The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism

Description

Victorian medievalism physically transformed the streets of Britain. It lay at the root of new laws and social policies. It changed religious practices. It deeply coloured national identities. And it inspired art, literature, and music that remains influential to this day. Sometimes driven by nostalgia, but also often progressive and future-facing, this wide-reaching movement, which reached its peak during the reign of Queen Victoria, looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods spanning a thousand years, in order to inspire and vindicate cultural, political and social change. Medievalism was pervasive in Victorian literature, with texts ranging from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse, to triple-decker novels. It became a dominant architectural mode – transforming the English landscape, with 75% of new churches built on a ‘Gothic’ rather than a classical model, as well as museums, railway stations, town halls, and pumping stations. It was appealed to by both Whigs and Tories. But it also permeated domestic life – influencing the popularity of beards, the naming of children, and the design of homes and furniture. This landmark study is an attempt to draw together for the first time every major aspect of Victorian medievalism, and to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant, including intellectual history, religious studies, social history, literary history, art history, and architecture. Bringing together the expertise of 39 experts from different subject areas, it reveals the pervasiveness and multi-faceted character of the movement in the nineteenth century, and explains its continuing legacy today. Copyright page Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty Old English and Old Norse Studies to the Eighteenth Century Validating the English Church The Diggers and the Norman Yoke The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History Medieval Forgery Grímur Thorkelin, Rasmus Rask, and the Origins of Philology The Romantic Gothic Imagination Gothic Ruins and Revivals: The Lake Poets’ Architecture of the Past Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel The Study of Anglo-Saxon Poetry in the Victorian Period Chaucer among the Victorians The Later Victorian Recovery of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period Scottish Neo-medievalism The Lure of Boccaccio’s Medievalism in D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne Eddas, Sagas, and Victorians Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany The Influence of French Medievalism on Victorian Britain Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and National Identity Toryism and the Young England Movement The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire Illuminating Propaganda: Radical Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era Bodies and Buildings: Materialist Medievalism Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design The Gothic Revival Beyond Europe The Pre-Raphaelites: Medievalism and Victorian Visual Culture William Morris and Medievalism Revisiting the Medievalism of the British Arts and Crafts Movement Medievalist Music and Dance Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Medieval Modernism Women Writers and the Medieval Building Utopia: The Structural Medievalism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur Index