G. Gentry’s “Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany” or Elizabeth Emery and Janet T. Marquardt’s “The Influence of French Medievalism on Victorian Britain” investigate similarities and differences between medievalisms in other European countries. Other essays—for example Kathleen Davis and Nadia R. Altschul’s “Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism” and G. A. Bremner’s “The Gothic Revival beyond Europe”— trace the British export of medievalism to other parts of the globe, whether in colonial attitudes or in architectural designs. As with the temporal diversity of the collection, this geographic diversity demonstrates the way that medievalism affected virtually every sphere of nineteenth-century life. In addition, it suggests the ways that people in a variety of national contexts adapted medievalism to their local circumstances and deployed it for their own purposes, emphasizing the malleability of medievalism and the suitability of the plural term medievalisms. The collection also impresses because of the variety of fields covered and approaches employed. Literature is well-represented throughout, from the Ballad Revival (David Matthews), the Lake Poets (Tom Duggett), and Sir Walter Scott’s novels (James Watt) to...
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