Victorian medievalism physically transformed the streets of Britain It lay at the root of new laws and social policies I
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Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction
Medievalism and classicism
The variety and extent of Victorian medievalism
The study of medievalism
Medievalism before 1750
Romantic period medievalism
Sources and parallels
Social, political, and religious medievalisms
The visual arts and architecture: From antiquarianism to aestheticism to global Gothic
Medievalist literature
The legacy of Victorian medievalism
Part I: Medievalism Before 1750
Chapter 1: King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty
Arthur in Tudor Politics
Arthur as Spectacle
The Defence of Arthur
Arthur in Tudor Literature
Conclusion
Suggested Reading
Chapter 2: Old English and Old Norse Studies to the Eighteenth Century
Old English studies to the mid-seventeenth century
The origins of Old Norse studies in England
The work of the Oxford Saxonists
Suggested reading
Chapter 3: Validating the English Church
Suggested reading
Chapter 4: The Diggers and the Norman Yoke
The Norman Yoke
The Diggers’ Medievalism
The Afterlife of the Diggers
Suggested reading
Part II: Romantic Period Medievalism
Chapter 5: The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History
Enlightenment medievalism: exotic and sublime
Victorian medievalism: domesticating the past
Conclusion: what was the revival?
Suggested reading
Chapter 6: Medieval Forgery
Suggested reading
Chapter 7: Grímur Thorkelin, Rasmus Rask, and the Origins of Philology
Suggested reading
Chapter 8: The Romantic Gothic Imagination
Gothic and German Fiction
Radical Romantic medievalism
Patriotic medievalism
The second generation and beyond
Suggested reading
Chapter 9: Gothic Ruins and Revivals: The Lake Poets’ Architecture of the Past
The shape of the sheep-fold
A Gothic plan
Insular history
Suggested reading
Chapter 10: Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel
Suggested reading
Part III: Sources
Chapter 11: The Study of Anglo-Saxon Poetry in the Victorian Period
The poetry manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon England
John Josias Conybeare: the first fruits in English
Benjamin Thorpe
John Mitchell Kemble
Frederick James Furnivall
Suggested reading
Chapter 12: Chaucer among the Victorians
The rediscovery of Chaucer
From the antiquarians to academic Chaucerians
Chaucer among the Victorian public
The nation's poet
Suggested reading
Chapter 13: The Later Victorian Recovery of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture: George Forrest Browne, Proctor, Professor, Bishop, and Anglo-Saxonist
Introduction
George Forret Browne (1833-1930)
Presenting Anglo-Saxon sculpture
Acknowledgments
Suggested reading
Chapter 14: The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period
Contexts
The Place of the Middle Ages in the Irish and Welsh Past
Medieval golden ages
Art and architecture
Irish and Welsh Literature
Conclusion
Suggested reading
Chapter 15: Scottish Neo-medievalism
Suggested reading
Chapter 16: The Lure of Boccaccio’s Medievalism in D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne
Boccaccio’s Fiammetta in Rossetti’s double works of art
Boccaccio, Morris, and the romance of the medieval garden
Swinburne’s perverted re-writings of Boccaccio’s Decameron
Suggested reading
Chapter 17: Eddas, Sagas, and Victorians
Pre-Victorian foundations
Victorian Translations
Victorian Editions of Old Icelandic Texts
Travel
Tools
Century’s end: the legacy of Victorian Icelandophilia
Suggested reading
Chapter 18: Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Suggested reading
Chapter 19: The Influence of French Medievalism on Victorian Britain
The conservation mentality: vandalism, preservation, and restoration
In the service of the nation: antiquarians, philologists, and educators
The Spectacular Middle Ages
Mystical and Symbolist Medievalism
Suggested reading
Part IV: Social, Political, and Religious Praxis
Chapter 20: Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and National Identity
Suggested reading
Chapter 21: Toryism and the Young England Movement
Suggested reading
Chapter 22: The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire
Suggested reading
Chapter 23: Illuminating Propaganda: Radical Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era
Illuminated Propaganda
Merry England
Suggested reading
Chapter 24: Bodies and Buildings: Materialist Medievalism
Design, discipline, and custom
The uses of the dead: dissection, burial societies, and commemoration
Designing cities for bodies at risk
Suggested reading
Chapter 25: Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism
Chile’s Medieval Moorish Self
Conquest, commerce and the time of Mughal India
Concluding remarks
Suggested reading
Part V: Arts and Architecture
Chapter 26: Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism
Faith
Time
Architecture
After the textual turn
Conclusion
Suggested reading
Chapter 27: Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design
A. W. N. Pugin
John Ruskin
G. G. Scott’s Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture
C. L. Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste
Medievalism in the wider domestic context
The Legacy of the Gothic Revival
Suggested reading
Chapter 28: The Gothic Revival Beyond Europe
Secular Gothic beyond Europe
Religious architecture beyond Europe
The established Church of England and its imperial mission
Episcopalians in the United States
Roman Catholic and cathedral architecture in Britain’s colonies
Other denominations in the wider world
Adapting forms and assimilating cultures
Conclusion
Suggested reading
Chapter 29: The Pre-Raphaelites: Medievalism and Victorian Visual Culture
A revivalist revolution: the Pre-Raphaelites and the Middle Ages
Writing the Middle Ages: Dante, Chaucer and the Pre-Raphaelites
Avalon, Shalott and London: the Arthurian Pre-Raphaelites
Holiness and Historicism
Suggested reading
Chapter 30: William Morris and Medievalism
Manufactures
Conservation
Politics
Printing
Suggested reading
Chapter 31: Revisiting the Medievalism of the British Arts and Crafts Movement
Conclusion
Suggested reading
Chapter 32: Medievalist Music and Dance
The Middle Ages preserved by the folk
Musical antiquarianism
Medieval operas
The medievalism of the music-hall
Conclusion
Suggested reading
Part VI: Literature
Chapter 33: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Medieval Modernism
Suggested reading
Chapter 34: Women Writers and the Medieval
Medievalism and the literary market place
Translations
Arthuriana
War and politics
Form and gender
Crimean War
Suggested reading
Chapter 35: Building Utopia: The Structural Medievalism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere
Gothic futures
Styles and values
Architectural Dreaming
Conclusion
Suggested reading
Chapter 36: Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry
Suggested reading
Chapter 37: Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers
Suggested reading
Chapter 38: Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel
The origins of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism
The nineteenth-century context of Anglo-Saxonist Novels
The Influence of Walter Scott
Harold: The Last of the Saxon Kings
Hereward the Wake: Last of the English
Suggested reading
Chapter 39: Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur
Suggested reading
Index
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THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
VICTORIAN MEDIEVALISM
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THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ................................................................................................................................................................................................
VICTORIAN MEDIEVALISM ................................................................................................................................................................................................
Edited by
JOANNE PARKER and
CORINNA WAGNER
1
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in Impression: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN –––– Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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For sage advice in the early days of this project, we would like to thank Tom Shippey. For invaluable advice from beginning to end, including an incredibly detailed review of the entire final manuscript, we owe a great deal of gratitude to Nick Groom. For their enthusiasm and much patience, gentle prodding, and professionalism, we thank our editors at Oxford University Press, Aimee Wright and Jacqueline Norton. We are grateful, too, to our copy-editor Jane Robson, project manager Shanmugasundaram Balasubramanian and our research assistants, Rosa Berman, Josh Jewell, and Jo Esra, all of whom handled complicated editing tasks magnificently. Finally, we would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for providing financial support for a project on Victorian Medievalism in the South West. The project’s collaborative research, conferences, public events, and exhibition, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic, provided much inspiration for this volume.
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List of Illustrations List of Contributors
xi xiii
Introduction J P C W
PART I
MEDIEVALISM BEFORE
. King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty
P S
. Old English and Old Norse Studies to the Eighteenth Century
T G
. Validating the English Church
G P
. The Diggers and the Norman Yoke
C A. S
PART II
ROMANTIC PERIOD MEDIEVALISM
. The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History
D M
. Medieval Forgery
J L
. Grímur Thorkelin, Rasmus Rask, and the Origins of Philology
K W
. The Romantic Gothic Imagination
J C
. Gothic Ruins and Revivals: The Lake Poets’ Architecture of the Past T D
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. Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel
J W
PART III
SOURCES
. The Study of Anglo-Saxon Poetry in the Victorian Period
M. J. T
. Chaucer among the Victorians
R U
. The Later Victorian Recovery of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture: George Forrest Browne, Proctor, Professor, Bishop, and Anglo-Saxonist
J H
. The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period
H P
. Scottish Neo-Medievalism
S D G C
. The Lure of Boccaccio’s Medievalism in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne
E S
. Eddas, Sagas, and Victorians
C P
. Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany
F G. G
. The Influence of French Medievalism on Victorian Britain
E E J T. M
PART IV SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND RELIGIOUS PRAXIS . Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and National Identity W A
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. Toryism and the Young England Movement
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R A. G
. The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire
D J
. Illuminating Propaganda: Radical Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era
I H
. Bodies and Buildings: Materialist Medievalism
C W
. Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism
K D N R. A
PART V
ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE
. Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism
W W
. Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design
J C
. The Gothic Revival beyond Europe
G. A. B
. The Pre-Raphaelites: Medievalism and Victorian Visual Culture
A L
. William Morris and Medievalism
J M
. Revisiting the Medievalism of the British Arts and Crafts Movement
R I
. Medievalist Music and Dance J H
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PART VI
LITERATURE
. Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Medieval Modernism
E H
. Women Writers and the Medieval
C B S
. Building Utopia: The Structural Medievalism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere
M W
. Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry
A H. H
. Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers
H O’D
. Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel
J P
. Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur
I B
Index
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I.. St Pancras, London. Photograph by Corinna Wagner.
.. C. R. Cockerell, RA, ‘The Professor’s Dream’, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
.. Émile Sagot’s view of the ruined abbey church of Cluny in Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, vii (–). By permission of Northwestern University.
.. Le Vieux Paris, Paris exhibition, in the public domain. Photograph by Elizabeth Emery. By permission of Northwestern University.
.. Les Salles des Croisades, Château de Versailles, . Licence by CC BY-SA ..
.. Basilique de Fourvière, Lyons, –. Licence by CC BY-SA ..
.. John Leech, ‘The Kidnapper.—A Case for the Police’, Punch ( March ): .
.. Philip Hermogenes Calderon, St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation, , © Tate, London .
.. Joseph Lyne as part of a ‘characteristic group’ at Llanthony Abbey, undated photograph in Beatrice de Bertouch, The Life of Father Ignatius, O.S.B., the Monk of Llanthony (London: Methuen, ), opposite p. .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, a page from Part One, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, title-page of the privately printed version, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Henry VIII as the Poor Law commissioners, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, ‘Sundry friars . . . ’, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Queen Bess and the Poor Laws, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Bob in his workhouse cell, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, the impish cotton bobbin, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, Edward Duncan, the ‘Place of Games’, .
.. William James Linton, Bob Thin, William Bell Scott, a village scene, .
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.. Willey Reveley, Elevation, Section and Plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon penitentiary, , in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vols, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: W. Tait, ), iv, postscript ii.
.. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, Contrasts, (nd ed).
.. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Public Conduits’, Contrasts, .
.. ‘Abbey Mills Pumping Station, Stratford, London,’ The Illustrated London News, .
.. Interior of Crossness Pumping Station, photograph by Corinna Wagner, .
.. George Gilbert Scott, Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, c.–, photographer unknown.
.. A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Modern Gothic Decoration’, in True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, .
.. G. G. Scott, Convocation Hall, University of Bombay, –. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, photograph by Francis Frith (–), acquired from F. Frith & Co., .
.. Joseph Reed, Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, –, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.
.. R. C. Carpenter, St John the Baptist, Prosser Plains, Tasmania, –.
.. Reed & Barnes architects, The Scots’ Presbyterian church (left, –), and St Michael’s Independent (Congregationalist) church (right, ), on Collins Street, Melbourne, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.
.. Jacob Wrey Mould, All Souls Unitarian Church, New York, –.
.. William Emerson, All Saints’ Cathedral, Allahabad, India, –.
.. T. G. Jackson, Patteson Memorial Chapel (St Barnabas’s church), Norfolk Island, New Zealand, – USPG Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, courtesy of United Society Partners in the Gospel.
.. Edward Medley, Christ Church, St Stephen, New Brunswick, –, photograph by Peter Coffman.
.. Charles Decimus Barraud (lithographer), Interior of Rangiātea Church, Ōtaki, New Zealand, –.
.. David Wilkie Wynfield, John Everett Millais as Dante, c. early s, National Portrait Gallery.
.. Edward Burne-Jones’s painted wardrobe for William and Jane Morris, c..
.. Frontispiece from Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies ().
.. ‘Parody of the Singing Minstrel’, Punch, (): .
.. ‘England’s War Vigil’, Punch, ( May ): .
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Will Abberley is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sussex. He is author of Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (), English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, – (), and co-author of British Nature Writing: – (forthcoming). He has guest-edited a special issue of : Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century on the theme of ‘Replicating Bodies’ (, ). He has also published in Victorian Studies, The Journal of Victorian Culture, Critical Quarterly and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Nadia R. Altschul is Senior Lecturer of Hispanic Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Geographies of Philological Knowledge (), Literature, Authorship and Textual Criticism (, in Spanish), and co-editor with Kathleen Davis of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ outside Europe (). Her new book is Politics of Temporalization: the Medieval and the Oriental from the Underside of Modernity (). G. A. Bremner is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests centre on the history and theory of Victorian architecture, especially in its relation to the wider British world. His books include Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c– (), and the edited volumes Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire (), and (with Jonathan Conlin) Making History: Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian Cultural Politics (). He is currently working on a history of Edwardian Baroque architecture in Britain and its empire. Clare Broome Saunders is a member of the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s poetry, nineteenth-century uses of history, and nineteenth-century women travel writers in Europe, in which fields she has published widely. Her most notable recent publications include: Louisa Stuart Costello: A th Century Writing Life (); Women, Travel Writing, and Truth (); and Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (). Current projects include a book on medievalism and politics in the nineteenth century. Inga Bryden is Professor of Cultural History and Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winchester. Her research interests
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span literary, visual, and material cultures, with a focus on interdisciplinary ways of interpreting places and spaces. Publications include the books Reinventing King Arthur (), Domestic Space (), and The Pre-Raphaelites (), as well as a range of chapters and articles, more recently on fashion, literature and architecture, practicebased doctorates in the creative arts, Indian domestic interiors, mapping, the kitchen and the street. Gerard Carruthers FRSE is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the Oxford edition of the works of Robert Burns and co-editor (with Colin Kidd) of Literature and Union, Scottish Texts, British Contexts () and (with Liam McIlvanney), the Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (). Jim Cheshire is Reader in Cultural History at the University of Lincoln. His most recent monograph is Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing: Moxon, Poetry, Commerce (). He co-edited a special edition of History of Photography: ‘Photography and Networks’ in and has written chapters on ‘Public Buildings’ for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Interior and ‘Stained Glass’ for the forthcoming Routledge Companion of William Morris (). Joseph Crawford is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of three books on the history of Gothic and Romantic literature: Raising Milton’s Ghost (Bloomsbury Academic, ), Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (Bloomsbury Academic, ), and The Twilight of the Gothic (). He is currently researching the cultural history of altered states of consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Kathleen Davis is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (), Deconstruction and Translation (, ), and co-editor with Nadia Altschul of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ outside Europe (). Her current work investigates the relationship between the creation of ‘the Middle Ages’ as a historical category and current struggles regarding secularism. Tom Duggett is Associate Professor in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong—Liverpool University. His first book, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form () won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. He has published essays in journals including Romanticism, Review of English Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle. Recent work includes a special issue on Wordsworth’s Excursion () and a scholarly edition of Robert Southey’s ghost-dialogue, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (). Sarah Dunnigan is Senior Lecturer in English and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University. She has written about medieval and early modern Scottish literature;
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traditional ballads and folktales; folklore and fairy tales; Scottish women’s writing; Robert Burns; and J. M. Barrie. She is currently exploring the history of Scottish children’s literature. Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French at Montclair State University, and the author of books, articles, and essay anthologies related to the reception of medieval art and architecture in nineteenth-century France and America, and to the links between early photography, journalism, and celebrity culture. Recent books treating medievalism include Telling the Story in the Middle Ages, co-edited with Karen Duys and Laurie Postlewate (), Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France, co-written with Laura Morowitz (, ); Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, coedited with Richard Utz (, ). Richard A. Gaunt is Associate Professor in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His research concentrates on aspects of British Toryism/Conservatism in the period between and . Publications include Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy () and work on the UltraTory peer, the th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne. His new monograph is, From Pitt to Peel: Conservative Politics in the Age of Reform. Dr Gaunt is joint editor of the journal Parliamentary History. Francis G. Gentry is a Professor Emeritus of German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Pennsylvania State University. He has published extensively on medieval German literature and culture as well as on the cultural and literary reception of the Middle Ages (‘medievalism’) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany. As a ‘sideline’ he has also published on mystery novels with a medieval background as well as on the depiction of the Middle Ages in American film. Timothy Graham is Timothy Graham is Distinguished Professor of History and Regents’ Professor in Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico, where he served as Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies from to . His research focuses on the study of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts by scholars of the early modern era; he has written numerous articles on the pioneering work of Matthew Parker’s circle and other early Anglo-Saxonists, including Robert Talbot, William L’Isle, Abraham Wheelock, and William and Elizabeth Elstob. He is the editor of The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and co-author of the widely acclaimed Introduction to Manuscript Studies. John Haines is Professor of Music and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published on medieval and Renaissance music and its modern reception in a variety of journals, both musicological—from Early Music History to Popular Music— and non-musicological—from Romania to Scriptorium. Recent books are Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy () and The Notory Art of
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Shorthand (Ars notoria notarie): A Curious Chapter in the History of Writing in the West (). Antony H. Harrison is Distinguished Professor of English and Department Head at North Carolina State University. His authored books include Swinburne’s Medievalism, Christina Rossetti in Context, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture, and The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold. Most recently, he is co-author of Victoria’s Lost Pavilion: From Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics to Digital Humanities. He is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, The Culture of Christina Rossetti, and Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the ACLS. He is a completing editor for The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (vols –) and serves on the Advisory Board of the NINES and the Dante Rossetti Hypertext Archive, as well as the Editorial Boards of RaVoN, Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Review , and the Victorians Institute Journal. Jane Hawkes is Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of York where she lectures in the Department of History of Art and the interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies on late antique and early medieval art and architecture, with a particular focus on the early medieval sculpture of Britain and Ireland. Her current research interests, growing out of her expertise in the early medieval art and architecture of Britain, Ireland, and Europe, concerns the historiography of Anglo-Saxon sculpture. Ian Haywood is Professor of English at the University of Roehampton. Among his books are The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People – (), Romanticism and Caricature () and three edited volumes of Chartist fiction for Routledge. He is co-editor of Spain and British Romanticism () and Romanticism and Illustration (). His most recent book, will be The Rise of Victorian Caricature (), is a study of radical caricature in the s and s. Elizabeth Helsinger is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (), Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain – (), Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (), and most recently, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (). She has also edited or co-edited volumes on the Woman Question and on the etching revival in Britain, France, and America. She is an editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. Rosie Ibbotson is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research mostly centres on the long nineteenth century, and principally concerns the entanglements
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of visual culture and environmental change. This is the subject of her forthcoming book, Picturing the Imperial Anthropocene: Visual Representation, Environmental Change, and Migratory Imaginaries in and around Long Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa New Zealand. Rosie has a long-standing interest in the transnational Arts and Crafts movement, which her current research examines in relation to ecocriticism. Dominic Janes is Professor of Modern History at Keele University. He is a cultural historian who studies texts and visual images relating to Britain in its local and international contexts since the eighteenth century. Within this sphere he focuses on the histories of gender, sexuality, and religion. His most recent books are Picturing the Closet (), Visions of Queer Martyrdom (), and Oscar Wilde Prefigured (). He has been the recipient of a number of research awards including fellowships from the AHRC and the British Academy. Ayla Lepine is a specialist in the intersections of theology and the arts in Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. Following her MA and Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Courtauld and Yale, and was a Lecturer and Fellow in Art History at the University of Essex. She has published widely including articles on the British art and religious visual culture in Architectural History and British Art Studies, and co-edited books including Revival: Memories, Identities, Utopias () and Architecture and Religious Communities –: Building the Kingdom (). She is a contributor to the Visual Commentary on Scripture (www. thevcs.org) and a trustee of the charity Art and Christianity. Jack Lynch is Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark. He is author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (), Deception and Detection in EighteenthCentury Britain (Ashgate, ), and editor of Samuel Johnson in Context () and The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, – (). He is at work on a study of William Henry Ireland. Janet T. Marquardt is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Art History and Women’s Studies at Eastern Illinois University. She now teaches for Bard College and is a research associate in History at Mount Holyoke College. Marquardt rethought the traditional art history survey course with the thematic textbook Frames of Reference: Art, History, and the World (). Other publications trace the ideological function of cultural heritage: From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony (, ); Medieval Art after the Middle Ages (, ); and most recently, Zodiaque: Making Medieval Modern – (). The annotated translation, Françoise Henry: The Inishkea Journals, received an Irish Heritage Council Grant in . Marquardt was awarded an NEH senior fellowship –, was a Visiting Professor at the CESCM in Poitiers , and a Humanities Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. She is currently working on New England Protestant missionary women in the Near East during the nineteenth century and how their ‘hagiography of humanitarianism’ affected attitudes about the Middle East in the United States.
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Jan Marsh is past President of the William Morris Society UK, exhibition curator, and author of books and papers on William Morris’s political and social ideas, the PreRaphaelite Sisterhood, biographies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, and the Bloomsbury movement. Recently, she co-edited, with Frank Sharp, The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (). She has curated a number of exhibitions including Black Victorians (–); Jane Morris () and Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (–). David Matthews teaches in the English department at the University of Manchester, where he is Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies. He is the author of Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship and Literature in England, – (), and Medievalism: A Critical History (). Heather O’Donoghue is Professor of Old Norse at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College. Publications include Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative, From Asgard to Valhalla, and English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History, as well as individual articles about the influence of Norse myth on poets such as Blake, Morris, MacDiarmid, Auden, and Heaney, and novelists such as Thomas Hardy, Hermann Melville, and Gunter Grass. Current research explores the meaning of time in the Icelandic family saga. Joanne Parker is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are focused on Victorian medievalism, the Victorians and the prehistoric, and the relationships between place, history, literature, and identity more broadly. Her publications include Britannia Obscura (, ); England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (); The Harp and the Constitution (); Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments (); and with Corinna Wagner, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic (). Graham Parry is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York. Over the course of his career he has taught at Columbia University, New York, the universities of British Columbia, Leeds, Toulouse, and York. He has also been a visiting professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Specializing in the cultural history of seventeenthcentury England, he has published eight books relating to this period, including The Golden Age Restor’d on the culture of the Stuart Court, The Trophies of Time on the antiquaries of the seventeenth century, and Glory, Laud and Honour on the culture of the Anglican Counter-Reformation. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Carl Phelpstead is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, where he teaches Old English and Old Norse. He has published extensively on medieval literature and on its reception and influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His books include Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas () and Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity ().
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Huw Pryce is Professor of Welsh History at Bangor University. He has published widely on both the history of medieval Wales and the historiography of Wales, including Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales (), a major critical edition, The Acts of Welsh Rulers – (), and J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (). He is currently writing a book on Welsh history writing from the early Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century, and is co-editor of the Welsh History Review. Eleonora Sasso is Associate Professor in English at the ‘G. D’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). She has published on Victorian literature, the Pre-Raphaelites, literary, intersemiotic, and audiovisual translation, as well as on cognitive stylistics, Canadian literature and language. She has translated into Italian W. M. Rossetti’s Some Reminiscences and is the author a number of monographs including The PreRaphaelites and Orientalism . Philip Schwyzer is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter, and the author of books including Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III (), Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (), and Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (). He is currently co-editing Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion and preparing an edition of the complete works of the Welsh historian and cartographer Humphrey Llwyd. Clare A. Simmons is a Professor of English at the Ohio State University. She has published extensively on medievalism in nineteenth-century British literature, including Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature () and Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (). M. J. Toswell teaches Old English, early medieval codicology, and speculative fiction at the University of Western Ontario, and researches early medieval psalters and medievalism. Recent publications include The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (), co-winner of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Book Prize in ; a translation of Jorge Luis Borges’s Ancianas literaturas germánicas, Old English Publications (), Borges, the Unacknowledged Medievalist (), and Today’s Medieval University (). She is preparing an edition of the Old English metrical psalter, and various articles. Richard Utz is Chair and Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, and President of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. His scholarship centres on medieval studies, medievalism, the interconnections between humanistic inquiry and science/technology, reception study, and the formation of cultural memories and identities. His contributions to the field of medievalism include Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman, ed. with Tom Shippey (), Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Critical Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, – (), Postmodern Medievalisms, ed. with Jesse Swan (), Medievalism. Key Critical Terms, ed. with Elizabeth Emery (), and Medievalism: A Manifesto ().
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Corinna Wagner is Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. She has published chapters and articles on Victorian medieval architecture and Gothic literature, photography and nineteenth-century visual culture, art and anatomy, and the relationship between medicine and the arts. Her books include Art, Anatomy, and the Real (forthcoming), Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture () and with Joanne Parker, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic (), which accompanied the AHRC-supported exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. She has also edited A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine, with Andy Brown () and Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory (). Marcus Waithe is a University Senior Lecturer and Fellow in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (), and has published widely on John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Two co-edited publications are forthcoming: with Michael Hurley, Thinking through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, ); and, with Claire White, The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, –: Authorial Work Ethics (Palgrave). He is completing a book titled The Work of Words: Literature and the Labour of Mind in Britain, –. James Watt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict – (), and his other work on the Gothic includes an Oxford World’s Classics edition of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron. He has also published widely in the field of Orientalism and empire and his most recent book is British Orientalisms, – (). William Whyte is Professor of Social and Architectural History at St John’s College, Oxford. His publications include Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities () and Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (). Kirsten Wolf is Kim Nilsson Professor, Thorger Thompson Chair, and Associate Chair of the Department of the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her area of research is Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature and hagiography. She has published editions of several sagas and written articles on a variety of topics pertaining to Old Norse, including non-verbal communication, colour, and gender issues. Her most recent publications are The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry, together with Natalie M. Van Deusen, and The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose
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.................................................................................................................................. I the mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone world, two great national libraries opened their doors for the first time. One was the British Museum Reading Room, opened in , with its geometrically precise domed ceiling and oculus, modelled on the remains of the Pantheon in Rome. The other was the Library of Parliament in Ottawa, Canada, built to resemble a twelfth-century chapter house with flying buttresses, structural polychromy, vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, and elaborately carved gargoyles. Work began on the building in —though problems with its construction delayed its opening until . The two libraries encapsulate in their architecture one of the great cultural binaries of the nineteenth century: classicism versus medievalism. In nineteenth-century Britain, both architectural styles flourished—sometimes on the same street. But classicism and medievalism were not merely architectural styles. In , the year that work on the Canadian library began, Lord John Acton pronounced: Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society.¹
As Acton here explains, either ‘antiquity’—the cultures of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations—or the values and practices of the Middle Ages could be identified as underlying many of the religious, political, social, literary, musical, educational, scientific, and economic ideals of the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. This was part of a pervasive fascination with history. In , looking back across the nineteenth century in a speech given at the British Museum, the historian Frederic Harrison asserted, ‘if ours was the age of progress, it was also the age of history’.² It was ¹ Acton, unpublished draft, quoted in Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ² Alfred Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary: A Record of the National Commemoration (London: Macmillan, ), .
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a fascination that also manifested itself in a boom in history publishing and the rise of historical anniversaries as events in the English calendar.³ As Acton himself demonstrates, there was awareness of the influence that both medievalism and classicism were exerting, during the Victorian period itself. Indeed, it was in that the word ‘medievalism’ was first used to describe the impact of medieval culture on modern society. In August of that year, the seventh issue of the Anglican magazine The British Churchman (published in response to the growing Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement) opened with an anonymous article on monasticism, which complained: ‘there is many a one who fiercely denounces mediævalism, yet whose heart is tainted with the monastic or antisocial poison’.⁴ Most other early uses of ‘medievalism’ were similarly negative. In , the Virginia-based Southern Literary Messenger grumbled about ‘Toryism, feudalism, medievalism, all manners of retrogradism and rottenness in opinion’, while in the periodical th Century protested about the impact of ‘mediævalisms’ on the English language.⁵ The perception that medievalism was a negative, retrograde phenomenon became more dominant with the end of the Victorian period, and the development of modernism.⁶ It was perhaps because of this that, for the first half of the twentieth century, the movement received little attention, whereas Victorian classicism became the focus of considerable critical analysis and survey, and was readily acknowledged as having been an influential movement in European cultural history.⁷
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.................................................................................................................................. A central aim of this Handbook is to demonstrate that medievalism was as influential a cultural force in Britain—if not more influential—for much of the nineteenth century as was classical culture. Victorian medievalism was broad-ranging and diverse. It was not only embraced by different political factions and drawn upon for a wide variety of social agendas, it also looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods, together making up nearly a thousand years of history. While the Anglo-Saxon culture of the fifth to the eleventh centuries was credited in the nineteenth century as the source of Britain’s jury system, free schools, and representative parliament, the Norse ³ In , for example, Thomas Gill’s volume The Anniversaries was published containing a commemorative poem to be read on each day of the year, and in every single edition of the Cornhill Magazine carried an ‘anniversary study’ of an historic event. ⁴ Anon., ‘Monachism’, The British Churchman, / (Aug. ): . ⁵ See the Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com. ⁶ T. S. Eliot famously attacked medievalist authors as the ‘forces of death’. See Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot (London: Macmillan, ), . ⁷ One exception to this general trend being William Gaunt’s publications on the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
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and Danish ‘Viking’ raiders who first began to attack Britain in the eighth century were acclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy and empire, and the Anglo-Norman society of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was admired and emulated for its feudal system, its religious rituals, its architecture, and its craftsmanship. Of course, the grouping together of all these phenomena as ‘medievalism’ is to some degree a modern and retrospective phenomenon. While we have a broad consensus that the medieval period lasted from roughly the fifth to the fifteenth century—from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, or the conversion of the emperor Constantine, to the fall of Constantinople, or the beginning of the Renaissance—there was no clear agreement about what precisely was and wasn’t ‘medieval’ for much of the Victorian period. Indeed, it had only been in that the word ‘medieval’ had been coined from the Latin ‘medium aevum’, meaning literally ‘middle age’, by the antiquary Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, in the preface to his second edition of British Monachism: Or, Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England—where it was used to refer specifically to Anglo-Norman monastic doctrines.⁸ In the mid-nineteenth century, in particular, the period prior to the Renaissance was often divided into the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, with the latter being carefully and favourably distinguished from the former, and with either the Norman Conquest of or the first Crusade of serving as a period boundary.⁹ Increasingly, however, as first Saxons and Danes, and then Danes and Normans, were identified as part of the same Northern people, the multiple centuries and cultures that we now class as ‘medieval’ began to be viewed collectively—as did the Victorian reception of them.¹⁰ If Victorian medievalists differed significantly as to what precisely they categorized as ‘medieval’, their work was also expressed in a wide variety of forms. It was pervasive in 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 per cent of new churches built on a ‘Gothic’ rather than a classical model, as well as museums, railway stations, town halls, and pumping stations. But it also permeated everyday life—influencing the popularity of beards, the naming of children, and the design of homes. Tennyson’s uncle, who added a moat, drawbridge, and portcullis to his home, was part of a venerable minority, but the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris & Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms, as did the
⁸ Oxford English Dictionary. ⁹ On this development see E. G. Stanley, ‘The Early Middle Ages = The Dark Ages = The Heroic Age of England and in English’, in Marie-Francoise Alamichel and Derek Brewer (eds), The Middle Ages After the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –, . ¹⁰ On the merging of Danes and Saxons in the late Victorian imagination see Joanne Parker, ‘The Victorians, the Dark Ages, and English National Identity’, in Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle (eds), The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, ), –. On the merging of Saxons and Normans in the late Victorian imagination, see Andrew Sanders, ‘Utter Indifference? The Anglo-Saxons in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, in Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (eds), Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
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lush allegorical paintings and stained glass of the Pre-Raphaelites, while the massproduced ‘Gothic’ furniture produced in factories such as Barnstaple’s Shapland & Petter allowed middle-class homes to also assume a veneer of the Middle Ages. Many of these individual aspects of nineteenth-century medievalism have been addressed in detail elsewhere. This Handbook 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 today, including intellectual history, religious studies, social history, literary history, art history, and architecture.
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.................................................................................................................................. As a diverse movement, which influenced not only religion and architecture, but also politics, literature, art, and social thinking, ‘medievalism’—the reception history of the medieval period—began to attract serious attention in the late twentieth century with the publication of monographs such as Arthur Johnston’s Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century () and Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English (), and the founding in of the journal Studies in Medievalism by Leslie J. Workman. In , Workman also established the annual International Conference on Medievalism, and in the following decade a number of key figures spearheaded the study of different aspects of the medieval revival in the long nineteenth century—among them Andrew Wawn, Christine Fell, and Geraldine Barnes on Old Northernism, Tom Shippey, Alan Frantzen, and Clare Simmons on Anglo-Saxonism, Stephen Knight, Richard Barber, and Elizabeth Brewer on the revival of Anglo-Norman chivalry and balladry, Peter Faulkner on the Arts and Crafts movement, and Chris Brooks’s wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work on the Gothic revival. Gradually, work such as this overcame an old prejudice that the reception history of the Middle Ages was a ‘light’ subject for established academics to dabble in, and not a specialism on which one might establish a career, and since then numerous theses on many different aspects of Victorian medievalism have ensured that the field continues to flourish—indeed the subject is now taught at undergraduate level.
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.................................................................................................................................. Although the focus of this Handbook is the Victorian period, when medievalism became a dominant cultural force, retrospective interest in what we now know as ‘the medieval period’ began far earlier—indeed, it commenced almost as soon as the Middle Ages ended. The first section of the Handbook therefore focuses briefly on medievalism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century—when Old English and Old Norse began to be studied as subjects, and when medieval manuscripts
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were first collected, edited, and put to a range of political uses—in order to provide a sense of the ways in which Early Modern texts often served as lenses through which the nineteenth century viewed the Middle Ages. Philip Schwyzer’s chapter ‘King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty’ begins this process, by introducing a subject that will be returned to in later chapters—the political and cultural uses to which the figure of King Arthur has been put. Schwyzer traces the evolution of this figure through the Tudor period—from a national hero widely assumed to have been historical, who was represented in state pageantry and invoked in legal proceedings, to a medieval figure generally dismissed as fictional, who yet continued to inspire enthusiasm on a popular level and would return again with force in the nineteenth century. Timothy Graham’s chapter, ‘Old English and Old Norse Studies to the Eighteenth Century’, also focuses on a Renaissance movement which laid the groundwork for much Victorian medievalism. The chapter charts the study of the Old English language in the sixteenth century and the study of Old Norse a century later, revealing the techniques employed by early translators, the motivations which lay behind their enterprise, the way in which translation fed into the later concept of the ‘Norman yoke’, and the gradual emergence of dictionaries, grammars, and typefaces for the languages. ‘Validating the English Church’ by Graham Parry also focuses on early interest in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts—but in this case considers the nationalist use to which they were put in asserting an ancient heritage for the newly created Anglican church, during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I. Parry’s chapter not only considers the collecting, editing, and printing of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts during this period, which laid the foundations for much of the Anglo-Saxonism of the nineteenth century, it also discusses how analysis of the Germanic roots of the English language, appreciation of Gothic architecture, and finally an appreciation of medieval Catholicism, developed at this time—pre-empting three important strands of Victorian medievalism. A central underpinning of much Victorian Anglo-Saxonism is examined in Clare Simmons’s chapter, ‘The Diggers and the Norman Yoke’, which outlines the development of radical understandings of the Norman Conquest from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth. The chapter begins by considering the appeals to the Middle Ages made by John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers, in the s and then traces the ways in which this seems to have fed into the rhetoric of the Diggers and then resurfaced in the nineteenth century, in the works of such key medievalist figures as William Blake, Major John Cartwright, Thomas Spence, and William Morris.
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.................................................................................................................................. Romantic medievalism might best be defined by the activities of collectors, poets, novelists, and artists in the era that gave rise to Victorian medievalism proper: they recovered past languages, literatures, and histories; they revived and began to define Gothic architectural style; they referred to the feudal and religious institutions of the
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Middle Ages to renew national and regional identities. Histories like Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance began to illuminate what was a very murky Middle Ages, thus stimulating more historically sound studies of the political and cultural life of feudal society. At the same time, James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (ostensibly a transcription of poems by the third-century Gaelic poet Ossian), the poet-forger Thomas Chatterton’s verses of that same decade, and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry of did as much to recover past literatures as to stimulate new Gothic and medievalist forms of poetry. These acts of recovery and imaginative creation defined what would become Romanticism. Supposed medieval authenticity is fused with what we identify as distinctly Romantic priorities: sublime and/or picturesque landscapes, a deeply introspective self, and the expression of an effusion of emotion and spontaneous feeling. All of this is part of what David Matthews describes as the important prehistory of Victorian medievalism. In his chapter ‘The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History’, he traces how a corpus of ancient ballads, romances, and early verse was formed through the efforts of Percy and the antiquarian Thomas Warton, and later, Sir Walter Scott and Joseph Ritson. Matthews notes that medieval literature was seen as ‘an undiscovered territory ready to be enjoyed and colonized’. Like Matthews, Jack Lynch encourages us to reconsider our conceptions of how history was and is made, reminding us that, until the nineteenth century, medieval literature was largely ‘terra incognita’. Lynch details how Richard of Cirencester’s De situ Britanniae influenced countless other texts, from its ‘discovery’ by Charles Bertram in until its debunking as a purely fictional concoction in . Bertram’s deception sent ripples of uncertainty throughout the antiquarian and historiographical enterprise, and as a result, the whole ‘basis of understanding early British history was in doubt’. There were other outcomes to forgery cases, including new attitudes to authenticity and the emergence of a more sensitive, attentive readership. Another important ‘discovery’ was Beowulf, which features in Kirsten Wolf ’s account of early nineteenth-century Romanticism and the recovery of the ancient Nordic past. Grímur Thorkelin and Rasmus Rask, the principal founders of Anglo-Saxon and Norse philology, were instrumental in resurrecting the shared Germanic past of Britain and Scandinavia, and in bringing that past to a modern readership. As Wolf reveals, this endeavour was deeply embroiled in personal politics and professional jealousies, as well as natural disasters, which are also an important context for Romantic literary history and the shaping of Victorian medievalism. The next generation created a new body of work that reached a wider audience, and expanded the medievalist remit. This included the Ossian-influenced novels and romances of Walter Scott; Coleridge and Keats’s sexually charged medieval poetry; the troubadour poetry of women writers, of which Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Troubadour () is but one example; and nationalist poetry, including the Scottish ballads of Robert Burns, the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore (–), and the Welsh Melodies of Felicia Hemans (). Much of this literature stimulated, or was stimulated by, visual culture. The Swiss Romantic painter Henri Fuseli and the German
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painter of ruins Caspar David Friedrich provided a Gothic visual vernacular that helped define the atmospheric settings we associate with the s Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe or Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. William Blake’s illuminated plates merge ancient types and medieval-styled marginal details with Gothic spires and arches, the latter of which recall his early study of monuments at Westminster Abbey. The Tintern Abbey that features so famously in Wordsworth’s poem had been represented in watercolour by J. M. W. Turner a few years earlier and was painted in oil by William Havell in . Engravings of these and other works inspired tourism to sites of ruins as well as to Horace Walpole’s ‘new-build’ Gothic pile at Strawberry Hill and William Beckford’s hastily erected and ill-fated Fonthill Abbey. All of these historical, literary, artistic, and architectural enterprises negotiated between past and present, authenticity and invention, history and imagination. Even in this earlier phase, medievalism was less insular and more outward-looking than has sometimes been assumed. In his chapter on Romantic Gothic literature, Joseph Crawford traces the influence of the fantastical, terror-filled German Gothic tradition on the early—and often rather edgy—writing of British poets, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and on the novels of Scott and Matthew Lewis. However, as the political climate changed, so too did literary tastes. Crawford argues that, in the first years of the nineteenth century, nationalist feelings produced a patriotic form of Gothic that turned away from the continent. Both Crawford and Tom Duggett remind us how in this revolutionary era, when politics touched almost all spheres of life, medieval history was interpreted and employed to new ends. The collecting activities of eighteenth-century antiquarianism gave way to politically urgent historiography. The Middle Ages were conjured in heated debates about individual rights, the structure of government, and the nature of class. How one viewed the past determined and was determined by one’s political allegiances. In his famous lament that the French Revolution demonstrated that ‘the age of chivalry is gone . . . and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’, Edmund Burke gave impetus to a conservative political agenda that sought to rekindle the inherited traditions, values, and institutions then threatened by working-class radicalism and liberal philosophies.¹¹ For their part, radicals and liberals tended to view those same feudal institutions as either the source of political, religious, legal, and class tyranny or as the origin of enshrined rights and liberties. The word ‘tended’ is significant, for many of the chapters in this book challenge the traditional view of medievalism as characterized by distinct battle lines: divisions may have existed between political and aesthetic opponents, but they were also obscure at times, and liable to be redrawn. Burkean conservativism and a belief in the importance of local traditions rooted in regional landscape characterizes Wordsworth’s Michael, a text at the centre of Tom Duggett’s chapter. The architectural ruin is the focus of fears about global expansion, and is part of a poetic reinvention of a distinctly English medieval past, against an enigmatic East—or more specifically,
¹¹ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, ), .
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China. Wordsworth’s ‘“insular” Gothic ideal’ would seem just that then, but Duggett also identifies surprising connections between Wordsworth’s Lake District and China. These negotiations were part of the important process of defining national and regional identities. Walter Scott’s historical novels were particularly influential, James Watt observes, for they had a considerable number of imitators who shaped Victorian writing. By bringing to life remote and partially unknown events such as the Norman invasion for readers and writers, Scott’s Ivanhoe became ‘enduringly formative for modern imperial Britain’. By detailing the entanglements between the personal lives of characters and larger historical conflicts, Scott explored questions that would become central to Victorian authors about the relationship between the individual and the nation. His novels established a tradition of recruiting the past to negotiate values and priorities for the modern age.
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.................................................................................................................................. Many expressions of Victorian medievalism—from historical novels, to paintings, to ornaments and architecture—were dependent in the first instance on the collection and preservation of source materials from the Middle Ages. The nineteenth century saw the establishment of many learned, literary, and antiquarian societies whose aim was to make the remains of medieval culture accessible to the public, and to protect them for future generations. Without the groundwork of these organizations, little of the reimagining of the Middle Ages that proliferated in the Victorian period would have been possible. While the majority of Victorian medievalism looked to rediscovered Saxon, Norman, and ‘Viking’ culture (because of its importance to nationalist discourses), however, there was also significant interest in the medieval pasts of other European countries. This section of the Handbook will therefore allow some of the interconnections and relationships between Victorian antiquarians, editors, and translators and those working in other European countries to be highlighted. In ‘The Study of Anglo-Saxon Poetry in the Victorian Period’, Jane Toswell considers the shift that took place in the early nineteenth century from deep interest in the history of the Anglo-Saxon period to serious study of its texts. In particular, the chapter examines the work of John Josias Conybeare, John Mitchell Kemble, Benjamin Thorpe, and Frederick J. Furnivall, who were together responsible for producing some of the first critical editions of Old English poetry, and it reveals how the work of these men fed into popular medievalism: through the societies that they established, which were attended by members ranging from poets to politicians; and through the articles that they produced for popular periodicals. Richard Utz’s ‘Chaucer Among the Victorians’ shifts the focus to the afterlife of Middle English literature in the nineteenth century—though Furnivall, the prolific, self-taught editor and social reformer, surfaces again in this context. Charting the rediscovery of Chaucer from the eighteenth century,
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to Furnivall’s important editorial and popularizing work, to Walter Skeat’s professionalization of the study of Middle English, to the appearance of penny dreadful and children’s versions of the Canterbury Tales, Utz reveals how the medieval poet became celebrated as the founding father of English literature and as an embodiment of Englishness by the end of the nineteenth century. It was not merely medieval texts that were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, however. Jane Hawkes’s chapter traces the study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture to the work of George Forrest Browne in the s. Browne’s interest in preserving Anglo-Saxon sculpture was underpinned by his concerns about the role of the Church of England and its relationships with both the State and the papacy. The chapter reveals that not only did Browne play a crucial role in saving some of England’s early sculptures from neglect, and in identifying, by his meticulous comparative research, the unique qualities of Anglo-Saxon sculpture, he was also involved in a number of contemporary art projects which took their inspiration from Anglo-Saxon works. Just as there was interest in Anglo-Saxon and in Norman culture in Victorian England, so too attention was given to the Welsh and Irish Middle Ages in nineteenth-century Ireland and Wales—though this fascination has seldom been considered in the wider context of Victorian medievalism. Hugh Pryce’s chapter considers the idealization of aspects of the medieval period in both countries, highlighting similarities—such as the portrayal of the two countries’ early ecclesiastical history as an age of saints—but perhaps even more importantly, the differences in treatment which meant that while one nation drew on medieval history to justify political self-determination, the other used it to vindicate union with England. In the late nineteenth century, there was a coalescence of Irish and Scottish medievalism which is outlined in Sarah Dunnigan and Gerard Carruthers’s wide-ranging chapter on ‘Scottish Neomedievalism’. Focusing on ‘vernacular’ medievalism in Scotland—in other words, on that which was based on Scottish or ‘Celtic’ subject matter—the chapter traces the emergence of the editing societies in Scotland which first made medieval Scottish texts widely available to both Scottish and English authors, and which importantly established the significance of medieval Scottish literature as a distinct literary culture—and not merely a dialect of Middle English. The chapter also traces the emergence of the late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland, which both drew on Victorian medievalism and also fed into it, as Scottish artists who were part of this ‘Celtic Revival’ movement illustrated works by William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti among others. The late nineteenth-century Scottish painters John Duncan and Anna Traquair both drew on Italian medieval art and manuscript illumination for some of their most important works. The culture of the Italian Middle Ages was also influential on medievalism in nineteenth-century England. Eleonora Sasso’s chapter on ‘The Lure of Boccaccio’s Medievalism’ looks at the importance of Boccaccio’s works in the writings and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne. Examining how not merely the content but also the form of Boccaccio’s writings profoundly influenced Victorian medievalist works, the chapter surveys
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the reuse and reimagining of his eroticism, his paradisal gardens, and his female musefigures, in the nineteenth century. Besides that of Italy, the literature of medieval Iceland was one of the most influential non-English literatures to feed into British medievalism in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Carl Phelpstead’s chapter outlines, during the Victorian period, Icelandic literature became more central than it has ever been since to British culture. His chapter surveys the major Icelandic texts that were translated into English in the Victorian period, as well as the original-language editions that were produced to facilitate the study of Old Norse, revealing that religious, national, or local allegiances often influenced the choice of texts for these projects. The chapter also charts the production of dictionaries, primers, and grammars for Old Icelandic during the Victorian period, as well as the growth of tourism to Iceland, charting how these developments fed into a British enthusiasm for the sagas that lasted well beyond the end of the nineteenth century. While Victorian Britain was rediscovering its Anglo-Saxon past and using that heritage as a cornerstone of national identity, similar processes were also under way in the European kingdoms that now make up Germany. Francis Gentry’s chapter on ‘Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany’ investigates the different ways in which the culture of the German Middle Ages was drawn upon to aid the formation of a united German national identity, in the years leading up to and following the unification of Germany. Covering beliefs about early constitutional freedoms, the rediscovery of the myth of the Nibelungs, and the completion of the medieval Cologne Cathedral in , the chapter reveals how medievalism allowed nineteenth-century German thinkers to define their nation in opposition to romance cultures, and in particular, the French. The French Revolution is often cited as one of the key events which initiated the medieval revival in nineteenth-century Britain.¹² What is less often considered in British studies of medievalism, however, is the impact that that same Revolution had upon the evolution of French medievalism—or the important cross-fertilization that developed between the parallel cultural movements on each side of the Channel. In their chapter on ‘French Sources’ Elizabeth Emery and Janet Marquardt chart the rediscovery of French medieval culture and its impact upon key figures in the Victorian medieval revival. They also stress, however, that influence worked in both directions: just as English artists travelled to France to be inspired by medieval art and architecture, so French scholars journeyed to Britain to transcribe manuscripts. And the creative medievalism of both countries was also mutually influential: Walter Scott’s novels and Edward Burne-Jones’s paintings were just as popular in France as were Victor Hugo’s novels and the medievalist works of J.-K. Huysmans in Britain.
¹² See, for instance, Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale, ), .
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S, ,
.................................................................................................................................. At times, medievalist forms of expression conveyed loss and regret—loss of liberties, the fading of past glory, the passing of a time characterized by intense religious and aesthetic experiences. Yet, even in its most nostalgic forms, Victorian medievalism answered to the demands of the present. This is particularly true with respect to such weighty concerns as contemporary political events, social problems, and philosophical and religious questions. Architects and designers, writers and artists lifted the religious, legal, and political remnants of the past and transposed them onto the present (and vice versa). The chapters in this section are concerned with the way medievalism worked in concrete and pragmatic ways, as political or social activism. It explores, too, how philological and theological study sought to recover or resurrect liberties or identities that were thought to have roots in the Middle Ages. In ‘Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and National Identity’, Will Abberley shows how medievalists identified liberty and independence as national values, which could be traced to their supposed Anglo-Saxon origins through the history of the English language. However, as Abberley points out, ‘Victorian visions of Anglo-Saxon language as a pure national origin were haunted by the philological reality that it was only an arbitrary point in a continuous chain of mutation and intermixture.’ Thus, Abberley’s chapter shares a theme with others in this Handbook: that a search for origins and authenticity often produced something very different. Richard A. Gaunt contributes to overturn established misconceptions about medievalism in his study of ‘Toryism and the Young England Movement’. He challenges the characterization of Young England—largely public school Tories that included George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Richard Monckton Milnes, and the group’s figurehead Benjamin Disraeli—as the ‘last hurrah of romantic Toryism’. The caricature of them as an ‘introspective, retrospective and elitist’ group that succumbed to modernity, capitalism, and individualism, obscures their rather valiant efforts at social and moral regeneration. In this the Young Englanders were allied (despite their religious differences) to the Oxford Movement, and the teachings of its founders, John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Bouverie Pusey.¹³ In his chapter ‘The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire’, Dominic Janes focuses on a lesser known aspect of the revival of Catholicity in the Church of England: monasticism and the new religious asceticism. Although Victorian monasticism had, as one might expect, a generally conservative moral agenda, it was cast by some as ‘peculiar, exotic and threatening’. This was because, as Janes’s case studies reveal, monasticism was a way ¹³ The religious ideas of the Oxford Movement took architectural form, through the efforts of the Cambridge Camden (Ecclesiological) Society (founded ), which advocated Gothic revivalism in church building. For more on this, see Bremner’s chapter in this volume.
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of life that refused to conform to many of the social, sexual, and domestic imperatives of the Victorian age. The last three chapters of this section push forward the revisionary agenda by challenging deep-rooted perceptions of medievalism as a basically conservative reaction against modernity, liberalism, and radicalism. Ian Haywood, Corinna Wagner, and Kathleen Davis and Nadia Atschul examine more closely the nuances of medievalist politics. In ‘Illuminating Propaganda: Radical Medievalism and Utopia in the Chartist Era’, Haywood argues that the scholarly focus on the more usual suspects—William Morris in particular—has obscured the political activism of earlier medievalists. Morris’s socialist remaking of medievalism was a major triumph, as is aptly demonstrated by Jan Marsh’s essay in this volume, but Haywood brings to light a neglected work of ‘poetic vision and political practice’, W. J. Linton’s Bob Thin; Or The Poorhouse Fugitive. This text might be nostalgic, but in its use of an imaginative vision of history to promote political and social reform, it is distinctly political or radical nostalgia. In ‘Bodies and Buildings: Materialist Medievalism’, Corinna Wagner argues that it is something of a misconception that values such as chivalry, valour, fidelity, and community had little in common with utilitarianism and materialism. In fact, Wagner argues that Victorian medievalists such as Thomas Carlyle and utilitarian thinkers such as William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, put forward surprisingly similar proposals relating to political and social reform. In particular, there were significant points of agreement on issues surrounding the body—an area of concern not often associated with Victorian medievalists. In a chapter that further extends the borders of medievalism, Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul demonstrate how orientalization was at the core of neo-colonial medievalism in other parts of the globe. Early nineteenth-century Chile and late eighteenth-century India might not seem an obvious pairing, but as the authors point out, both areas were defined as ‘Moorish’ and were associated, in the European imagination, with its own medieval past. Through their examination of British travel writing about Chile and India, Davis and Altschul show how medievalistOrientalist discourse supported efforts to incorporate these nations into Britain’s mercantilist empire. This chapter, along with others in this volume, demonstrates the methodological value of paying attention to under-examined materials and to looking beyond the more familiar national contexts of medievalism.
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.................................................................................................................................. The chapter title ‘This Will Kill That’ in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (), refers to a time when print took the place of architecture as ‘the great book of mankind . . . the great script
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of the human race’.¹⁴ Through a long stretch of human history, people had recorded and acquired their values through buildings, but the arrival of the Gutenberg printing press in the fifteenth century changed everything: it was ‘the greatest event in human history’, Hugo writes, ‘It is the mother of revolutions’.¹⁵ Itself a product of the popular press, Notre-Dame de Paris placed that titular cathedral in the public eye and helped to initiate something of a revolution in architectural taste. Hugo’s Romantic Gothic roman played a key role, too, in a conservation movement that had far-reaching effects on the built environment, including the preservation of important Gothic monuments and the reconstruction of Notre-Dame under the guidance of architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In the British Isles, print also inspired and sustained a revival of Gothic architecture. Sir Walter Scott’s novels, A. W. N. Pugin’s design treatises, and the theological-architectural writings of the Cambridge Camden Society influenced a generation that included the prolific architect Sir George Gilbert Scott. Besides restoring countless medieval churches and cathedrals, Scott designed some buildings in England and many more across the globe, from Bombay to Newfoundland. In an effort to rekindle an appreciation for then-unfashionable Victorian architecture, Kenneth Clark declared in that the Gothic revival was ‘the most widespread and influential artistic movement which England has ever produced’.¹⁶ Whether an accurate assessment or not, the revival’s influence on the landscape, on the urban built environment, on the history of fine art, on interior design and craft, and on the dizzying realm of everyday goods is nothing short of remarkable. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid superlatives when describing the richness, variety, and visual impact of medievalist art and architecture; in fact, for many of us, the terms ‘medievalism’ or ‘Gothic’ tend to conjure buildings, designs, paintings, or films, even before they do novels, poems, or other literary texts. A number of the essays challenge the exceptionalism of Victorian revivalism, by looking back to pre-Pugin design and forward to fin-de-siècle Aestheticism and beyond. William Whyte’s chapter on ecclesiastical design does the former, but also cautions us from swinging the pendulum too far away from views of Victorian revivalism as an exceptional movement, since it ‘was every bit as revolutionary and as distinctively Victorian as contemporaries believed it to be’. Medievalism borrowed from the past, but it also innovated or expanded—sometimes dramatically—upon what it borrowed, much like language. Jim Cheshire’s chapter on civic design also expands the chronological perimeters of the Gothic revival, by showing how the very principles forwarded by Pugin motivated designers and collectors to identify good design in Greek, Roman, or Renaissance styles. The influential design theorist Owen Jones, for instance, identified ‘family likeness’ between the Alhambra and Salisbury Cathedral, while architect E. W. Godwin’s early Ruskinian medievalism gave way to Anglo-Japanese Aestheticism. ¹⁴ Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) –. ¹⁵ Hugo, Notre-Dame, . ¹⁶ Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste. rd edn, , ed. J. Mordaunt Crook (London: John Murray, ).
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This global turn is precisely the theme of G. A. Bremner’s chapter on ‘The Gothic Revival beyond Europe’. The aims of empire and the expansionist policies of political and religious institutions were often carried vis-à-vis architecture to places as far flung as Tasmania and Sri Lanka. Importantly, however, Bremner makes the point that Gothic was also a nuanced style that merged with other national styles, and was often adapted to other climates, landscapes, and civic uses in America, Australia, Canada, and India. Malleability is a dominant characteristic of international Gothic revivalism, as is indicated by the variety of architectural languages, including ‘Bombay Gothic idiom’. The next three chapters in this part focus on art, and more specifically, the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement, and Aestheticism. Ayla Lepine’s chapter examines how the Pre-Raphaelites borrowed from a much wider range of sources than we might assume. By blending identifiably medieval material with mythological, classical, early modern and contemporary themes, the Pre-Raphaelites ‘conscientiously refused easy categorization’. As Lepine does, Jan Marsh considers carefully the issue of method in her chapter on that giant of Victorian medievalism, William Morris. His method ‘was not to describe or copy the Middle Ages, but to imaginatively inhabit them’, she observes, ‘and then make new things in the same spirit’. Using the past to make things new is a theme, too, of Rosie Ibbotson’s chapter on the British Arts and Crafts movement. Ibbotson challenges the scholarly inclination to consolidate, generalize, and to favour certain practices in the Arts and Crafts movement, thereby neglecting methods and objects deemed peripheral. To address this, she investigates the careers of, among others, turn-of-the-century figures William Lethaby and C. R. Ashbee (with Janet Ashbee), and focuses on certain lesser considered themes in their work. Ibbotson’s description of the Arts and Crafts movement as ‘a nebulous, inconsistent, and internationally widespread constellation of ideas, people, and practices’ develops important themes raised throughout this Handbook. John Haines’s chapter addresses music and dance, a sometimes overlooked facet of Victorian medievalism. He also challenges Victorian exceptionalism, or more accurately in the context of music, presentism. Victorians may have seen themselves as discoverers of medievalist musical forms, but their projects of recovery very often had early modern roots. Still, Victorians developed distinctive styles by blending medievalism and modernity in music hall entertainments and by importing American vaudeville. Haines’s chapter is a fitting end to this part, for he encourages us to think about the legacy of Victorian tastes, by calling attention to the way the medievalism of the Victorian music hall transmuted into cinema, from George Méliès’s Le chevalier mystère () to Monty Python and the Holy Grail () to Shrek Forever After ().
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.................................................................................................................................. Literature was one of the most pervasive forms of the medieval revival in the Victorian period. It was also one of the most diverse, including poetry, novels, plays, children’s
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stories, and even pantomimes. In some cases, works were influenced by medieval texts and literary traditions—from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s imitations of fourteenthcentury rondels, to William Morris’s masque based on the Mabinogion, to W. G. Collingwood’s Norse-style ‘sagas’ set in the English Lake District. Far more Victorian medievalism, however, took the form of modern literature that was simply based on events and figures from the medieval past. While some major figures in this movement—Charles Kingsley or Alfred Tennyson—are still read and studied today, there were also many other medievalist authors such as Charles Whistler or Dinah Mulock Craik, whose work enjoyed popularity in the nineteenth century but is now largely forgotten. This final section of the Handbook will consider the wide range of medievalist literature produced during the Victorian period—from popular to literary—and the relationships that this textual medievalism had with other aspects of the Victorian medieval revival. Elizabeth Helsinger’s chapter, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Medieval Modernism’, which opens the section, examines the relationships between literary imitation and the translation into modern English of Italian, French, German, and Middle English texts, in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite author and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The chapter also considers the connections between textual and artistic medievalism in the work of both Rossetti and William Morris, and how Morris’s study of medieval architecture and music informed his literary medievalism. Revealing that both the poetry and the artwork of these writers was often driven by the same impulse, it analyses the ways in which Morris and Rossetti redeployed old literary forms in order to estrange the modern reader. Morris, Rossetti, and a small group of other male writers are the names that today we tend immediately to associate with the literature of the Victorian medieval revival. However, as Clare Broome Saunders’ chapter on ‘Women Writers and the Medieval’ reveals, medieval history and literature was also drawn upon throughout the nineteenth century by an interesting and significant body of women writers—many of whom were attracted to the period as a time when women seemed to have enjoyed a climate of greater rights and freedom than in their own nineteenth-century present. Revealing the different ways in which women employed medieval images and settings to reflect on the problems of modern society, the chapter analyses the uses of this medievalism not only in fiction, but also in accounts of contemporary political events— from coronations to wars. Relationships between literary and non-literary medievalism are explored again in Marcus Waithe’s chapter ‘Building Utopia: The Structural Medievalism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere’. The chapter examines the important role that both medieval and medieval-revival architecture play in Morris’s best-known medievalist novel, analysing the ways in which Morris de-historicized the medieval Gothic style in order to make it serve as a revolutionary architecture of the future. Morris’s manipulation and refashioning of medieval cultural forms is also considered in Antony Harrison’s chapter on ‘Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry’, which analyses his poem ‘The Defence of Guinevere’ alongside other key medievalist poetry: Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ and Tristram and Iseult, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,
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Dante Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, and Swinburne’s ‘Laus Veneris’. Focusing on the ways in which these works variously deploy medieval culture both to advocate and to challenge dominant Victorian values, the chapter argues that late nineteenth-century medievalist poetry can be distinguished by its peculiarly ideological uses of the medieval. While Arnold and Tennyson were reworking Arthurian material, other Victorian writers drew on rather different medieval source material: on the Norse sagas which had begun to be translated into English in the nineteenth century. As Heather O’Donoghue reveals, in her study of the saga-imitations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and W. G. Collingwood, when nineteenth-century authors imitated the saga form or recycled saga material into new narratives, one motivation was the close fit between the interests of their own Victorian society and the typical concerns of the original saga authors—family ties, civil and political freedoms, sexual mores, and the relationships between paganism and Christianity. Even more importantly, though, the chapter reveals that the motivation for creating new saga narratives also often involved beliefs about national or regional heritage. National identity was also an issue that was investigated and questioned in Victorian novels about the Anglo-Saxons. ‘Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel’ argues that an interest in heterodox and complex identities was a feature of Anglo-Saxonist novels throughout the nineteenth century. The chapter focuses in particular on the two most significant novels of the genre—Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel Harold, and Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake—identifying these as importantly different from the works of Sir Walter Scott and as distinctively Victorian rewritings of Saxon narratives that should not be overlooked in discussions of the Victorian medieval revival as a whole, or its legacy today. Inga Bryden’s ‘Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur’ also looks forwards from Victorian medievalism to the modern day. The chapter draws on objects as a means of reconsidering the Arthurian texts which formed such an important element of the Victorian medieval revival. Focusing on Excalibur, the Grail, and the Round Table, the chapter reveals that the function of these artefacts in Victorian texts was far from merely decorative, and it analyses the often contradictory social and cultural attitudes that they embodied. Looking forward to the reinvention and packaging of the Arthurian narrative as cultural heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the chapter also sounds an appropriate note on which to end this book about the growth and development of medievalism through the course of the Victorian period.
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.................................................................................................................................. In a concluding section about the legacy of Victorian medievalism, one might expect to find something about the everlasting appeal of Morris & Co. wallpapers,
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Arthurian legend, or Robin Hood. There may also be reference to Monty Python or Umberto Eco or The Da Vinci Code. Some mention, too, could be made of contemporary political uses of the term ‘medieval’ to denote brutal acts and irrational people who are ostensibly outside the realm of the modern. Along these lines, there might be discussion of journalistic and political descriptions of Islamic State terrorists as ‘medieval’, and perhaps also analysis of the phrase ‘getting medieval’, which, following its use in Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, has referred to swift and merciless violence. Related to these linguistic evolutions is the term ‘neomedievalism’, most often applied to a branch of political philosophy concerned with modern global politics and world economics in the digital age. A discussion of legacy should include this growing area, and might also consider how medievalism underpins the work of twentieth-century continental theorists, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Georges Bataille—subjects which, in the last few years, Bruce Holsinger has brought to scholarly attention.¹⁷ All of these possibilities indicate something of the vibrant and multi-faceted afterlife of Victorian medievalism, but there has also been another, persistent, legacy: the view of medievalism as nostalgic and escapist. In his study of medievalism in modern theory, Holsinger challenges this perennial characterization: ‘In its variegated assault on the legacy of the Enlightenment’, he writes, the ‘critical generation’ of the twentieth century ‘turned to the Middle Ages not in a fit of nostalgic retrospection, but in a spirit of both interpretive and ideological resistance to the relentless inevitability of modernity’.¹⁸ Why is it that Victorian medievalism has been, and continues to be understood as largely nostalgic? Why is it that literary, architectural, and cultural historians find themselves still countering this charge, as many of us have done in this Handbook? One answer, offered here, has to do with Holsinger’s description of the march of modernity as relentless and inevitable. It could be argued that medievalism has been labelled as negatively escapist because moderns find it difficult to imagine a movement such as this—largely literary and visual arts-based—as having any real effect on the world. From a twenty-first-century perspective, we may find it difficult to imagine that figures cast in the mould of a Pugin, a Ruskin, or a Morris could actually challenge, in any meaningful way, such monumental phenomena as capitalism, industrialized labour, ecological disaster, or social injustice. Many people are—perhaps justifiably—rather cynical about the idea that the arts could mobilize history in ways that would change practices and institutions which seem so inevitable and unmovable. But Victorian medievalists refused to accept the inevitability of urban poverty or the ugliness of mass production and consumption; they challenged the this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-things attitude
¹⁷ On this, see Bruce Holsinger, ‘Neo-medievalism and International Relations’, in Louise d’Arcens (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, ); The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). ¹⁸ Holsinger, Premodern, .
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Figure I.. St Pancras, London. Photograph by Corinna Wagner.
by demonstrating, via the medieval past, the spuriousness of that perception. Victorian medievalists offered blueprints for ways to realize utopic visions—so succinctly expressed by the title of one of Morris’s essays: ‘How we live and how we might live.’ There is also something ‘ineffable’ about the Middle Ages that accounts for its durability and diversity. John Haines uses this word in his chapter to capture the endurance of medievalism in such forms as the capitalist Gesamtkunstwerk that is contemporary cinema. Arguably, Gesamtkunstwerk—which attempts the total or ideal synthesis of the arts—characterizes as much the all-encompassing medievalist design project of William Morris as it does the utopian urban vision of Le Corbusier, whose ‘emphasis on urban cells reflects the monastic influence on his austere modernism’.¹⁹ And those with perhaps less encompassing schemes than Morris or Le Corbusier—say, for example, the poet Felicia Hemans, the French art collector Alexandre Lenoir, the engraver W. J. Linton, or the novelist and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (all of whom are represented in this volume)—were also transformative and forward-looking, dissenting and inspiring.
¹⁹ See Marcus Waithe’s chapter in this volume.
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In this world of global politics, environmental calamity, economic expansion, rapid urban growth, and unfettered consumerism (existing alongside dire poverty), we could learn something from Victorian medievalists who sought to make things with integrity, to produce ethically, to conserve their built and natural environments, and who insisted that happiness, truth, and beauty matter. They remind us to strive after ideals because, to borrow Simon Jenkins’s phrase, ‘Sometimes, just sometimes, beauty wins.’²⁰ The win to which Jenkins refers was the long-awaited and much-needed restoration of George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece of London architecture and design, St Pancras (Figure I.). Beauty, in the way the Victorians understood it, may sound an oldfashioned and rather meaningless term to our jaded ears, but it was at the heart of a movement that believed beautiful words, objects, places and spaces were the means to health, well-being, and happiness. We think that is monumental.
²⁰ Simon Jenkins, ‘Sir George Gilbert Scott, the Unsung Hero of British Architecture’, The Guardian, July .
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H’ voluminous Chronicles (, expanded ) are justly regarded as the greatest repository of historical lore of the Tudor age. Detailing the histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland from misty antiquity down almost to the present era, these enormous volumes provided Shakespeare with material not only for his history plays but for tragedies like King Lear and Macbeth. Yet if Shakespeare ever contemplated a play on the theme of King Arthur, he would have found the usually reliable Chronicles of scant usefulness. Only a handful of pages are devoted to the famous Arthur, and even these are hedged with apologies and undercut by scepticism. suerly such one there was of that name, hardie and valiant in armes, though not in diuerse points so famous as some writers paint him out . . . This is the same Arthur, of whom the trifling tales of the Britains euen to this day fantasticallie doo descant and report woonders: but woorthie was he doubtlesse, of whom feined fables should not haue so dreamed, but rather that true histories might haue set foorth his woorthie praises, as he that did for a long season susteine and hold vp his countrie that was readie to go to vtter ruine and decaie . . . ¹
Here we find the chronicler struggling to preserve Arthur as a historical British hero, without committing himself to any solid fact about this much-storied figure. The sheer impossibility of the fantastic tales told about him is presented, paradoxically, as the greatest testimony to his actual existence. Yet the historical Arthur is bought at the price of nullifying the narrative tradition. The vast and complex body of Arthurian lore is reduced to a tautology: Arthur was Arthur. Holinshed’s brief account is indicative of the radically problematic relationship between the Tudors and King Arthur. In no century did Arthur loom so large as a figure of national and imperial identity. Yet no century found itself with so little to say about him. ¹ Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles, ii (London, ), .
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.................................................................................................................................. To many observers in Britain and beyond, the year must have looked like a gateway opening onto that Arthurian future promised in the phrase ‘rex quondam et futurus’. The newly crowned Henry VII was conscious of the degree to which Arthur had been his ally in his rapid and unlikely rise to power. For several years before Bosworth, years in which few in England would have regarded the Earl of Richmond as a plausible claimant to the throne, the Welsh authors of prophetic poetry had been praising Henry Tudor (or Harri Tudur) as a reviver of Britain’s ancient glory. Henry was not always explicitly associated with Arthur in this tradition; indeed, Arthur’s name carried less weight in late medieval Welsh literature than might be assumed, and Henry was more importantly the offspring of the Trojan Brutus and the last British king Cadwaladr.² Yet among the English, the idea that the Welsh were awaiting the revival of King Arthur was firmly entrenched; to the extent that such a thing existed, Arthur was the acceptable face of Welsh nationalism. In Worcester in May , a pageant prepared for the arrival of King Henry welcomed him as ‘Arture the very Britan kyng’.³ Four months later, Henry’s Queen, Elizabeth of York, gave birth to a son at Winchester; with a differently inflected nod to both national communities, Henry named this son Arthur. King Arthur figures fairly prominently in the iconography of the early Tudor era, both before and after the untimely death of Arthur Tudor in . Given the lustre of his international reputation, far exceeding that of any other home-grown hero, Arthur could be useful in smoothing relationships not only with the Welsh but with a range of continental powers, especially the Holy Roman Empire. When Henry VIII met with Charles V in a magnificent pavilion outside Calais in , a resplendent statue of Arthur stood at the outer portal; the accompanying text identified Arthur as ‘Principal leader of all valorous hearts’, and encouraged the two monarchs to ‘Follow my deeds and my knightliness’.⁴ Arthurian references and imagery likewise studded the pageants that welcomed Charles V to London in June ; at Winchester, Charles was treated to a view of the newly restored and redecorated round table, upon which the painted figure of Arthur surmounted a brilliant Tudor rose.⁵ In the swiftly changing circumstances of the late s and s, Arthur strove to adapt himself to the new political and religious climate, albeit with mixed success.
² See the discussion in Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ³ ‘First Provincial Progress of Henry VII’, in Herefordshire, Worcestershire, ed. David N. Klausner (Toronto: Toronto University Press, ), . ⁴ See Martin Biddle, ‘The Painting of the Round Table’, in Biddle (ed.), King Arthur’s Round Table (Woodbridge: Boydell, ), –. ⁵ See Stewart Mottram, Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer), , –; Biddle, ‘Painting of the Round Table’, –.
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Where previously Arthur had been used to symbolize the bond between England and the Holy Roman Empire, now he helped drive a wedge between them. When the Duke of Norfolk met the imperial ambassador Chapuys to argue the case for the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, he invoked the example of Arthur as head of a historic British empire; the inscription on Arthur’s seal at Westminster, which identified him as Britanniae, Galliae, Germaniae, Daciae imperator, was produced in evidence. Though we have only Chapuys’s side of the story, it seems Norfolk’s gambit was met with barely disguised scorn. Professing never to have heard of Arthur, the ambassador declared himself sorry to hear he had not also been Emperor of Asia.⁶ In general, reliance on the example of Arthur in Reformation diplomacy and legislation was less explicit. The crucial Statute in Restraint of Appeals () noted in its preamble that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world’.⁷ The content of these chronicles was not specified, but the case for a historic British empire would have rested primarily on the emperors Constantine (thought to have been born in Britain) and Arthur. As the Arthurian past was placed at the service of Reformation policy, the British king became increasingly associated with a pristine Christianity uncorrupted by Roman superstition. In a tract deriding the doctrine of purgatory, Simon Fish urged his readers to reflect that Arthur would never have been able to lead his armies against the might of Rome if his realm had been sucked dry by chantry priests and indulgences.⁸ After the s, Arthur began to retreat from the political stage, though never entirely. Later in the century, John Dee assured Elizabeth that she had a rightful claim to all the islands of the north sea, from the coast of Muscovy to the New World, basing his case ‘cheiflie vppon our Kinge Arthur’.⁹ Like the legislators of the s, Dee associated Arthur not only with ancient glory but with a long obscured truth that must be revealed and restored to actuality. Although Elizabeth could not and did not adopt Dee’s ambitious programme for Atlantic expansion, his claims were taken seriously enough to be included in Richard Hakluyt’s compendious Principal Navigations . . . of the English Nation (, –). Indeed, in the second edition of Principal Navigations, even as he excised other fabulous medieval materials such as the travels of Sir John Mandeville, Hakluyt gave Arthur uncontested pride of place on the opening page of the volume, which begins with ‘Certain testimonies concerning K. Arthur and his conquests of the North regions, taken out of the history of the Kings of Britain . . . ’¹⁰ Arthur, then, retained ⁶ See Richard Koebner, ‘ “The Imperial Crown of this Realm”: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great, and Polydore Vergil’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, (), –. ⁷ See Koebner, ‘Imperial Crown’, . ⁸ ‘The nobyll kinge Arthur had never ben able to have carried hys army to the fote of the mountaynes to resyste the comynge downe of Lucius the Emperor yf syuch yearely exactions had ben taken of his people.’ Simon Fish, A Supplicacyon for the Beggers (Antwerp?, ), v. ⁹ John Dee, Brytanici Imperii Limites, BL Add. MS , p. . ¹⁰ Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation. nd edn, i (London, ), .
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a national-political significance from the beginning to the end of the Tudor era, having successively embodied dynastic, ecclesiastical, and finally imperial ambitions.
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.................................................................................................................................. At the dawn of the Tudor era, the printer William Caxton made the case for the historical Arthur in the preface to his edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur, noting that ‘in dyuers places of Englond many remembraunces ben yet of hym and shall remayne perpetuelly and also of his knyghtes’.¹¹ Among the Arthurian relics he cited were the King’s seal at Westminster, and the round table at Winchester. ‘[I]n the castel of douer ye may see Gauwayns skulle & Cradoks mantle . . . in other places Launcelottes swerde and many other thynges.’ The skull and mantle at Dover do not appear to be mentioned again in later lists of the wonders or tourist attractions of Britain, but other objects mentioned by Caxton had a longer Tudor career. Arthur’s seal at Westminster, as we have seen, was invoked by the Duke of Norfolk in his interview with Chapuys— uniquely, this artefact provided testimony both to the King’s historical existence, and to the extent of his extraordinary achievements (though, as Chapuys’s response implies, the latter tended to undermine the former). The round table at Winchester was undoubtedly the most famous sight in Tudor England associated with Arthur’s reign (especially after , when the monuments commemorating the discovery of Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury were lost in the dissolution of the abbey). Recent archaeological and historical study has shed a great deal of light on the table’s origins and history, though some aspects still remain mysterious.¹² It appears to have been crafted in the fourteenth century, and perhaps to have played a role in Arthurian entertainments under Edward III. The decoration of the table that is visible today, featuring a seated Arthur at the apex, a Tudor rose at the centre, and places for twenty-four knights around the circumference, belong to the early years of the reign of Henry VIII; the table was repaired in , and the new painting was certainly done before Charles’s visit in (when, indeed, it provoked some scepticism about the relic’s antiquity). The first forty years of Tudor rule were undoubtedly a heyday for Arthurian pageantry, followed by an apparent lull, with something of a revival in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Arthur and his legendary associates featured in major Elizabethan pageants, including the famous appearance the Lady of the Lake at the Kenilworth entertainment of . Even as late as , Prince Henry’s Barriers would feature the Lady of the Lake, Merlin’s tomb, and Arthur in the form of a star. Yet Arthur in this era was more commonly a participant in civic entertainments than in royal pageants; and for Londoners at least, he would have been associated first and ¹¹ Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (London, ), iiv. ¹² Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table.
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foremost with an archery club. As celebrated in Richard Robinson’s The Auncient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable, of Prince Arthure, and his knightly armory of the Round Table (), the company of Prince Arthur’s Knights, composed of prominent London citizens, presented public shows of archery in which each member took on the persona of a different knight of the round table. These festive presentations are recalled by Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow when he declares, ‘I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show.’¹³ A place in Arthur’s show was undoubtedly honourable, and the Queen herself was said to have stopped to watch one of their performances. Nonetheless, Arthur had declined in rank from the days of Henry VII and Henry VIII; no longer a fit companion for kings and emperors, he had become comparatively common.
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.................................................................................................................................. It is tempting to link Arthur’s apparent social decline to the decline in faith in his historicity over the course of the Tudor era. The story of the battle of the British books and the assault on Arthur’s historical existence has been told often enough, and marks a significant episode in the development of early modern historiography.¹⁴ Yet it is important to stress that Arthur’s existence remained a matter for debate throughout the whole of the Tudor era, and he had both his ardent defenders and his contemptuous detractors in , no less than in . Caxton in his preface to Morte Darthur had noted that ‘dyuers men holde oppynyon that there was no suche Arthur and that alle suche bookes as been maad of hym ben but fayned and fables by cause that somme crony|cles make of hym no mencyon ne remembre hym noo thynge ne of his knyghtes’.¹⁵ Against these, he argued ‘many evidences of the contrary’, including Arthur’s sepulchre at Glastonbury, the account of his body’s discovery in Higden’s Policronicon, and the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, as well as the objects and artefacts at Dover Castle, Westminster, and Winchester. The substance of the longlasting Tudor debate is already present here, with the positions of both the defenders and the detractors concisely mapped out. The first hammer blow against Arthur is often said to have been struck by Polydore Vergil in his Anglica Historia (). In fact, though Polydore made no secret of his contempt for Geoffrey of Monmouth and the tradition of the Trojan foundation of
¹³ William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part , .., in Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, ). ¹⁴ See e.g. Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –; James P. Carley, ‘Polydor Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur: The Battle of the Books’, in Edward Donald Kennedy (ed.), King Arthur: A Casebook (New York: Garland, ), –; Frederick Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, ). ¹⁵ Malory, Morte Darthur, iiv.
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Britain, his remarks on Arthur are less than damning. Arguably, it is more the brevity of his account than its content that conveys the insult: At this time Vtherius departed owte of this world, after whome succeeded his sonne Arthur, being no doubte suche a mann as, if he hadd lived longe, hee surelie woulde have restored the whole somme being allmoste loste to his Britons. As concerninge this noble prince, for the marvelus force of his boddie, and the invincible valiaunce of his minde, his posteritee hathe allmoste vaunted and divulged suche gestes, as in our memorie emonge the Italiens ar commonlie noysed of Roland, the nephew of Charles the Great bie his sister, allbeit hee perished in the floure of his yowthe; for the common people is at this presence soe affectioned, that with woonderus admiration they extol Arthure unto the heavens . . . Not manie years since in the abbey of Glastonburie was extructed for Arthur a magnificent sepulchre, that the posteritee might gather how worthie he was of all monuments, whearas in the dayse of Arthure this abbaye was not builded.¹⁶
This ambiguous and slight account formed the most notorious attack on Arthur’s historicity in the course of the Tudor era. It was neither entirely damning nor very original in its analysis. Yet it gave rise to a series of passionate and learned retorts by English and Welsh scholars, some of which, for all the hopelessness of the case they were defending, were more important in the advance of historical method than Polydore’s own history. John Leland’s Assertio inclytissimi Arturii () was the first major defence of Arthur in the period. Leland was a devoted adherent of Henry VIII, and of what he perceived as the King’s mission to reclaim the glory and independence of the British Empire. For him, the spirit and meaning of the Reformation had less to do with changes in religious observance (he may, indeed, have been a traditionalist at heart) than with the opportunity to restore the splendours of British antiquity. Arthur was the key to a past that, in the excited intellectual atmosphere of the immediate post-Reformation era, seemed ready to live again. Leland’s arguments for the historical Arthur rest in part on material evidence (the round table at Winchester, the seal at Westminster, and above all the bones discovered at Glastonbury), and in part on the testimony of older British writers. That Roman and Saxon writers fail to mention him is unproblematic; the Romans were distracted by barbarian invasions in Arthur’s era, whilst the Saxons, as enemies of the Britons, would have avoided praising them in any way. That Polydore the Italian should write so slightingly of Arthur is, for Leland, part of a long history of foreign slander and neglect. ‘He handleth Arthures cause in deed, but by the way, he yet is so fainte harted, luke warme & so negligent yt he makes me not onely to laugh, but also to be angry (as while he is contrary to truth, and filled wt Italian bitternesse) . . . ’¹⁷ The anti-Italian and
¹⁶ Polydore Vergil’s English History: From an Early Translation, i, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London: Camden Society, ), –. ¹⁷ John Leland, A Learned and True Assertion of the Original, Life, Actes, and Death of the Most Noble, Valiant, and Renoumed Prince Arthure, King of Great Brittaine, tr. Richard Robinson (London, ), sig. v.
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anti-Roman feeling that animates Leland’s defence would have resonated with readers all the more strongly in , when the treatise was translated into English by Richard Robinson, a citizen of London and proud member of the Worshipful Society of Archers. A far more capable and learned defence of Arthur’s existence was undertaken by the Welsh scholar Sir John Prise, whose Historiae Britannicae Defensio was published some eighteen years after the author’s death in . Like Leland, Prise cited the evidence of Arthur’s tomb and the many medieval English chroniclers who refer to him in some way. Yet Prise was also able to bring forth early Welsh references to Arthur by the bards Taliesin and Myrddin, and to cite the evidence of Welsh place-names and oral tradition. As Prise points out, ‘If all those famous men, about whom it will never be possible to produce so many and such great pieces of evidence or records as are available for Arthur, were to be totally erased from our collective memory, a huge crowd of distinguished people would undoubtedly have to be got rid of in a mighty jettisoning of antiquity.’¹⁸ Prise was not alone in this perception, and it must have been shared by many, like Holinshed, who found themselves able neither to defend Arthur nor to discard him. For if Arthur were to be jettisoned, how many other figures of British antiquity—from the Trojan Brutus to King Lear, King Lud, and old King Cole— would fall with him?
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.................................................................................................................................. was a year no less important in the history of Arthurian literature than in the history of the Tudor dynasty. Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur was printed at Westminster on July . A day later, Henry Tudor set sail from France with a small army of French and Breton mercenaries. Caxton’s preface may well have been printed and bound with the new edition only after the Battle of Bosworth on August.¹⁹ It must have seemed fitting to welcome a new monarch with an account of the deeds of his supposed ancestor, after whom he would shortly name his first-born son. Further editions followed in , , , and . Each of these editions retained Caxton’s prologue, with no significant revision or updating of either the frontmatter or the text. By the middle of the sixteenth century, it is clear that sophisticated readers had come to see Arthurian literature, and Malory in particular, as relics of a bygone and rather disreputable age. As the censorious Ascham wrote:
¹⁸ John Prise, Historiae Britannicae Defensio/A Defence of the British History, ed. and tr. Ceri Davies (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, ), p. x. ¹⁹ On the date and cautious politics of the preface, see Terence McCarthy, ‘Old Worlds, New Worlds: King Arthur in England’, in Arthurian Studies, (), –.
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In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons: as one for example, Morte Arthure: the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye: In which booke those be counted the noblest Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarell, and commit fowlest aduoulteres by sutlest shiftes: as Sir Launcelote, with the wife of King Arthure his master: Syr Tristram with the wife of kyng Marke his vncle: Syr Lamerocke, with the wife of king Lote, that was his own aunte. This is good stuffe, for wise men to laughe at, or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know, when Gods Bible was banished the Court, and Morte Arthure receiued into the Princes chamber. What toyes, the dayly readyng of such a booke, may worke in the will of a yong ientleman, or a yong mayde, that liueth welthelie and idlelie, wise men can iudge, and honest men do pitie.²⁰
Arthur was clearly moving downmarket, but there is ample evidence that he retained his popularity among the less educated, though precisely which oral or textual traditions they drew on is difficult to determine. Sir Philip Sidney in the Defence of Poetry comments that ‘Honest King Arthur will never displease a soldier.’²¹ The term ‘honest’ here is double edged, as Sidney clearly does not regard Arthurian literature as ‘honest’ in terms of relating the truth about the past. Nonetheless, a work like Morte Darthur might indeed be considered honest in the colloquial sense of plain-speaking and unpretentious, and as such a fit companion for a soldier. As if to validate Sidney’s thesis, amongst the most enthusiastic Elizabethan works in praise of Arthur came from the hands of an old soldier, Thomas Churchyard, whose The Worthiness of Wales () was published a year after Sidney’s death. In his poetic tour of Wales, Churchyard pauses at Caerleon, once the site of ‘King Arthur’s golden hall’, but now, like its former master, fallen into obscurity.²² The poet appeals to the Queen, ‘Who came from Arthurs rase and lyne’ (Dr), to redress the situation, restoring both the Welsh town and the British King to their former glory. Yet, conscious of swimming against the tide of modern scepticism, Churchyard lacks confidence in his own (admittedly limited) poetic power; he is thus driven to supplement his verses with a substantial extract from older chronicles in both English and Latin, which he regards as irrefutable: Than you that auncient things denyes, Let now your talke surcease: When prose is brought before your eyes, Ye ought to hold your peace. (Dr)
²⁰ Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London, ), r-v. ²¹ Philip Sidney, Defence of Poetry, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). ²² Thomas Churchyard, The Worthines of Wales (London, ), sig. Dr.
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Whereas the subject of Churchyard’s verses was the splendour and gaiety of Arthur’s court and the mysterious wonders of the Caerleon, the chronicle passages centre rather on Arthur as a military leader, and in particular his defiant response to Roman aggression. The reader cannot avoid impression that the Arthur of poetry and the Arthur of history belong to different worlds. Although Churchyard, Dee, and others promoted Arthur as a figurehead for British imperialism, the Arthurian tradition could also be mobilized for other ideological purposes. The Misfortunes of Arthur, a play produced in the Inns of Court in , seems designed to demonstrate the dangers more than the enticements of imperial ambition. Although the Prologue arguably sets up expectations of a chivalric Arthurian entertainment of the sort that would have been familiar to courtly audiences, the ensuing play shows the downfall of an overextended British empire, undermined by the monarch’s own past indulgence in incest.²³ At the conclusion of the play Arthur and his line are irredeemably extinguished and Britain set to fall prey to a host of successive invaders, although the vengeful ghost of Gorlois does acknowledge that a thousand years hence Britain will again know peace and prosperity under a virgin queen. If Tudor England can be credited with an enduring contribution to Arthurian literature, it is Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (; expanded ). In this sprawling, episodic, and unfinished epic romance, composed of six books featuring a range of knights and heroines, Arthur is the unifying thread. Self-consciously modelling his poem on the Iliad and Aeneid, which celebrate the heroes of Greece and Rome respectively, Spenser selected Arthur as the exemplar of national (British) virtue. As he explained in a prefatory letter to his friend Raleigh, ‘I chose the historye of king Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person being made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time.’²⁴ Spenser’s insistence that Arthur, being so long dead, should not be associated with any present-day figure or cause, is unconvincing, and perhaps meant to be so; certainly it did not prevent early readers of the poem from scribbling their own identifications of the modern Arthur in the margin, be it the Earl of Essex, Leicester, or Cumberland.²⁵ Although Spenser claims to have selected Arthur because of his famous deeds, recorded in so many past works, The Faerie Queene recounts none of them. Its hero is not the potent British monarch with his seat in Camelot, but rather Prince Arthur, a young and apparently isolated figure who wanders Faerieland in a fruitless search for its elusive queen. Neither the familiar knights of the round table nor the conventional geography of Arthurian romance feature in his quest. By focusing exclusively on the young Arthur’s ‘lost years’ Spenser had arguably found a solution to the problem ²³ Curtis Perry, ‘British Empire on the Eve of the Armada: Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur’, Studies in Philology, (): –. ²⁴ Edmund Spenser, ‘A Letter of the Authors’, The Faerie Queene. ²⁵ ‘MS Notes to Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” ’, N&Q (), –; Graham Hough, The First Commentary on The Faerie Queene (privately published, ).
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adumbrated by Holinshed and others before him—that Arthur was the indisputable and indispensable centre of national history, yet that almost everything reported of him was clearly false. Yet the Arthurianism of The Faerie Queene is ultimately self-erasing. In book of the poem, Arthur reads with delight a chronicle of ‘Briton Moniments’, leading from the conquest of Britain by Brutus the Trojan down to his father, Uther Pendragon, but fails to find his own name; a few songs later, the subsequent history of Britain, down to the reign of Elizabeth, is revealed by Merlin, but again Arthur goes unnamed, his place taken by the fictional knight Artegall (a name suggestive of ‘Arthur’s equal’). Like Faerieland itself, Arthur is at once the essence of British history and external to it, a centre and a blank.
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.................................................................................................................................. With its complex and conflicting attitudes to the Arthurian tradition, the Tudor era seems to constitute a bridge or way-station between the Arthur of the Middle Ages and the Arthur of more securely post-medieval (and, hence, medievalist) eras. Whether sixteenth-century celebrations of Arthur can themselves be seen as early examples of medievalism is a complex question. Elizabethans were aware, certainly, that military technology had changed since Arthur’s time, and the tournaments and archery contests of this period seem drenched in nostalgia for a simpler era of elite masculine prowess and chivalric combat. When Shakespeare’s Shallow recalls playing ‘Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show’, he is recalling his participation in a medievalist re-enactment. Yet for many Tudor writers, Arthur was not really a figure from the Middle Ages at all, but rather a hero of British antiquity. When John Leland or John Dee expressed a wish to revive the glory of Arthur’s day, the sentiment was not so much medievalist as antimedievalist, for the Middle Ages were seen as the era in which Britain had declined from its Arthurian apex into superstition and subservience. Increasingly, the Arthur of history and the Arthur of poetry and romance inhabited different worlds, and indeed different epochs. The historical Arthur of ancient Britain, buffeted by the scepticism and indifference of forward-thinking historians, was approaching his eclipse. The fictional Arthur of medieval England, on the other hand, had a glorious future ahead of him.
S Biddle, Martin. King Arthur’s Round Table (Woodbridge: Boydell, ). Carley, James P., ‘Polydore Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur: The Battle of the Books’, in Edward Donald Kennedy (ed.), King Arthur: A Casebook (New York: Garland, ), –. Escobedo, Andrew. Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ).
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Koebner, Richard. ‘ “The Imperial Crown of this Realm”: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great, and Polydore Vergil’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, (): –. Levy, Frederick. Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, ). McCarthy, Terence. ‘Old Worlds, New Worlds: King Arthur in England’, Arthurian Studies, (): –. Mottram, Stewart. Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Perry, Curtis. ‘British Empire on the Eve of the Armada: Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur’, Studies in Philology, (): –. Schwyzer, Philip. Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
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V medievalism reproduced, reinvented, and transformed selected aspects of medieval literature, history, art, and architecture. In doing so, it rested upon the endeavours of generations of scholars who, beginning in the sixteenth century, applied themselves to the study of the Middle Ages. Originating in the Reformation period, those scholars’ efforts were linked to a burgeoning sense of national identity as well as to the assertive separation of the English Church from its Roman Catholic ties. Among the themes most characteristic of Victorian medievalism were admiration of the freedoms believed to have been enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxons prior to the Norman Conquest and celebration of Anglo-Saxon England’s most vaunted king, Alfred, who had held the Vikings at bay while reviving the cultural life of his kingdom. Ironically, the Vikings themselves also became frequent subject matter for Victorian writers and artists. The Victorian popularization of Anglo-Saxon and Viking themes would have been impossible without the committed scholarship that, beginning in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, facilitated the recovery of Old English language and literature and, about a hundred years later, applied itself to the study of Old Norse texts including the Poetic and Prose Edda and the saga literature.
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O E -
.................................................................................................................................. By the late Middle Ages, the language of the Anglo-Saxons was effectively a dead language, understood only by isolated individuals with antiquarian interests.¹ Old English texts began to generate sustained attention only with the Reformation, when Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries threatened the very survival of the contents of the great monastic libraries while also provoking the efforts of dedicated collectors who were able to acquire manuscripts of varying provenance. Already in the years immediately preceding the dissolution, the self-styled antiquarius John Leland (c.–), apparently acting under commission from the King, travelled throughout England surveying the contents of monastic libraries; his lists of their holdings include several references to Old English texts and there is some evidence that Leland made an effort to learn the language. It was Leland’s contemporary and acquaintance Robert Talbot (/–), a prebendary of Norwich Cathedral, who applied himself most assiduously to the study of Old English materials. His collection of medieval manuscripts, admired by the Protestant polemicist and bibliographer John Bale (–), included at least ten containing vernacular Anglo-Saxon texts, among them copies of the Old English Hexateuch and Gospels, the vernacular translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary and Catholic Homilies, and a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that also included the Old English version of Paulus Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans; this latter manuscript Talbot lent both to Leland and to the mathematician and antiquarian Robert Recorde (c.–), who demonstrated his interest in Old English by transcribing excerpts from the Chronicle into a manuscript in his own collection and referencing the Orosius in one of his mathematical treatises.² Talbot’s endeavours included his compilation of a list of Old English words with Latin definitions that reveals one key method he used as he set about acquiring knowledge of Old English: he compared vernacular translations with their Latin originals, using the Latin as a key to the Old English and thereby reversing the purpose for which the translations had originally been made.³ Subsequent scholars were to use
¹ Old English texts in just a handful of manuscripts have late medieval additions indicating that they were read with understanding. Exceptionally, the mid-fifteenth-century Winchester monk Thomas Rudborne quotes the Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Old English text of King Alfred’s will in his Historia maior. See N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. xlix. ² See Timothy Graham, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds), A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, at –. ³ Talbot’s word list is in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS , fol. rv. See Timothy Graham, ‘Early Modern Users of Claudius B. iv: Robert Talbot and William L’Isle’, in Rebecca Barnhouse and
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this same method to good effect. Like other early modern antiquarians, Talbot annotated the manuscripts that he studied, and his notes help us to understand what motivated his interest in Old English. The notes reveal an engagement with religious issues—Talbot realized that the manuscripts provided key evidence for the early practices of the English Church—but above all they demonstrate an interest in the Anglo-Saxon forms of English place names; when encountering such forms in a manuscript Talbot frequently copied them out in the margin. A similar preoccupation with historical place names characterized the work of a major Anglo-Saxonist of the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Laurence Nowell (–c.), who, following several years spent on the Continent in the s, had by early joined the household of Elizabeth’s Secretary of State Sir William Cecil (/–), where he served as tutor to Cecil’s ward Edward de Vere (–), seventeenth earl of Oxford and future playwright. It was during his time with Cecil that Nowell dedicated himself to Old English studies, up until his departure in on further continental travels from which he did not return; he died two or three years later under mysterious circumstances, probably in Germany.⁴ Nowell is apparently the first identifiable owner of the manuscript containing the sole surviving copy of the great Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf (London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv)⁵ and the only one of the early Anglo-Saxonists to leave evidence of any interest in Old English poetry, demonstrated by a few glosses and titles that he added to the Exeter Book—another of the handful of codices containing the bulk of surviving Anglo-Saxon verse—and his transcription of a homiletic verse text, The Seasons of Fasting, that he found in the now largely destroyed MS Cotton Otho B. xi. More central to Nowell’s Old English studies, however, were the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings. He made extensive transcriptions of these, working from several different manuscripts. In the margins of his Chronicle transcripts in London, BL Add. MSS ,–, he wrote out place names mentioned in the text; and into his copy of Richard Howlet’s printed Latin– English dictionary, the Abcedarium Anglico Latinum of , he inserted blank paper leaves on which he compiled an alphabetical gazetteer of more than four hundred English place names, accompanied by information about each place that he drew from Anglo-Saxon and later historical sources.⁶ Nowell was also a skilled mapmaker—a talent that recommended him to Cecil—and one of his major cartographic undertakings was a set of maps of the different regions of England (London, BL, MS Cotton Domitian A. xviii, fols v–r) on which he entered Benjamin C. Withers (eds), The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ), –, at –. ⁴ On Nowell’s career and scholarly activities, see esp. Carl T. Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell (–ca. )’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Literature and Philology, vol. ii of Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline (New York: Garland, ), –. ⁵ His name and the date ‘’ entered at the top of the manuscript’s first page imply his ownership. ⁶ See Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), ch. .
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many of the place names in ‘Old English’ forms and in script imitating Anglo-Saxon minuscule.⁷ Talbot’s and Nowell’s fascination with the early forms of English place names associates them with a major movement in Tudor antiquarianism that originated with Leland, reached full fruition in William Camden’s Britannia of , and expressed the growing nationalism characteristic of England in the wake of the Reformation; the researches of the early Anglo-Saxonists made a unique contribution to this movement by solidifying its historical basis. Leland planned, but never completed, a vast chorographical account of Britain that would describe the island’s geography and history county by county while also recording the landholdings of the great families. Such a work would epitomize England’s unity and growing selfconfidence and remained an antiquarian goal following Leland’s demise. Research on the historical forms of place names could play a fundamental part in such a project. Nowell’s own efforts in this area were continued and extended by his friend and associate in Anglo-Saxon studies, William Lambarde (–). It was to Lambarde that Nowell entrusted his scholarly papers when he departed England in , and Lambarde made a landmark contribution to the chorographical enterprise by publishing the first English county history, A Perambulation of Kent (), into which he incorporated his Anglo-Saxon researches. Of even greater long-term significance than Nowell’s and Lambarde’s chorographical endeavours was their work on the Anglo-Saxon laws. Nowell made a detailed study of the laws both in their original language and through their twelfth-century Latin translation, the Quadripartitus; he prepared a handwritten edition of the laws of King Alfred that rested upon the careful comparison of different manuscripts and that included an accompanying Modern English translation on facing pages.⁸ Lambarde, himself a trained lawyer, expanded Nowell’s work and in , combining Nowell’s and his own materials, published an edition and Latin translation of most of the surviving Anglo-Saxon laws, along with a glossary elucidating the meaning of Old English legal terms, under the title Archaionomia, sive de priscis Anglorum legibus libri. Lambarde believed that sixteenth-century English common law was ultimately rooted in Anglo-Saxon law. His work influenced leading legal theorists such as Sir Edward Coke (–) and John Selden (–) and contributed to the legalconstitutional debates that prefaced the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century; it helped establish the context for the concept of the ‘Norman yoke’, the belief that the pre-Conquest English had enjoyed basic liberties subsequently overridden by their Norman overlords. Lambarde brought his deep historical perspective to the meetings of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, founded in London around to investigate the history of English institutions, offices, and customs but disbanded ⁷ In many cases the place names are Nowell’s own conjectural back-formations from the sixteenthcentury form of the name rather than actual Old English forms he found in Anglo-Saxon sources. For a detailed description and analysis of these maps, see Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention, –. ⁸ See Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell’, –, and Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention, –.
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in , perhaps because its researches were unwelcome to a Stuart monarchy increasingly keen to emphasize royal prerogative independent of historical precedent. The investigations of the Society’s members often included an etymological component that might encompass Old English.⁹ Contemporary with the work of Nowell and Lambarde was that of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury (–), and individuals associated with him in his archiepiscopal household at Lambeth—especially John Joscelyn (–), who became his principal expert on Old English. Parker took Anglo-Saxon studies in a new direction that persisted well into the seventeenth century and rested upon the magnificent collection of manuscripts that he assembled after becoming archbishop: some five hundred altogether, of which around seventy dated from the Anglo-Saxon period. A scholar by training—between and he was successively Bible Clerk, Fellow, and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to which he bequeathed the great majority of his books—Parker realized that Anglo-Saxon texts attested to the earliest ascertainable practices and beliefs of the English Church and concluded that the evidence they presented helped justify the stance of the newly independent Anglican Church against Rome. That conclusion impelled him to publish the first printed edition of Old English texts, issued in or under the title A Testimonie of Antiquitie, shewing the auncient fayth in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord.¹⁰ Initiating a tradition in typography that was to last into the eighteenth century, Parker had a special Anglo-Saxon font designed for his printer, John Day, who used the same font for Lambarde’s Archaionomia, printed a year or two later. The centrepiece of A Testimonie was an edition of an Easter Day sermon by Ælfric that in Parker’s mind established that this most orthodox of AngloSaxon churchmen held views relating to the transubstantiation of the eucharistic bread and wine that were consonant with those of the reformed English Church. Also included in the publication were Old English versions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed, to demonstrate that it was ‘no new thyng’ to turn the basic texts of Christianity into the vernacular—another practice that differentiated the Anglican from the Roman Catholic Church. Two further Anglo-Saxon editions appeared under Parker’s auspices. In John Day issued The Gospels of the Fower Euangelistes Translated in the Old Saxons Tyme, an edition of the Old English version of the Gospels with a preface by John Foxe, most celebrated of English Protestant apologists, whose account of Protestant martyrs, ⁹ The content of the Society’s studies is discussed in Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, –: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ¹⁰ See John Bromwich, ‘The First Book Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, / (): –, and Theodore H. Leinbaugh, ‘Ælfric’s Sermo de sacrificio in die Pascae: Anglican Polemic in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (eds), Old English Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), –. On the difficulty of assigning a precise date to the publication, see Erick Kelemen, ‘A Reexamination of the Date of A Testimonie of Antiquitie, One of the First Books Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types’, ANQ, / (Fall ): –.
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the Acts and Monuments, Day had first printed in .¹¹ The publication incorporated Old English liturgical rubrics that in Parker’s view attested to the actual reading aloud of the vernacular text within the Anglo-Saxon Church. The outer margins of each page carried a Modern English translation taken from the Bishops’ Bible of , the version overseen and organized by Parker himself and adopted for general use in the Anglican Church. For most readers, the translation provided an essential key to the Old English, but equally, the juxtaposition made the point that a venerable tradition of translating the scriptures into the vernacular lay behind and justified the Bishops’ Bible. In Parker published Ælfredi regis res gestæ, an edition of Asser’s Latin Life of King Alfred accompanied by editions of Alfred’s will—the earliest Anglo-Saxon royal will to survive—and of Alfred’s preface to his Old English translation of the Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory the Great, a document in which the monarch lays out his plan to restore the educational and cultural level of his kingdom by having key works translated from Latin into the vernacular. Parker’s Præfatio ad lectorem praises Alfred for combining prowess in battle with unceasing dedication to study and sets the stage for his later emergence as an iconic figure within the national consciousness. While assisting Parker with these publications, John Joscelyn completed, in manuscript, two resources essential for the study of the Old English language: a dictionary and a grammar.¹² Both remained unpublished but circulated among scholars of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the dictionary, which included some , entries, was, as transcribed by Sir Simonds D’Ewes (–), a principal source for William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, issued at Oxford in . Somner’s was the first published dictionary of Old English, but more than fifty years earlier an Old English word list of over six hundred entries was included in a work that stands on its own in the early history of Anglo-Saxon studies, Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, in Antiquities: Concerning the Most Noble and Renowmed English Nation ().¹³ In distinct contrast to other early Anglo-Saxonists, Verstegan (c.–) was a committed Roman Catholic. Of Dutch descent, he spent the first thirty years of his life in England and received his university education at Oxford before fleeing to the Continent in the early s. Settling in Antwerp, he worked as a Catholic ¹¹ See Kees Dekker, ‘Reading the Anglo-Saxon Gospels in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Thomas N. Hall and Donald Scragg (eds), Anglo-Saxon Books and their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s ‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’ (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ), –, esp. –. ¹² Both ended up in Sir Robert Cotton’s library. The dictionary is now London, BL, MSS Cotton Titus A. xv–A. xvi; see Timothy Graham, ‘John Joscelyn, Pioneer of Old English Lexicography’, in Timothy Graham (ed.), The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ), –. The grammar, loaned by Cotton to William Camden in , subsequently went missing and was never rediscovered, despite attempts to locate it by scholars of the later seventeenth century. ¹³ See Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ch. , and Richard W. Clement, ‘Richard Verstegan’s Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent’, in William Gentrup (ed.), Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –.
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publicist, writing accounts of the martyrdoms of English Catholics illustrated by engravings from his own hand. His Restitution of Decayed Intelligence is unique among his publications. Its purpose is to demonstrate the Germanic origins of the English nation and thereby to provide a counterpoint to the narrative of the foundation of Britain by Brutus, great-grandson of Æneas, that featured prominently in Camden’s Britannia and other antiquarian writings. Verstegan’s work is notable for its description, with accompanying illustrations, of the pagan gods worshipped by the Saxons before their conversion.¹⁴ In addition to the glossary of Old English words, A Restitution includes chapters analysing the Germanic derivations of some three hundred English personal names, surname elements, titles of offices, and terms of contempt. Written by an émigré who, forced to leave England because of his religious views, subsequently smuggled books for and provided intelligence to the Catholic Church, it expresses huge pride in the heritage of his birth country. Less scholarly than the work of the Parker circle, Verstegan’s book nevertheless seems to have made a stronger impression on the reading public, for within seventy years it underwent four reprints. Notwithstanding Verstegan’s work, it was largely a Protestant impulse that continued to drive Anglo-Saxon studies during the seventeenth century. The raw material available to Anglo-Saxonists grew significantly through the collecting activities of Sir Robert Cotton (–), who, beginning in the late s, assembled a manuscript library about double the size of Parker’s and including such choice items from the Anglo-Saxon period as the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, BL, MS Cotton Nero D. iv), in which the Old English gloss constituted the earliest surviving vernacular translation of the four Gospels, and a copy of the Old English Hexateuch (London, BL, MS Cotton Claudius B. iv) which, with its more than four hundred pictorial representations of the biblical text, was the most extensively illustrated of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.¹⁵ Cotton maintained his library in his London residence which, from about , was adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. Wishing the library to serve as a national repository of knowledge, he welcomed scholarly visitors to his home and was generous in providing them with access to the library and permitting them to borrow books. Among those to benefit from his generosity and that of his son Thomas (–), to whom Sir Robert bequeathed his library, were two Cambridge scholars whose Anglo-Saxon endeavours had widely differing outcomes. William L’Isle (c.–) planned to publish whatever portions of the Bible existed in Old English in order to demonstrate to Catholic detractors that the Church of England had the scriptures ‘so long agoe in her Mother-tongue’.¹⁶ His project would have included a
¹⁴ See Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Pantheon According to Richard Verstegen ()’, in Graham, Recovery of Old English, –. ¹⁵ On the formation and use of Cotton’s library, see Colin G. C. Tite, The Manuscript Library of Sir Robert Cotton (London: British Library, ). ¹⁶ The phrase comes from the subtitle of L’Isle’s A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament (London, ), wherein he provides an edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Sigeweard and announces
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parallel Modern English translation of his own. He completed full translations of the Old English Hexateuch and Psalms; he also transcribed and translated Old English homilies on the books of Job and Esther, as well as any quotations from the scriptures that he came upon in the homilies of Ælfric and others. But he died before he could bring this all to publication. By contrast, Abraham Wheelock (–) published the most extensive set of Old English texts yet to see the light of day when, in , he issued an edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in both Latin and Old English (utilizing six manuscripts variously in Cambridge and the Cotton collection), accompanied by a complete edition and Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (based on one of the Cottonian copies compared with the version in the Parker collection at Corpus Christi College).¹⁷ Wheelock’s title-page proclaimed the vernacular translation of Bede to be the work of King Alfred, and the edition privileged the Old English text by the use of a larger font and wider column as well as by its placement on the left of each page, where the reader’s eye encounters it first. Wheelock supplements Bede’s text with extensive notes in which he quotes from numerous Anglo-Saxon homilies and other sources in order to provide additional evidence about key doctrines and practices of the early English Church. For, as he notes in his preface, a central goal of his work was to demonstrate the essential conformity between pristine English Christianity and the reformed Anglican Church—to which, along with the triune God and the University of Cambridge, Wheelock dedicated his book. Wheelock was an ordained member of the clergy who from served as librarian to the University and from as Cambridge’s first lecturer in Arabic. From he started providing descriptions and transcripts of Anglo-Saxon texts found in Cambridge to the antiquary Sir Henry Spelman (/–), who was then gathering materials for the first volume of his Concilia (published in ), a monumental collection of documents that would chart the development of the Church in Britain from Roman times onward. Spelman found Wheelock’s services so valuable that in – he negotiated with the University to establish a lectureship in ‘British and Saxon Antiquities’, the first university-level appointment anywhere in Anglo-Saxon studies, which Wheelock then occupied until his death, after which the funds that had supported the position were channelled instead toward the publication of Somner’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Spelman—whose son John (–) published an edition of the Old English Psalter in and wrote a Life of King Alfred that appeared posthumously, in Latin translation, in —was a driving force in the promotion of the study of Old English, agitating for the production of a grammar and dictionary and entering into correspondence with continental scholars whose study of the historical (sigs br, er) his intention to publish at a future date all that he can find of the Bible in Old English. See Graham, ‘Early Modern Users’, –. ¹⁷ Abraham Wheelock (ed.), Historiæ ecclesiasticæ gentis Anglorum libri V. a venerabili Beda presbytero scripti (Cambridge, ). On Wheelock and his work with Old English, see J. C. T. Oates, From the Beginnings to the Copyright Act of Queen Anne, vol. i of Cambridge University Library: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), chs and .
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dimension of the Germanic languages led them to an interest in Old English. Among these scholars were Johannes de Laet of Leiden (–), who aspired to produce an Old English dictionary, and Ole Worm of Copenhagen (–), one of the pioneers of medieval Scandinavian studies.
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.................................................................................................................................. Spelman’s interest in Worm’s work was first stimulated when a member of the retinue of Palaemon Rosencrantz, the Danish ambassador in London, showed Spelman Worm’s interpretation of a runic monument located in Scania (then part of Denmark, now the south-western province of Sweden). In April Spelman wrote to Rosencrantz, who forwarded his observations to Worm, who responded directly to Spelman in July, initiating a correspondence that lasted until Spelman’s death twelve years later.¹⁸ Both men recognized the kinship between Old English and the Scandinavian languages; Spelman was even able to suggest an etymology for rune superior to that proposed by Worm by relating the word to Old English ryne and geryne (‘mystery’/ ‘hidden thing’).¹⁹ Spelman expressed interest in the ancient laws of Denmark; Worm sent him a codex of the laws lent by his countryman, Axilius Julius. The two exchanged copies of their own books, with Worm sending Spelman his Fasti Danici ()— which includes a detailed discussion of runic calendar sticks or primstave—and his Runir seu danica literatura antiquissima (). In May Worm sent a further fifty free copies of the latter work to Spelman’s London bookseller, hoping to receive in return English publications that would assist his studies. Worm’s Danica literatura antiquissima helped to spread knowledge of Old Norse literature in England, though the work has the peculiarity that Worm prints in runes texts that in their original manuscripts occur in the Roman alphabet; like other scholars of the time, he believed that all Old Norse poetry had originally been written in runes (and that runes in turn derived from Hebrew, reckoned the most ancient of all scripts). The book ends with an extended essay on the nature of Old Norse poetry in which Worm provides editions and Latin translations of two skaldic poems: Krákumál, often referred to as The Death Song of Ragnar Lothbrok and said to have been uttered by the legendary Viking hero Ragnarr as he lay dying in a snake pit, and Höfuðlausn, a praise poem purportedly composed by Egill Skalla-Grímsson to ransom himself from the clutches of Eric ¹⁸ The complete sequence of letters, including Spelman’s initial letter to Rosencrantz, is published in Olai Wormii et ad eum doctorum virorum epistolæ, vols (Copenhagen, ), i. –. For the points mentioned in the text, see pp. – (derivation of rune), and (ancient Danish laws), and , , and (exchange of books). ¹⁹ See Christine E. Fell, ‘Runes and Semantics’, in Alfred Bammesberger (ed.), Old English Runes and their Continental Background (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, ), –, at –.
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Bloodaxe (d. ), the last Viking king of York. Both poems came to enjoy considerable popularity in England and were among the items rendered into English prose in Thomas Percy’s landmark Five Pieces of Runic Poetry translated from the Islandic Language (). Although Worm’s antiquarian labours were later satirized by Alexander Pope in the Dunciad,²⁰ he was a key figure in the revival of interest in Old Norse texts that took place in Scandinavia in the middle and late decades of the seventeenth century.²¹ Another pioneer was Worm’s fellow Dane Peder Resen (–), who in published editions of the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (–) and of Völuspá and Hávamál, all with Latin translations.²² Völuspá (‘The Song of the Seeress’) constitutes the first part of the Poetic Edda, the compilation of which was believed in the seventeenth century to be the work of the Icelandic priest and scholar Sæmundr the Learned (–). Consisting of some sixty stanzas and taking the form of a seeress’s address to Odin, the poem tells of the creation of the world and its coming end, and is a major primary source for Norse mythology. Hávamál (‘Sayings of the High One’), presented as a single poem uttered by Odin himself, offers advice on right living and ends with an account of how Odin received the runes, followed by a list of runic spells. The inclusion of Latin translations was crucial for the reception of these works in England, for very few English scholars yet had the slightest knowledge of Old Norse. Between and the end of the seventeenth century nine saga editions appeared at Uppsala, Sweden, issued by Olaus Verelius (–) and others.²³ The first four of these editions included only the original Old Norse text accompanied by a Swedish translation, but beginning with Jacob Reenhielm’s edition of The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason () these saga publications commonly included a Latin translation. Another significant work was Antiquitatum danicarum de causis contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentibus mortis libri tres, written by Danish royal antiquarian Thomas Bartholin (–) and issued at Copenhagen in . Aimed at explaining the courage and cheerfulness with which the Scandinavian peoples had faced death while still pagan, the ²⁰ Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, rd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), III.– (p. ): ‘ “But who is he, in closet close y-pent, / Of sober face, with learned dust besprent?” / “Right wel mine eyes arede the myster wight, / On parchment scraps y-fed, and Wormius hight. / To future ages may thy dulness last, / As thou preserv’st the dulness of the past!” ’ ²¹ See Andrew Wawn, ‘The Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic Literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, at –. ²² Peder Resen (ed.), Edda Islandorum (i.e. the Prose Edda), Philosophia antiquissima NorvegoDanica dicta Voluspa quæ est pars Eddæ Sæmundi, and Ethica Odini, pars Eddæ Sæmundi vocata Havamal, all published in Copenhagen. ²³ () Olaus Verelius (ed.), Gothrici et Rolfi Westrgothiæ regum historia (); () Olaus Verelius (ed.), Herrauds och Bosa saga (); () Olaus Verelius (ed.), Hervarar saga (); () Jacob Reenhielm (ed.), Thorstens Viikings-sons saga (); () Jacob Reenhielm (ed.), Saga om k. Oloff Tryggwaszon i Norrege (); () Petter Salan (ed.), Fostbrödernas, Eigles och Asmunds saga (); () Guðmundur Ólafsson (ed.), Sagann af Sturlauge hinum starf-sama (); () Guðmundur Ólafsson (ed.), Sagan af Illuga Grydar Föstra (); () Olof Rudbeck (ed.), Ketilli Hængii et Grimonis Hirsutigenæ patris et filii historia ().
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study included excerpts from some two dozen Icelandic sagas, cited over twenty eddic poems—all the Old Norse being accompanied by Latin translations—and quickly established itself as the standard handbook of Nordic mythology; much of the material was provided by Bartholin’s collaborator Árni Magnússon (–), the era’s most prolific collector of Icelandic manuscripts. At the very end of the century appeared Johan Peringskiöld’s edition of Heimskringla, the massive sequence of sagas about kings of Norway attributed to Snorri Sturluson, published at Stockholm in two volumes in and . The first English author to make substantial use of Old Norse material published on the Continent was Robert Sheringham (c.–), whose De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio appeared at Cambridge in .²⁴ An expert on Semitic languages and an ardent royalist, Sheringham spent most of the Interregnum period (–) in the Netherlands, where he made the acquaintance of his fellow émigré Thomas Marshall (–), an enthusiast for the Germanic languages who was later to return to Oxford and assist with the establishment of Anglo-Saxon studies there. Sheringham’s Disceptatio sought to demonstrate the historical basis for English institutions, but much of its interest lay in its account of the movements of the Gothic peoples, from whom Sheringham derived the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had invaded the British Isles in the fifth century. Making use of a copy of Resen’s Edda Islandorum sent to him by Marshall²⁵ as well as of continental histories of the northern peoples such as Stephan Stephanius’s edition of the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus (–) and Johan Locken’s Antiquitates Sueo-Gothicæ (), Sheringham postulated that the Goths— whom, like many of his contemporaries, he identified with the Getae mentioned in classical sources—were descended from Noah’s son Shem, had settled in Scandinavia after the Flood, had subsequently migrated to eastern Europe and western Asia, and had returned to northern Europe from Asgard under their great leader Woden/Odin, who was also a soothsayer, the first to carve runes (which he used for spells and incantations), and the father of the skaldic poets of the Old North. Sheringham’s is the first English publication to print texts in Old Norse, for which he used a regular Roman font (in the process introducing several typographical errors not found in his Scandinavian sources); all texts are accompanied by a Latin translation (taken from his sources). In the course of his work he provides a table of the
²⁴ On Sheringham’s Disceptatio, see Parry, Trophies of Time, –, and Christine E. Fell, ‘The First Publication of Old Norse Literature in England and its Relation to its Sources’, in Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (eds), The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, ), –, at –. ²⁵ Robert Sheringham, De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio (Cambridge, ), sig. br: ‘Usus etiam sum Edda Islandorum, vetusto monumento, quam mihi insignis vir, & summus meus amicus Thomas Mareschallus S.T.D. ex Hollandia misit, de cujus antiquitate & authoritate multa à me suo loco dicuntur’ (‘I have also used Edda Islandorum, an ancient record, which the celebrated Thomas Marshall, Doctor of Sacred Theology, my very great friend, sent me from Holland, concerning the antiquity and authority of which I will say many things in their place’).
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twenty-four runic characters (listed in alphabetical rather than futhark order, p. ); describes how skalds would accompany kings into battle in order to witness their heroic deeds and then record them in verse (p. ); quotes extensively from Ynglinga saga (pp. –), the first portion of Heimskringla, which he knew from Stephanius’s citations in the notes to his edition of Saxo; references the fearless attacks of Woden’s berserker warriors (p. ); suggests that Woden’s appointment of a council of twelve lies at the origin of the twelve-man jury system (p. ); and offers the first extended discussion in a work published in England of the nature and content of the Poetic and Prose Edda (pp. –), following his Scandinavian sources in attributing the former to Sæmundr the Learned and the latter to Snorri. He stresses the originality of the Old Norse mythology and its independence from classical influence. He is fascinated by the pre-Christian Old Norse view of the afterlife, according to which those who die of illness or old age after leading a soft life are consigned to the realm of Hel, goddess of the underworld (p. ), while those who fall valiantly in battle will greet death with laughter, joining Odin in Valhalla, where they will drink beer from the hollowed-out skulls of their enemies (pp. –, ). On that last detail, Sheringham was misled by the erroneous Latin translation, within the edition of The Death Song of Ragnar Lothbrok printed in Worm’s Danica literatura antiquissima, of the Old Norse kenning ‘ór bjúgviðum hausa’, which describes nothing more ghoulish than drinking from the horns of animals (‘the curved trees of skulls’).²⁶ The error had a long life in England.²⁷ Much of Sheringham’s Old Norse material was rendered into English in Aylett Sammes’s Britannia antiqua illustrata: or, the Antiquities of Ancient Britain of .²⁸ Sammes had his own elaborate racial theory—that the British Isles were originally settled by Phoenicians from the eastern Mediterranean— but he agreed with Sheringham in seeing the Goths as the ancestors of the Germanic invaders who entered Britain in the fifth century and he has much to say about Woden in his chapter ‘The Antiquity and Original of the Saxons’. He offers the first English translation of the stanzas of the Death Song that reveal Ragnarr’s attitude to his mortality (p. ): In Wodens Hall there Benches be, Where we may sit and drink. ²⁶ The edition and Latin translation of the Death Song in Worm’s work were based on materials provided by Magnús Ólafsson (c.–): see Anthony Faulkes, Magnúsarkver: The Writings of Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás (Reykjavik: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, ), (I am most grateful to Rory McTurk for providing this reference). The Latin note to the text printed by Worm comments that the verse describes warriors drinking ex craniis eorum quos occiderant (‘from the skulls of those they had killed’): Olaus Wormius, Runir seu danica literatura antiquissima (Amsterdam, ), –. ²⁷ See Christine E. Fell, ‘Norse Studies: Then, Now and Hereafter’, in Anthony Faulkes (ed.), Viking Revaluations: Viking Society Centenary Symposium, – May (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ), –, at –. ²⁸ See Parry, Trophies of Time, ch. , esp. p. , Fell, ‘Norse Studies’, –, and Fell, ‘First Publication’, –.
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There we shall Tope our bellies-full Of Nappy-Ale in full-brim’d Skull. . . . . . . With Asians there in highest Seat, I merrily will quaff, Past-hours I care not to repeat, But when I die I’le laugh.
The heroism implicit in such an attitude exercised a strong fascination over Sammes’s contemporary, the diplomat and author Sir William Temple (–), respected in his time and throughout the eighteenth century as one of England’s leading essayists. Temple’s pair of essays ‘Of Heroick Virtue’ and ‘Of Poetry’, both appearing in the second volume of his Miscellanea (), set out to celebrate those two endowments of nature and art—heroism and poetic composition—that in his estimation raised humanity to the level of the divine. Each essay reveals how Old Norse material had now become subject matter for literary discussion. In the first, Temple praises the Gothic peoples for their cheerfulness in the face of death as well as for their commitment to principles of liberty and representation as embodied in their manner of government, wherein, according to Temple, their leaders were always advised by a council. Discussing the Death Song, Temple notes that ‘such an alacrity or pleasure in dying, was never expressed in any other Writing, nor imagined in any other People’; and he acknowledges ‘a vein truly Poetical’ both in this poem and in Egill SkallaGrímsson’s Höfuðlausn, also published by Worm.²⁹ In ‘Of Poetry’, however, Temple’s attitude is much more ambivalent. On the one hand, he recognizes that Old Norse verse takes multiple and complex forms, ‘some Composed in longer, some in shorter Lines, some equal and others unequal, with many different Cadencies, Quantities, or Feet’.³⁰ But on the other hand, knowing that some of the verse was rhymed, he blames it for first introducing end-rhymes into European poetry—in Temple’s view, a debasement of the poetic art—and even proposes the novel but false etymology that rhyme derives from rune:³¹ another sort of Runes were made, with the Care and Study of ending two Lines, or each other of four Lines, with Words of the same Sound, which being the easiest, requiring less Art, and needing less Spirit (because a certain Chime in the Sounds supplied that want, and pleased common Ears); this in time grew the most general among all the Gothick Colonies in Europe, and made Rhymes or Runes pass for the modern Poetry, in these parts of the World. ²⁹ William Temple, ‘Of Heroick Virtue’, in Miscellanea: The Second Part, in Four Essays (London, ), . ³⁰ Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, . ³¹ Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, ; for the derivation, see p. . Temple’s apparent belief that much of Old Norse poetry used end-rhymes may have resulted from the fact that two of the three complete poems published by Worm in his Runir seu danica literatura antiquissima were rhymed (the Rune Poem and Höfuðlausn). See Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
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The misconception that Old Norse verse commonly used end-rhyme played its part in the broader seventeenth-century discussion of poetics and the relative merits of rhyme as opposed to quantitative or blank verse.³²
T O S
.................................................................................................................................. Old English and Old Norse studies converged in a remarkable collaborative effort centred on Oxford in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that marked the high point of premodern English scholarship on the ancient northern languages and literatures.³³ The University had long held that it owed its origins to King Alfred, who according to a fourteenth-century account had founded University College in the s. Soon after the Restoration of , the College commissioned a portrait of Alfred to be hung in the Master’s lodgings; presenting a crowned, bearded monarch clad in ermine, the picture influenced much of the eighteenth-century iconography of the king.³⁴ In the College’s Master, Obadiah Walker, published his own Latin translation of John Spelman’s Life of King Alfred, which Spelman had completed while serving in the royalist camp in Oxford in . Spelman’s work presented Alfred, ‘First Founder of the English Monarchy’, as a model of good kingship and was dedicated to the -year-old Prince Charles, son of Charles I. The publication of the book—which in was issued in its original English version by the Oxford scholar Thomas Hearne—significantly shaped subsequent treatments of Alfred’s accomplishments.³⁵ Oxford’s Alfredian preoccupations served as the backdrop for an interconnected web of scholarly initiatives that began in the s and lasted for about forty years. In Thomas Marshall, who had lived in the Netherlands since , returned to Oxford as the newly elected Rector of Lincoln College. An expert on the Germanic languages who had collaborated with the great Dutch philologist Francis Junius (–) on an edition of the Gothic and Old English Gospels published at Dordrecht in , Marshall persuaded Junius to spend his last years in Oxford; on his death in , the Dutchman bequeathed to Oxford University the types and punches he had procured in the Netherlands for the printing of Old English and ³² See Judy Quinn and Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘The Image of Norse Poetry and Myth in SeventeenthCentury England’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, ), –, at –. ³³ See David Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’, in L. S. Sutherland and Leslie Mitchell (eds), The Eighteenth Century, vol. v of The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –; and Richard L. Harris, A Chorus of Grammars: The Correspondence of George Hickes and his Collaborators on the ‘Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium’ (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, ). ³⁴ See Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, (): –, at – and plate VIIIa. ³⁵ Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, –.
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other ancient Germanic texts, a sizeable number of manuscripts and printed books— including his own transcripts of numerous Old English texts in the Cotton collection and elsewhere—and his draft dictionary of the northern languages, which focused on Old English but included entries in Gothic, Old Norse, and ‘Runic’ (treated as a separate language).³⁶ The acquisition of Junius’s materials coincided with a desire to promote AngloSaxon studies among key figures within the University, notably John Fell (ViceChancellor –; Bishop of Oxford –), a tireless promoter of the University who in revived its press, establishing it in Christopher Wren’s newly constructed Sheldonian Theatre adjacent to the Bodleian Library. Two years after Junius’s death, with Fell’s support, The Queen’s College created a lectureship in Anglo-Saxon, awarding the position to the -year-old William Nicolson (–), who had spent the previous year studying in Germany under the patronage of Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson, the founder of the lectureship. Scholars who made their first acquaintance with Old English at Queen’s, whether under Nicolson or his inspirational successor Edward Thwaites (–), holder of the lectureship from , were among those who contributed to a remarkable series of publications on Old English and other Germanic languages that issued from the university press beginning in , using Junius’s types. First came a grammar of Old English and Gothic, Institutiones grammaticæ AngloSaxonicæ, et Mœso-Gothicæ, by George Hickes (–), who had been an associate of Thomas Marshall at Lincoln College. The volume provided an essential tool for those who wished to study texts in Old English and Gothic (which was regarded as the root of all the northern languages);³⁷ it offered further assistance to interested scholars by including a catalogue of manuscripts and printed books that contained texts in Gothic, Old English, Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old Norse. Between the grammar and the catalogue Hickes included a reprint of Grammaticæ Islandicæ rudimenta, the grammar of the Icelandic language published by Runólfur Jónsson at Copenhagen in , augmenting it with an alphabetized glossary of the Icelandic words used in Jónsson’s text;³⁸ Hickes pointed out in his preface (sig. cr) that because of Iceland’s isolation the contemporary language was essentially identical with Old Norse. Hickes’s work was followed over the next decade by a series of Old English editions based on materials in the Bodleian Library (including Junius’s transcripts made from manuscripts located elsewhere): Edmund Gibson’s Chronicon Saxonicum (), intended to surpass Abraham Wheelock’s Anglo-Saxon Chronicle edition of ; Christopher ³⁶ On the organization of Junius’s dictionary, see Kees Dekker, ‘ “That most elaborate one of Fr. Junius”: An Investigation of Francis Junius’s Manuscript Old English Dictionary’, in Graham, Recovery of Old English, –. ³⁷ Gothic was known from a single text, a fourth-century translation of the Gospels that survived only in the sixth-century Codex Argenteus, given to the library of Uppsala University by Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie in . ³⁸ This glossary was originally compiled by Junius but Hickes adjusted and expanded it. See Fell, ‘First Publication of Old Norse Literature’, –.
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Rawlinson’s edition of King Alfred’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (); and Edward Thwaites’s compendium of biblical and apocryphal texts that included Old English versions of the first seven books of the Old Testament, the book of Job, the gospel of Nicodemus, and the surviving fragment of a poetic rendition of the book of Judith (). In Thwaites’s pupil Thomas Benson published a Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum that was intended to supplant Somner’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary of , copies of which had become scarce. Other projects were planned but not brought to completion, including editions of the Alfredian translation of the Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory the Great and the vernacular version of Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans, which the Oxford scholars believed to be the work of Alfred. William Elstob (–), another product of Queen’s, prepared a complete transcript of the Old English Orosius; a brief printed specimen of the planned edition was issued by the press in , but the project went no further. The Orosius specimen was, however, sufficient to stimulate an interest in Old English in William’s sister Elizabeth (–), who went on to add her own important contributions to the work of the Oxford Saxonists, becoming known to her contemporaries as ‘the Saxon nymph’.³⁹ In her own estimation, Elizabeth was the first woman to acquaint herself with Old English ‘since the time when it was the current Language’.⁴⁰ Following her brother’s appointment as rector of the united parishes of St Swithin and St Mary Bothaw in , Elizabeth lived with William in London where, in addition to collaborating with him on a projected new edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws that was intended to surpass Lambarde’s, she issued two publications of her own. First came An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St Gregory (), an edition of Ælfric’s homily on Pope Gregory the Great, the ‘apostle of the English’, that included a substantial preface in which, before underlining the purity of the teachings of the Anglo-Saxon Church and emphasizing its similarities to the Anglican Church of her own day, Elizabeth offered a spirited defence of women’s education. Her second AngloSaxon publication, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (), has the distinction of being the first grammar of Old English to be written in English rather than Latin. Targeted specifically at a female readership, the work begins with a preface in which she delivers an impassioned apology for the study of Old English and the northern languages as a whole, taking aim at Jonathan Swift, who, in his A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue of , had demeaned the Old English tongue as ‘so barren and so barbarous’ and those who studied it as ‘laborious Men of low Genius’.⁴¹ Elizabeth’s most ambitious project was a complete edition of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, accompanied by a Modern English translation
³⁹ See esp. Mechthild Gretsch, ‘Elizabeth Elstob: A Scholar’s Fight for Anglo-Saxon Studies’, Anglia, (): – and –. On the impact that the sight of the Orosius specimen had upon her, see Elizabeth Elstob, An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St Gregory (London, ), pp. vi–vii. ⁴⁰ Elstob, English-Saxon Homily, sig. Av. ⁴¹ Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, nd edn (London, ), .
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and critical notes. Although the university press at Oxford announced publication for the autumn of , a mere thirty-six pages of proofs were printed; but Elizabeth’s immaculate transcriptions of the homilies, described by Hickes as ‘the most correct I ever saw or read’, still survive, executed in a finely controlled script that imitates Anglo-Saxon minuscule.⁴² Hickes himself was the driving force behind the Oxford Saxonists’ magnum opus, Antiquæ literaturæ septentrionalis libri duo, issued by the university press between and . Initially planned as a second edition of the Institutiones grammaticæ, the work was expanded to include new chapters on Old English dialects and poetics; a grammar of Franconian (the language of the Franks, known from a handful of surviving texts of the ninth to eleventh centuries); a masterful dissertation on the potential applications of knowledge of the northern languages; a study of Anglo-Saxon coins; and a vastly enlarged catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and printed books accompanied by lists of Old Norse and Franconian works, both manuscript and printed, in continental collections. Several of the Oxford Saxonists contributed to the publication, which also drew upon the expertise of Scandinavians visiting England or corresponding with Hickes and his collaborators—including Ole Worm’s grandson Christian, who advised on Old Norse material until he was obliged to leave England amid allegations of pawning or selling items borrowed from English acquaintances.⁴³ Hickes assigned the catalogue to Humfrey Wanley (–), whose detailed manuscript descriptions are models of precision and palaeographical acumen. Wanley’s work, Librorum veterum septentrionalium . . . catalogus historico-criticus, appeared as a separate second volume in ; the first volume bore its own title, Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, and the work as a whole is usually known simply as Hickes’s Thesaurus. The massive accomplishment that it represents is the more remarkable in that Hickes, as a nonjuror whose conscience would not allow him to pledge allegiance to William III, was in deprived of the deanery of Worcester, which he had held since , and forced for several years to live in hiding, changing his place of residence repeatedly until his reprieve in ; it was nevertheless during those years that plans for the Thesaurus took shape and much of the work was conducted. Hickes’s Thesaurus represented the culmination of the scholarship of the previous century and a half while also establishing the groundwork for future investigations. On one level Hickes, like the other Oxford Saxonists (most of whom were ordained churchmen), was motivated by the perception that Old English texts could provide ⁴² The transcriptions survive in London, BL, MSS Lansdowne – and Egerton . Hickes’s comment occurs in a letter of Dec. to Arthur Charlett; see Harris, Chorus of Grammars, . For a fuller discussion of Elizabeth Elstob’s transcriptions and planned edition of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, see Timothy Graham, ‘Female Agency in Early Anglo-Saxon Studies: The “Nuns of Tavistock” and Elizabeth Elstob’, in Helene Scheck and Christine E. Kozikowski (eds), New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Honour of Helen Damico (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, ), –, at –. ⁴³ Harris, Chorus of Grammars, and .
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historical justification for doctrines and practices of the Anglican Church; in this respect his work continued the trajectory for Old English studies initiated by Matthew Parker in the s. But more important was Hickes’s broader realization, explored in the dissertation ‘De linguarum veterum septentrionalium usu’ (‘On the Use of the Ancient Northern Languages’), that the study of northern texts was crucial for the exploration of the history of political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions as a whole. The chapters on dialects that he added to the Anglo-Saxon grammar represented the first scholarly attempt at a history of the English language from its origins,⁴⁴ while the new chapters on poetics offered the first sustained analysis of the principles underlying Old English verse, which scholars had long failed even to recognize, as a result of the Anglo-Saxon habit of not laying out vernacular poetry in verse lines. The chapters ‘De dialecto poetica’ and ‘De poetica Anglo-Saxonum’ draw substantially on the Old Norse texts published during the seventeenth century to establish parallels for the language and versification of Old English poetry, for example in the discussion of kennings, the compound circumlocutions that are among the major devices imparting their special stamp to Old English and Old Norse verse alike. At one point Hickes directly juxtaposes an Old English with an Old Norse text to illustrate their metrical similarities (‘De poetica Anglo-Saxonum’, pp. –). His edition of the two poems had abiding significance: the manuscript of the Old English text, the Finnsburh Fragment, which offers a parallel to Beowulf, is no longer extant, leaving Hickes’s edition as the only witness, while the Old Norse text, the verse section of Hervarar saga known as ‘The Waking of Angantyr’—telling the story of how the shield-maiden Hervör summoned up the ghost of her father Angantýr to implore him to give her the cursed sword Tyrfing—had a long-term impact on the English poetic imagination. Hickes’s English translation was, indeed, reproduced almost without change, under the title ‘The Incantation of Hervor’, in Thomas Percy’s influential Five Pieces of Runic Poetry of . The scholarly endeavours of the mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries laid the essential foundation for the exploration and exploitation of Anglo-Saxon and Norse themes in the Victorian period. Tools for the study of Old English and Old Norse were made available; a broad array of texts in prose and verse appeared in print. King Alfred’s image as model English monarch took shape, while both the Anglo-Saxons and their Scandinavian counterparts became associated with heroism, independence of spirit, and the promotion and defence of basic liberties. An enthusiasm for the northern world and its literary productions was kindled that would fire the imagination of writers and artists far into the future.⁴⁵
⁴⁴ For Hickes’s discussion of dialects, see esp. Christopher M. Cain, ‘George Hickes and the “Invention” of the Old English Dialects’, Review of English Studies, / (): –. ⁴⁵ I am most grateful to Professor Rory McTurk for reading an earlier version of this chapter and offering several valuable suggestions.
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S Berkhout, Carl T., and Milton McC. Gatch, Old English Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, ). Brackmann, Rebecca, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Clunies Ross, Margaret, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Faulkes, Anthony (ed.), Viking Revaluations: Viking Society Centenary Symposium, – May (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ). Graham, Timothy (ed.), The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ). Graham, Timothy, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds), A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. Keynes, Simon, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, (): –. Magennis, Hugh, ‘Not Angles But Anglicans? Reformation and Post-Reformation Perspectives on the Anglo-Saxon Church’, parts and , English Studies, (): – and –. Niles, John D., The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England –: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ). O’Donoghue, Heather, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, ). Page, R. I., Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, ). Parry, Graham, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Roesdahl, Else, and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (eds), The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, ). Wawn, Andrew, ‘The Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic Literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.
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B the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages had been reformed and the authority of the Pope had been rejected, but many radical protestants insisted that the Reformation had not been thorough enough. The Church of England was still governed by bishops, many ceremonies of the Roman Church had been retained, and the Book of Common Prayer contained many traces of Catholic worship. From abroad, Catholic theologians poured scorn on the church that had been created in England. It was a novelty, a new-fangled religion that had been put together with a lot of modern ideas from Germany and Switzerland. ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’ was a gibe sometimes flung against English Protestants. Catholics would maintain that the English Church had no roots in antiquity, could not claim descent from the Apostles, and lacked the traditions of worship sanctified by long ages of practice. In order to justify the character of the Elizabethan Church, English scholars were forced to think about the early centuries of Christianity in Britain. The faith had come to these islands in Roman times, and it had survived among the Britons after the Romans departed. There had been a British Church that had flourished before St Augustine came from Rome to preach the Gospel to King Ethelbert and the people of Kent in . The Saxons had distinctive ways of worship, and many holy men and women of Saxon times had been recognized as saints. These Celtic and Saxon Christians with their primitive piety and simple modes of worship were surely the ancestors of the reformed Church of Elizabethan times. One could argue that it was only with the Norman Conquest that England came under the full control of the Roman Catholic Church and the Papacy. But where was the evidence, how could one document the existence of purer forms of Christianity in Britain from which the modern Church could claim descent? Most of the records of the history of the Church had been in the monastic libraries. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge possessed small collections of early manuscripts, as did some of the ancient schools, but the monasteries, especially those of the
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Benedictine order, had been the principal custodians of the national past. At the Dissolution, the manuscripts and books of the monastic libraries had been jettisoned: dumped, sold, used for base purposes, some shipped abroad to foreign dealers or even used as ballast in ships. The books like the monks were deemed worthless. The accumulation of centuries had been dispersed in a few years. As the humanist scholars of early Elizabethan times came to realize what had been lost, the movement to preserve the survivors of the great destruction began. In , while the monasteries were still intact, the antiquary John Leland had received a commission from Henry VIII to search their libraries for ‘monuments of ancient matters’ that could be removed to the King’s library. Some three to four hundred manuscripts were saved in this way. John Bale (–), the first great bibliophile after the Reformation, devoted himself to gathering up as many stray manuscripts as he could, and recording the whereabouts of many others. He looked out for chronicles, ecclesiastical histories, epistles of medieval churchmen, works on councils and synods, and liturgical material. He published a summary of British writers of the Middle Ages and a catalogue of hundreds of their books that he had encountered, mostly by title only, a great proportion of which have vanished without trace.¹ Leland and Bale were both overwhelmed by the scale and diversity of the rescue attempt that they undertook. It was Matthew Parker who took a more purposeful approach to the recovery of the surviving manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and who envisaged a practical use for them. Parker had been the Master of Corpus Christi College Cambridge before he became Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury in , so he had both a strong scholarly background and a supreme position of authority from which to superintend the recovery of scattered manuscripts and give them a renewed life. He recognized the need to learn to read texts written in AngloSaxon, as the language was no longer comprehensible, so he encouraged young scholars to join his household with a view to deciphering the language and assessing the value of the manuscripts they collected. Parker also saw the need to print significant texts from Saxon or medieval manuscripts in order to make them more widely available. Materials should also be accumulated towards the history of Christianity in England that he contemplated. He wished to fill out the religious history of Saxon England, and document the slow decline of doctrine and worship from its simplicity at the time of St Augustine’s mission. He would trace the growth of complexity and error in the post-Conquest centuries until the return to the principles of the Gospels in King Henry’s times.²
¹ Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Bryttaniae . . . Catalogus. vols (Basel, –). The phase of manuscript retrieval in the time Leland, Bale, and Parker is usefully reviewed in the introductory section of Timothy Graham and Andrew G. Watson (eds), The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, ). ² The basic documents for the study of Matthew Parker remain J. Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, (repr. Oxford, –) and The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne (Oxford, ).
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From the manuscripts he had amassed, Parker was able to publish in De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae, a collection of documents and excerpts from chronicles that partially fulfilled his ambition to construct a history of primitive Christianity in Britain and its subsequent delinquencies, but it is a disjointed work, lacking a clear narrative. Inevitably, one might think, Parker began with the story of the arrival in Britain of Joseph of Arimathea, sent from Gaul by the apostle Philip.³ It was essential that someone who had had direct contact with Jesus should bring the Gospel to Britain, so that the link with apostolic times could be established. Joseph’s mission also provided a source for Christianity in Britain that was independent of Rome. Details of the early centuries are so sparse that Parker had to grasp at legends to keep afloat. We learn very little about the character or practices of the early Church. Parker did produce one work that demonstrated the value of Saxon writings. In he published, with the help of John Joscelyn his secretary, an edition of Aelfric’s ‘Homily’ under the title of A Testimonie of Antiquitie. Here he was able to show that the tenth-century abbot at Cerne Abbas in Dorset held a position on the eucharist that was similar to that professed by the Elizabethan Church. Aelfric did not hold the doctrine of transsubstantiation. He also provided evidence that services were conducted in the language spoken by the people. That the text of the Gospels was freely available in the native language in late Saxon times was made evident in Joscelyn’s edition of The Gospels of the Four Evangelists Translated . . . into the Vulgar Tongue of the Saxons, published in . The edition was prepared at the request of Archbishop Parker, and printed by John Day in his fine new Anglo-Saxon typeface, with an introduction by John Foxe. Parker wished to promote his belief that the Anglo-Saxon Church had a fair degree of independence from Rome in matters of doctrine and discipline, and access to the scriptures, a situation that held good until the Conquest strengthened papal authority. He was pleased, for example, to find manuscript evidence that clerical marriage was permitted in early Saxon times, a practice that was personally significant to him, as he himself had married, even though Elizabeth disapproved of married clergy. In general, however, Parker seemed more attracted to the broad history of the Middle Ages than just to its ecclesiastical history. He edited a number of chronicles: the Flores Historiarum attributed to ‘Matthew of Westminster’ (a patchwork compilation from several chronicles) in , the chronicle of Matthew Paris in , and that of Thomas of Walsingham in . He also published an edition of Asser’s Latin Life of Alfred in . The large project to construct a history of the early Church in Britain faltered from lack of appropriate evidence and Parker’s deepening involvement in ecclesiastical affairs.⁴
³ Parker probably took his account of Joseph of Arimathea’s mission to Britain from the twelfthcentury chronicle of William of Malmesbury, a manuscript of which was in his possession. The story does not appear in the earliest chronicles of Gildas and Nennius, nor in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, the source of so many medieval national legends. ⁴ The scholarly activities of the Parker Circle are described by May McKisack in chapter of her book Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
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The fullest account of the growth of Christianity in England was provided by John Foxe, in his long historical introduction to his Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, more commonly known as ‘The Book of Martyrs’, first published in by John Day, the printer who was always willing to advance the cause of reformed religion. A much expanded edition followed in . Working mostly from printed sources, Foxe asserts that the faith was widespread in Roman Britain from a very early date, having been brought here by Joseph of Arimathea. He can tell us nothing of the practices of those British Christians beyond what he learns from Bede. He pieces together an extended account of the progress of the faith in the Saxon centuries, noting the readiness of so many Saxons to accept the Gospel, but saying little about doctrine or modes of worship. Foxe is however reluctant to praise Saxon Christianity, probably because the tide of conversion coming from the south originated in Augustine’s mission, and Augustine came from Rome. There is little mention of conversion by the Celtic missionaries working down from the north. Foxe deplores the enthusiasm of the Saxons for the monastic life, and is particularly scornful of those kings and princes who entered monasteries, because they renounced thereby the duties and responsibilities of their station. Yet Foxe, like Parker, acknowledges that the hand of Rome lay lightly on Saxon England. In Foxe’s scheme of history, the great change came when Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII in , and began to raise papal power and control to unprecedented heights. The reign of Hildebrand, who to Foxe was one of the heads of Antichrist, coincided with that of William the Conqueror, so England was doubly subjected to foreign authority. Ultimately, only when all vestiges of Roman Catholicism have been expunged will the simple faith of apostolical days be recovered. Parker’s encouragement of younger scholars such as Joscelyn, Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and John Stow resulted in continuing investigation of Saxon England throughout Elizabeth’s reign. During this time, the Anglo-Saxon language was recovered, and the beginnings of the study of the religious structure and devotional practices of Saxon England were made. The other major area of investigation was the laws and systems of government that prevailed before the Norman Conquest. All this research was carried out from manuscripts that had been preserved within the Parker circle. The desire to clarify the laws and government of Saxon England was moved by the same impulses that had driven the quest to identify a distinctively British Church. It was desirable to demonstrate that the Saxon kingdoms had their own substantial codes of law that were quite independent of Roman law, and that the privileges and boundaries of monarchical authority were well defined. The rise of nationalist sentiment was the cause, released by the Reformation and reinforced by Elizabeth’s policies of proud independence, defiance of Spain, and mercantile expansion.⁵ William Lambarde, a Kentish gentleman with legal training, contributed significantly to this movement to emphasize the nordic character of the people who occupied the land from the fifth century onwards. They were ‘Saxons, Jutes and Angles: three ⁵ For a succinct and comprehensive account of this vast subject, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
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sorts of the Germane nation’. Vigorous, hardy, and warlike in contrast to the weak Britons they supplanted, they had a language, laws, and customs that were very different from those of the peoples who had lived for centuries under Roman rule. He published a collection of pre-Conquest laws under the title of Archaionomia in , with the laws in Anglo-Saxon type specially cut by John Day on one page facing a Latin translation opposite. The introduction briefly describes customs and modes of landholding and government peculiar to the Saxons, including their free assemblies to discuss matters of importance that Tacitus had described as a feature of Germanic tribes in his De Germania. In , Lambarde brought out his Perambulation of Kent, a volume of topography, history, and place-name studies that showed how comprehensively Saxon settlement had permeated and shaped his own county.⁶ This early phase of studies of Saxon England reached its apogee in with Richard Verstegan’s memorable book A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. Verstegan’s father had migrated to England from the Low Countries in Henry VII’s reign. Richard had attended Oxford in the s, and it was probably at that time that he grew interested in the Anglo-Saxon language, as a result of the publications coming from the Parker circle. It may well be that he began to write his book in that decade or in the early s, when curiosity about Saxon affairs was fresh and exciting. As a fervent Roman Catholic, he found it prudent to live abroad in centres of the Catholic faith, most notably Antwerp, where he wrote and illustrated several books that detailed the cruel persecutions of Catholics by Dutch, French, and English Protestants. His sortie into Saxon studies was as unexpected as it was impressive. The ‘decayed intelligence’ that needed restitution was the knowledge that the English nation was entirely Germanic in its origins. The Ancient Britons were not the ancestors of the English, and old legends that Britain had been settled by Trojan exiles could be dismissed. There was clear historical evidence that the English were the descendants of the tribes from Saxony and Jutland who had occupied the land from the fifth century onwards. The English language was the most convincing proof of the Germanic roots of the nation as Verstegan proceeded to demonstrate in great detail. At the end of the sixteenth century, the prevailing consensus about national origins—among poets, dramatists, and masque writers at least—was still the British History provided by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. He had described the Trojan forebears of the Ancient Britons, and the colourful line of British kings fabled for their heroic lives. When James became king in , he was hailed in his coronation pageants and in a torrent of celebratory verse as the worthy successor of a noble line that included the Trojan Brutus, Lear, Cymbeline, and Arthur. Antiquaries were beginning to discredit this tradition, but it still retained remarkable vigour. Verstegan dedicated his book to King James in , declaring him to be ‘descended of the chiefest blood royall of our Ancient English-Saxon Kings’. Now the Saxons were no longer to be viewed as rough ⁶ A helpful recent study of Lambarde’s achievements is provided by Rebecca Brackmann in The Ellizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Lawrence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ).
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interlopers, opportunistic barbarians who had seized the land of the British and had been slowly civilized by their adoption of Christianity. They were vigorous warlike Teutons, sprung from those Germans who had successfully resisted the armies of the Romans, and who had been described with deep admiration by Tacitus. The Restitution was the first book in English devoted entirely to the Saxons as a people. With the help of much recent continental scholarship, Verstegan attempted to reconstruct the religion they followed as pagans, showing a serious humanist curiosity in his enquiry, with no disparaging remarks about heathen folly. Their chief gods were exhibited, with their particular powers and the manner of worshipping them. Striking illustrations of their ‘Idols’ were provided, for Verstegan was a talented engraver. He went on to analyse the structure of Saxon society, with the titles of ranks and officers along with their roles and duties. Of the Saxon Church. however, he has nothing to report, a strange omission. Throughout the book he holds up the Anglo-Saxon language against the modern English language to show how the latter is of offspring of the former, all the time emphasizing ‘the proprietie, woorthinesse and amplytude’ of ‘our ancient English toung’. Personal names, place names, topographical names, occupational terms all declare our Saxon inheritance, and by word lists, etymologies, and lively expositions of Saxon usage he arouses the reader’s curiosity about the language. The Romans and the Danes are scarcely mentioned in Verstegan’s book, for they did little to shape the England his readers lived in. Even the Normans receive scant attention, for although their knights conquered the land, their language was eventually overcome by English. By the end of the book, the reader might feel persuaded that ‘he can lack no honor to be descended from so honorable a race’. The Restitution remained the most influential book on Saxon England for well over a century, being reprinted in , , , and . It was still being quoted with respect by antiquaries in the eighteenth century.⁷ The pride that Verstegan took in his Saxons was an emotion common to the antiquaries who restored the past in Elizabethan times and after. It is evident in the bold title of William Camden’s masterpiece: Britannia. Published in , Britannia became the most widely read and admired book about the various pasts of these islands. It gave every educated gentleman in the country an awareness that he was living in a deeply historical landscape, and aroused an interest in local history that has never since diminished. Camden, a master at Westminster School, had long been fascinated by antiquities. He had been urged by his friend the Flemish geographer Ortelius to present an account of Britain as a province of the Roman Empire for the illumination of European scholars. Roman settlements and military camps would be identified, the path of the great roads traced, and an account furnished of the British tribal areas controlled by the Romans. All this would be set in the framework of the topography of the country. Camden enlarged his scheme ambitiously, deciding to describe each county, recording what every invading race had added or obliterated ⁷ For an extensive account of Verstegan, see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
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and the growth of towns and markets. Notable military encounters would be included, and the achievements of famous men. He soon realized that he could not proceed with his plans without an understanding of Anglo-Saxon, for so much history lay locked up in Saxon manuscripts. When it came to topographical description, so many British or Roman place names had been overlaid by Saxon names that one could not pursue a local history without confident linguistic skills. How Camden learnt or taught himself Anglo-Saxon is not known, but it would have been through his friendship with William Lambarde, and others who had orbited around Matthew Parker, those men who loved and acquired manuscripts, and whose activities were encouraged by Parker’s friend and patron, William Cecil. (It was to William Cecil, Lord Burghley that Camden dedicated his Britannia.) Camden’s knowledge of Saxon history, as exhibited throughout Britannia, is detailed and confident, evidently the result of considerable research among surviving manuscripts. In the enlarged edition of Britannia, Camden added a whole new chapter on the Saxons and their gods, much of it derived from Verstegan. His competence in dealing with medieval history, post-Conquest, is exceptional. He has assimilated the contents of so many chronicles, knows the political currents flowing though the reigns and the personalities associated with them, and always he attaches history to place. Camden had little to say about the history of Christianity in Britannia. It was not part of his agenda, which was spacious enough already. He was a topographer first, and then a historian. As an example, see how he approaches Salisbury. The ruins of Old Sarum on its nearby hill first catch his eye. He describes the remains and the fortifications, and relates the site to the Roman settlement of Sorbiodunum. He then descends to modern Salisbury, briefly remarks the cathedral, which he notes was built in forty years and is ‘augustissimum’ and ‘speciosa’—magnificent and handsome. A short tour of the market town is followed by a long history of the Earls of Salisbury. He mentions the Saxon foundation of a monastery at neighbouring Wilton, but does not stop to investigate. Camden does not wish to engage with monasteries, for they were too hot a topic in the s to be discussed, evoking much hostility or nostalgia. Generally, Camden avoids religious history as too contentious. He will leave religious history to others. By the s the project for a full ecclesiastical history of Britain that had seemed so timely an enterprise to Parker and his associates in the s and s had run into the ground. Parker’s energies had gone into supervising the translation of the Bishop’s Bible, which was published in , and ensuring the acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer in the parishes of England. Church administration sapped his scholarly energies. He died in , and the impetus to explore British and Saxon religious history died with him. But the new reign of a theologian king revived the idea of a grand ecclesiastical narrative that would enable a new generation to understand where the episcopal Church of England stood in the great scheme wherein human designs attempted to interpret God’s will. In King James convened the Hampton Court Conference to try to settle the direction and the doctrines of his Church. He commissioned a new translation of the Bible that would recover as accurately as possible the
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meaning of the scriptures from their original languages. Once again the time seemed right for a study of the essential principles of a reformed religion that aspired to an integrity close to that of primitive Christianity.⁸ There was no shortage of scholars worthy of the undertaking. William Camden, John Selden, Henry Spelman, Henry Savile, Lancelot Andrewes, James Ussher, and Robert Cotton could all be engaged. The scale of the project was however too great, and no one was willing to take the lead. Sir Robert Cotton, the friend and former pupil of Camden, who had assembled the finest library of manuscripts in the country at his house in Westminster, was tempted by the prospect, for no nobler use could be imagined for his collections, but he was not a man for epic research. Eyes turned to James Ussher, the Irish scholar and controversialist who was prodigiously learned in ecclesiastical history. From his undergraduate years he had devoted himself to this study, and he had formed a minute knowledge of the history, theology, liturgy, and canons of the early Church. Such knowledge was held to be indispensable to judgements about the approximation of contemporary religious practice to that of primitive Christianity. The prospect of surveying the whole progression of the faith over thirteen hundred centuries was the kind of challenge that Ussher relished. He became a master of the grand scheme. Ultimately, his most renowned book would be his universal chronology, The Annals of the World deduced from the Origin of Time (). Ussher committed himself to investigate to the utmost degree the records of the early Church in Britain, and in this enterprise he received the backing of King James, who always supported the ideal of a learned clergy. In the King wrote to the Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland to inform them that he had granted Ussher indefinite leave of absence from his Irish bishopric to pursue his research. The King had chosen ‘to employ him in collecting the Antiquities of the British Church before and since the Christian faith was received by the English nation . . . which being published might tend to the furtherance of religion and good learning’.⁹ Ussher published several impressive volumes, beginning with A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Irish and British (, reprinted ). He was a great delver into church records and was able to bring forward much hitherto unknown material from Irish manuscripts. He declared ‘that the religion of the ancient Irish differed little or nothing from that which was maintained by their neighbours the Britons’. He drew a picture of a church using the holy scriptures in an almost uncontaminated form, adhering to the doctrines concerning predestination, grace, mercy, faith, works, justification, and salvation that were close to the pronouncements of St Augustine of Hippo, the touchstone of orthodox theology. The liturgy used in the early Irish and British churches and the ways of celebrating communion were similar to the practice of the Church of England in the seventeenth century, he reported.
⁸ For this project of a British church history, see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton –: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁹ The letter is printed in C. R. Elrington, The Life of the Most Rev. James Ussher, D.D. (), –.
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Ussher’s supreme achievement as a church historian did not appear until , when he published Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates. It was written in Latin, partly to convey its message to a learned European audience, and partly because so much of its source material was in Latin. This was not only the fulfilment of King James’s desire to have a profoundly researched account of the antiquity and integrity of the British Church, but it was also the answer to Matthew Parker’s desire to produce a coherent history of the early Church in Britain that would show its apostolic origins separate from Rome, and its simplicity and purity in doctrine and worship that were in keeping with the primitive Christianity of the evangelical era. It was a work that could be held up against the Catholic polemicists, who were so busy in Elizabethan and Stuart times, to show that the reformed Church of England was in most important respects the inheritor of the early Church in these islands. Ussher had access to a much greater range of documents and sources than Parker and his circle, and he had a much finer historical sense.¹⁰ He had an unprecedented understanding of the capillary progress of Christianity through Britain, thanks to his intensive study of the Celtic Church. He provides a wealth of documentary detail about the growth of the Church and its organization in mainland Britain. The fables relating to the first contact with the Gospel he carefully sifts, inclining to an acceptance of Joseph of Arimathea’s mission shortly after the death of Christ, and accepting as genuine the story of King Lucius’s conversion in the later second century. This last story recurred in most accounts of early Christianity in Britain as an indication of the eagerness of British rulers to hear of the new faith. Ussher believes that by the time of Constantine the Church was broadly networked across Britain. He applies his scholarship to determine how the episcopal sees were formed in Britain, and, from the record of Church councils, gives the fullest account yet made of the bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries. He devotes several chapters to the spread of the Pelagian heresy in Britain—Pelagius was a fourth-century British Christian based in Rome who argued that man’s free will contributed to salvation separately from the assistance of divine grace—but shows how the British Church successfully freed itself from this heresy.¹¹ This resounding vindication of the British Church was naturally dedicated to King Charles as the Supreme Governor of the Church, but the confident picture presented by this book would soon be smashed by the outbreak of civil war and the dissolution of the Church of England from onwards. Ussher was much aided in his research by Sir Henry Spelman, a lawyer and member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries who had enquired deeply into the ancient ¹⁰ Ussher was able to use various manuscripts of Gildas and Columbanus from the sixth century, Adamnanus from the seventh and Sedulius Scotus from the ninth century, as well as many early Celtic saints’ lives and the Letters of St Patrick. In he published an invaluable collection of documents relating to the early Irish Church which he had discovered, under the title of Veterum Epistolarum Hibernicarum Sylloge. ¹¹ For a fuller account of Ussher’s writings on church history, see Parry, Trophies of Time, –. Pelagianism had had certain beliefs in common with the Arminian doctrines that were spreading in England in the s and s and that were opposed by Ussher.
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privileges and entitlements of the Church such as tithes and sanctity of church lands. He was concerned to clarify the body of canon law that appertained to the Church of England. Canon law is made in the councils of the Church, so he conceived the plan of documenting all the councils that had been held in Britain since the earliest days of Christianity and all the councils of the Church catholic and universal that British representatives had attended.¹² Drawing on recent continental publications, notably the Annales Ecclesiastici ( vols, –) of the Roman scholar Cesare Baronius, and the Generalia Concilia of Severinus Bini () he detailed how the British and then the Saxon churches had engaged in European councils and absorbed doctrine and discipline from them. The most significant parts of Spelman’s Concilia () are the records and canons of the synods of the Saxon kings from Alfred onwards, Athelstan, Edmund, Edgar, Ethelred, and Edward the Confessor, which he prints in Anglo-Saxon and Latin. Here was the legal and doctrinal underpinning of the Saxon Church which, Spelman argues, was part of the inheritance of the Church of England in the seventeenth century. The contents of the Concilia (which concluded with the acts of Edward the Confessor) helped to root the Church of England more firmly in antiquity, and justified the hierarchy and spiritual discipline of the Church from ancient precedents. The extent to which the modern Church was bound by decrees from the old Church was left open, as a matter for divines and ecclesiastical lawyers to resolve. While high scholarship such as Spelman’s and Ussher’s might fill the Stuart intelligentsia with admiration and delight, and helped to concentrate minds on the religious life of the early centuries, it had no impact on the beliefs of ordinary people. But within the Church of England, beginning around , a movement was developing that would oblige English men and women to think hard about the way they worshipped and about the nature of reformed worship and its relation to pre-Reformation practices. This movement concentrated on enhancing the ceremonies associated with worship, for its leaders believed that the services of the established church were insufficiently reverent, and all too often they took place in churches that were not fit for the worship of God. A loosely allied group of churchmen came to believe that the virtue of the sacrament of the eucharist, or holy communion, was undervalued in the Church of England. In most parish churches it was celebrated only three or four times a year. For these churchmen, partaking of the sacrament was essential to the process of salvation; it was a vital component of worship, more important than the sermon that expounded the text of the scriptures. The celebration of communion should be at the centre of worship, and it should be performed reverently and formally. The Elizabethan communion table that could be brought out into the choir or nave when required was thought to be too casual and informal. It would be better to have a fixed table, at the east end of the church, perhaps railed off and raised up, and if one called the table an altar, perhaps that term bestowed greater dignity and respect on the place where Christ’s sacrifice was commemorated. The site of the altar, within the chancel, should
¹² For a review of Spelman’s work as an ecclesiastical historian, see Parry, Trophies of Time, –.
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be considered more sacred than the rest of the church, and so the chancel might be more richly decorated to acknowledge this special degree of holiness. The church overall, as the place where God is worshipped, should be made decent and beautiful. So many churches had become dilapidated and decayed in Elizabethan times that a vast amount of renovation needed to be undertaken. The men who drove this movement forward were a group of prominent bishops, Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Neile, John Overall, Bishop of Lichfield, John Buckeridge, William Laud, and Matthew Wren, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and John Cosin, a canon of Durham. All were learned men, and all shared the belief that the Reformation in England had been too severe. There were many features of pre-Reformation worship that were not doctrinally unacceptable, that might have been retained. A more ceremonious conduct of services, for example, a fuller liturgy, richer and more varied vestments—copes for bishops—candles and a cross on the altar, and embroidered cloths to dignify the altar. Musical settings of sacred texts could be allowed. In the furnishing of the church, painted glass windows with biblical scenes could be justified as an aid to devotion, and carving too might be acceptable. The Calvinist rejection of images, in line with the Second Commandment, may have been over-zealous, for the arts could stir up and intensify devotion, and add beauty to reverence. The decoration of the Temple at Jerusalem showed clearly that the arts could be used in the service of religion. So a more sympathetic attitude to late medieval worship prevailed in this movement, which we today would term a High Church movement.¹³ Its development proved extremely divisive, for the majority of Englishmen, who liked their Protestantism plain, saw it as a reintroduction of popery and a betrayal of the principles of the Reformation. A striking example of a return to a late medieval mode of worship was the publication in of John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions or The Houres of Prayer. Cosin made it clear that he wished to restore the old canonical hours into the pattern of English worship; his book caused outrage amongst Puritan critics, headed by William Prynne, who denounced the work as a reappearance of the Catholic breviary. There were prayers for the dead, prayers of confession, and preparatives to absolution, all excluded from the repertoire of Church of England prayers hitherto. Cosin insisted that he was returning to ‘the practice of the Ancient Church’, but his scheme of prayer was an acknowledgement that the medieval books of hours provided a pattern for private devotion that could be rewardingly employed by Anglicans. In Protestant spirits were again agitated by the publication of The Female Glory by Anthony Stafford, a gentleman of High Church principles, in praise of ‘our Blessed Lady, the Holy Virgin Mary’, a work which proclaimed the spiritual benefits to be gained by the contemplation of the life and death of Mary. In this book, Stafford also approves the institution of ¹³ For recent accounts of the Laudian movement, see Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Worship – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) and Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ).
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nunneries for devout women, and recommends the use of prayer-beads as an aid to devotion. The further one got away from the Reformation decades, the more prejudices against the practices and vestiges of Catholicism lessened, at least among the well-educated. Camden had felt unable to write about monasteries, because they aroused resentful feelings and because so many English gentlemen who owned land and buildings that had formerly been monastic property did not wish to be reminded of these origins. It fell to a trio of English Benedictine monks in France and the Low Countries to compile the first great collection of English monastic documents, printed at Douai in under the title Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia.¹⁴ The s saw the beginnings of monastic history by Protestant scholars, as Roger Dodsworth, the Yorkshire antiquary, started to make collections of monastic records with the immensely ambitious intent of documenting the growth of religious houses in England. His patron was Sir Thomas Fairfax of Nun Appleton near York, who would later become the commander of the Parliamentary armies in the Civil War. The fact that he lived in a house built on the site of a nunnery may have inclined him to support the project, but as an antiquary himself, Fairfax had a dispassionate curiosity about an institution that had been such a prominent feature of medieval England. Dodsworth benefited from the collaboration of William Dugdale, the Warwickshire antiquary, who was able to bring his organizational skills to Dodsworth’s voluminous collections and bring the work to the press after the latter died in . Monasticon Anglicanum (vol. i , vol. ii , vol. iii ) provided the groundwork for all subsequent study of this field. By the printing of charters and donations it enabled scholars to understand the extensive role played by monasteries in medieval society by means of their vast landholdings and economic activities; their devotional function was less examined. Dugdale’s friend the scholar and politician Sir Roger Twysden also began to take an interest in monastic history in the s, though only slender remains of his researches now survive. Twysden also contributed much to the restoration of medieval history by the publication of ten minor chronicles in under the title of Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem.¹⁵ Although the Monasticon was illustrated with many fine engravings, amongst which those by Wenceslas Hollar were particularly accurate in their depiction of Norman and Gothic architecture, Dugdale never pays any attention to the style or decoration of a building. This indifference to the style, craftsmanship, and beauty of medieval architecture was shared by all antiquaries. The vocabulary for discrimination and appreciation did not yet exist. When positive responses needed to be expressed, words like ¹⁴ These three monks were Augustine Baker, Leander Jones, and Clement Reyner. Reyner is generally regarded as the editor of the volume. See M. D. Knowles’s contribution to Levi Fox (ed.), English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ¹⁵ Twysden’s fragment The Beginners of a Monastick Life was published by Edmund Gibson at the end of his edition of Sir Henry Spelman’s History and Fate of Sacrilege (). Amongst the historians that Twysden put into print in Scriptores Decem were Ailred of Rievaulx, Simeon of Durham, and Gervase of Canterbury.
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‘fair’, ‘fine’, or ‘noble’ were used. The first truly observant remarks about medieval architecture would seem to be those made by William Somner in his Antiquities of Canterbury (). Somner (–) held a number of administrative posts associated with Canterbury Cathedral, where he was patronized by Archbishop Laud, to whom the Antiquities is dedicated. Half of the book is devoted to the city of Canterbury, the rest to the cathedral, which he considers to ‘exceed most of the Realm, if not all, in beauty, stateliness and magnificence of building’. Somner guides the reader reverently round the interior, looking into the many chapels and explaining their function in the medieval times. As a specimen of his observation, he remarks when he ascends the steps to the apse, ‘I hold [this part] to be somewhat less ancient than the quire and its undercroft: the ocular and peaked or pointed form of the arch, the round marble pillars or columns both above and below . . . showing a manifest discrepancy and difference one from the other’.¹⁶ He provides a ‘history of the fabrick’ using the cathedral archives and his own perceptions. Most enterprisingly, he tells his reader ‘I shall desire you would take notice of the Windows, especially in the Church’s upper part, which both for the Glass and Iron-work thereof are well worthy your observation’.¹⁷ He then records the subject of every window and the Latin verses that explain the parallelisms between the Old and New Testament scenes. Somner’s Antiquities offers an unprecedented way of looking at a medieval church: historically knowledgeable, articulate, appreciative, and contextual. Besides his accomplishments as a medievalist, William Somner was also the leading Anglo-Saxonist of his generation. He was appointed to the Readership in Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge that had been founded by Sir Henry Spelman in after its first holder, Abraham Wheelock, died in . Somner brought to completion the great project that had occupied him for many years, his great Dictionarium Saxonico-Anglicum that was published in folio in , which provided the first comprehensive explanation of the vocabulary, with specimen phrases and Latin and English equivalents. After the lexicon, Somner printed the Anglo-Saxon Grammar by Aelfric the early eleventhcentury grammarian as a way of communicating the structure of the language. This truly monumental work of scholarship finally established Anglo-Saxon studies on a firm foundation, now accessible to any determined aspirant. It might be appropriate to end this chapter, which has sketched the rise of AngloSaxon studies in connection with the early history of the Church and the beginnings of a serious approach to the medieval centuries of triumphant Catholicism, by drawing ¹⁶ William Somner, The Antiquities of Canterbury, nd edn (, repr. ), . Somner’s attempts at assigning medieval architectural styles to reigns precede John Aubrey’s more detailed efforts by some thirty years. Aubrey probably compiled his ‘Chronologia Architectonica’ in the early s, but never published his scheme. ¹⁷ Somner, Antiquities, . A similar enterprise in studying a medieval cathedral in the context of its history and with an eye to its architecture and to the programme of its stained glass was undertaken by Symon Gunton in the late s, but his account was not published until , as The History of the Church of Peterburgh. Both Somner and Gunton, incidentally, show a lively interest in monastic history in their works.
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attention to two books of similar title but of opposing ideologies that appeared just after the mid-century. Both were very large folios. One was Thomas Fuller’s The ChurchHistory of Britain (), the other was Serenus Cressy’s The Church-History of Brittany (). Fuller (who was a good friend of Somner) was a middle-of-the-road clergyman who retained his post as parson at Waltham Abbey in Essex during the Commonwealth. A scholar with a popular touch, he chose to write a full church history from the beginnings of Christianity in Britain until the death of Charles I. He produced a coherent narrative written from the standpoint of a patriotic Protestant. It is overcredulous about origins, well-informed about the Saxon Church, deeply prejudiced against Rome in the Middle Ages, and dense with detail about the Reformation. In composing it, as one can see from his marginal references, he was able to draw on a rich accumulation of historical scholarship published since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The names of Camden, Lambarde, Verstegan, Selden, and Weever recur with some frequency. Spelman’s Concilia is used as an indispensable source of information about Church councils and canons, while Ussher’s book on the Antiquities of the British Church serves as a guide across the early centuries. Bede is sensibly used as the principal interpreter of the Saxon Church, often with the help of Fuller’s friend Abraham Wheelock whose edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in Latin, Saxon and English had been published in .¹⁸ Many medieval chronicles were now in print to provide a bridge from Saxon to Norman times, and then through to Tudor times. From the Reformation onwards there is an abundance of material. Fuller keeps to the apostolic origins of the faith via Joseph of Arimathea and praises the purity of belief in the British Church. He ingeniously navigates the difficulty presented by the fact that the revered Bede sided with the Roman strain of Christianity introduced from the south of England by Augustine’s mission. Bede indicated that Saxon England came under papal rule, but Fuller suggests that the native British tradition of faith retained a distinctness from Rome for several centuries after Augustine. In particular, Fuller believed that the eremitic and monastic practices that were such a distinctive feature of the British Church derived primarily from Egyptian and Syrian models.¹⁹ His presentation of the high medieval phase is deeply coloured by anti-papal prejudice, and he asserts that only with Wycliffe does the light of true faith shine again. All in all, it is a creditable history, one that testifies how vast fields of knowledge about Saxon and medieval England have been cultivated by the development of specialized scholarship. Serenus Cressy (–) began life as Hugh Cressy who after his time as a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, became a chaplain to Thomas Wentworth and then to Lord Falkland. With the ruin of the Church of England in the Civil War, he left England, converted to Catholicism in Rome, then became a Benedictine monk at the English College at Douai, changing his name to Serenus Cressy. He joined a mission to England, and became a priest in the household of Queen Catherine of Braganza at ¹⁸ Wheelock had also published the first edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Chronologia AngloSaxonica (Cambridge, ). ¹⁹ Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain (), .
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Somerset House in London.²⁰ His thousand-page volume advances only to the end of the Saxon era. He used much the same source materials as Fuller, but wrote entirely as a confessed Catholic. Because of this, his book was printed in Rouen, thus avoiding the need for the English censor’s imprimatur, but sold in England. In his opinion, the Celtic Church of the Britons had benefited immeasurably from grafting itself onto the Roman stock introduced by Augustine. This was a case of one apostolic church merging with another, and being strengthened as a result. Cressy praised the pagan Saxons’ willingness to convert to the new faith, and approved and admired their enthusiasm for the monastic life. Especially is he impressed by the number of noblemen and women who sought the devotional life, rejecting the advantages of their high station. As Fuller had leavened his long narrative with many pleasant anecdotes, so Cressy gratifies his readers with many—too many—stories of miracles performed by British and Saxon saints or by their relics. His book is full of saints’ lives, and their miracles testify to the constant workings of divinity among the Saxons. Cressy was able to introduce a good deal of information from continental writings in the library at Douai. Religious history is intertwined with secular history, so The Church-History of Brittany was quite the fullest account of Saxon England when it was published. Fuller was persuaded that a deep current of gospel Christianity runs from the first century to the Conquest, gradually diluting as time passes. That original purity of faith was only restored by a new army of Protestant saints and martyrs in Tudor times. Cressy convinced himself that apostolic Christianity was reinvigorated by a gradual submission to Rome in the seventh century and was gloriously incorporated into the true Church that flourished in ‘Brittany’ until it was subverted by the heresies of the Reformation. Both these church histories were written in an age of bitter polemic when Catholic and Protestant apologists contended to prove their church the receptacle of the true faith. The fact that two large scholarly histories using similar source materials could come to opposing conclusions might suggest to the modern onlooker the vanity of all scholarly endeavour.
S Brackmann, Rebecca, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Lawrence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ). Fincham, Kenneth, and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Worship – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Fox, Levi (ed.), English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Graham, Timothy, and Andrew G. Watson (eds), The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
²⁰ A sketch of Cressy’s career is given by Anthony Wood in Athenae Oxonienses, ii (Oxford, ), cols –. Cressy wrote a life of Augustine Baker, one of the compilers of the Apostolatus (see n. ).
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Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). McKisack, May, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Parry, Graham, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Parry, Graham, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ). Sharpe, Kevin, Sir Robert Cotton –: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
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E though medievalism was only identified as a style and code of values in the mid-nineteenth century, appeals to an idea of the Middle Ages can be found as soon as writers and thinkers detected a critical distance between themselves and the medieval period. During the religious and political upheavals of the English Civil War period of the middle decades of the seventeenth century, when all orthodox ideas about nation, government, and belief came into question, the Diggers were among the groups finding inspiration in the Middle Ages as they sought for models for restructuring society. A general assumption among these groups is that social degree is a product of humanity’s fallen nature, rather than part of God’s plan. Rejecting the concept of the Divine Right of Kings, they argue instead for universal human rights. Such a claim does not require a historical precedent beyond the biblical story of the Fall, yet the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical reformist groups frequently appeal to English history, suggesting that the Norman Conquest is England’s own ‘fall’ from a more equitable political and economic system, and that documents such as Magna Carta mark the people’s efforts to reclaim those rights.
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.................................................................................................................................. As Christopher Hill argued in his seminal essay ‘The Norman Yoke’, this idea of the Middle Ages survived in the radical reformist tradition into the nineteenth century and can be found in the medievalism of William Blake, William Morris, and many others.¹ The theory of the Norman yoke influenced social and racial theory in the nineteenth ¹ See Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’ (). Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, , repr. ), –.
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century, so that even works suggesting class reconciliation rather than revolution, such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe () and Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, Or, The Two Nations (), construct oppositions between the ruling Normans and their descendants and the descendants of the Saxons who are obliged to work for them. For example, early in Ivanhoe, set long after the Norman Conquest at the end of the twelfth century, Wamba the Jester points out that ‘swine is good Saxon’ but ‘pork’ is ‘good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles’.² Similarly, in Sybil, the novel represents the Saxons under the Norman yoke continuing in Victorian Britain through ‘two nations’ of ‘the RICH and the POOR’, who are ‘formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws’.³ The focus here, though, is on political movements and works of art that attempt to redress these imbalances through the Digger tradition of communal ownership emerging in the era of the English Civil War period. The medievalism of the seventeenth century did not, of course, imply an uncritical acceptance of the style and values of the Middle Ages. For most of these thinkers, the period between the Norman Conquest and the English Reformation was dominated by Roman Catholicism, monarchical law, and oppression of the poor. They were hence highly selective in drawing precedents from medieval history, focusing largely on preNorman rights inscribed—or, according to most interpreters, reinscribed—in Magna Carta. The difficulty in determining what the Diggers knew about history is a result of the practice of their foremost writer Gerrard Winstanley, who only explicitly acknowledges the Bible as a written authority.⁴ Yet the Diggers certainly drew on the interpretive tradition of other radical-reformist groups emerging at a time of new thinking about the nature of government, especially the Levellers; indeed, an alternate title to Winstanley’s tract A Declaration to the Powers of England is The True Levellers Standard Advanced.⁵ While the Diggers made a special contribution to medievalism, their historical thinking makes assumptions either drawn from Leveller writers such as John Lilburne or from a common source. The Levellers’ history of England therefore provides a starting point for understanding the Digger perspective. The Levellers earned their name for arguing for equality under the law. Although they were not a cohesive group like the Diggers, John Lilburne (c.–) had emerged as a leader for the Levellers by . That year John Hare published St Edward’s Ghost: Or, Anti-Normanisme: Being a Patheticall Complaint and Motion in the Behalfe of Our English Nation Against Her Grand (yet Neglected) Grievance, ² Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (; Oxford: World’s Classics, ), . ³ Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil; Or, The Two Nations (; London: Penguin, ), . ⁴ In the introduction to their outstanding edition of The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein point out that, in early life, Winstanley very likely had access to books other than the Bible (i. ). ⁵ For the bibliographical history see Works of Winstanley, ed. Corns et al., ii. . Subsequent quotations follow this edition.
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Normanisme, although he had composed it some years earlier.⁶ Following the antiquarian Richard Verstegan, Hare argues for the Teutonic origins of the English and hence describes Edward the Confessor as ‘the last rightfull English king’ (). If, he argues, the English are an occupied and enslaved people like the Greeks under the Turks, will any reasonable man be so unjust? or any English man be so impious as to define it for unlawfull in us, to endeavour to recover our Right and lost honour and Libertie? would any man be so absurd as to stigmatize and detest it for rebellion, in the Greekes to shake off (if they were able) the Turkish Yoake, and to recover from that enimies usurpation their ancient honour, Lawes, Libertie, and Language that now ly overwhelmed and buried in Turcisme as ours in Normanisme? ()
Hare maintains that the kingly line should be derived from the Saxons; that the heirs of William the Conqueror’s army should surrender their titles and possessions; that law should be in English or Latin (not French); and that the English language itself should be ‘be cleared of the Normane and French invasion upon it, and depravation of it, by purging it of all words and termes of that descent, supplying it from the old Saxon and the learned tongues’ (). Although their argument was not so explicitly racial, the Levellers similarly characterized the monarchy as the heirs of Norman oppression. Lilburne had been imprisoned for helping the anti-episcopal cause in –, and although Oliver Cromwell assisted with his release and he fought for the Parliament party in the Civil War, he later distanced himself from the Presbyterians, advocating instead a complete restructuring of society. Even then, Lilburne supplemented his claims for natural rights by repeatedly appealing to English history. The subtitle of Regall Tyrannie Discovered, composed while Lilburne was again imprisoned in , is ‘A DISCOURSE, shewing that all lawfull (approbational) instituted power by GOD amongst men, is by common agreement, and mutual consent.’⁷ Yet while the title suggests natural right, the sentences that follow suggest historicized rights; his subject is also The Tyrannie of the Kings of England, from the dayes of William the Invader and Robber, and Tyrant, alias the Conqueror, to this present King Charles, Who is plainly proved to be worse, and more tyrannicall then any of his Predecessors, and deserves a more severe punishment from the hands of this present Parliament, then either of the dethroned Kings, Edw. . [or] Rich. . had from former Parliaments (title-page)
Having mentioned the deposed kings Richard II and Edward II, Lilburne reveals even more awareness of medieval history. Of William the Conqueror he says, ⁶ John Hare, Saint Edward’s Ghost, or Anti-Normanisme: being a patheticall complaint and motion in the behalfe of our English nation against her grand (yet neglected) grievance, Normanisme (London, ). ⁷ [John Lilburne], Regall Tyrannie Discovered (London, ). Lilburne’s authorship of some works is conjectural.
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. History makes it clear, that WILLIAM THE CONQVEROVR, OR TYRANT, being a Bastard, subdued this Kingdome by force of Armes. . . . And having gained the Country, he ruled it by his sword, as an absolute Conqueror, professing that he was beholding to none for his Kingdome, but God and his sword, making his power as wide as his will (just Tyrant like) giving away the Lands of their Nobles to his Normans, laying unwonted taxes, and heavie subsidies upon the Commons, insomuch, that many of them; to enjoy a barren liberty, forsook their fruitfull inheritance, and with their wives and children as out-lawes, lived in woods, preferring that naked name of freedome, before a sufficient maintenance possest under the thraldome of a Conquerar . . . For whereas the causes of the Kingdome were before determined in every Shire, And by a Law of King Edward Segier, all matters in question should, upon speciall penalty, without further deferment, be finally decided in the Gemote, or Conventions held monethly in every Hundred: Now he ordained· That four times in the yeare for certain dayes, the same businesse should be determined, in such place as he would appoint, where he constituted Judges, to that purpose, and others from whom as from the bosom of the Prince all litigators should have justice. And to make them as miserable, as slaves could be made, He ordered that the Laws should be practised in French, and Petitions, and businesses of Court in French, that so the poor miserable people might be gulled, and cheated, undone and destroyed; not onely at his will and pleasure, but also at the will and pleasure of his under Tyrants and Officers. ()
This passage, derived from Samuel Daniel’s history of England published in the early s, contains many of the ideas about English law later adopted by the Diggers. First, William conquered the land and distributed it to his followers. The English were driven out from the land, suffered heavy taxation, and in some cases chose to become outlaws rather than slaves. The law had previously been administered by regular gatherings of the people but was now replaced by judges presiding over quarter sessions. The law was also practised in French, so poor people could not understand it and had to rely on lawyers to handle legal matters. All of William’s policies remove agency from the people as a whole and place it in the hands of royal appointees and legal professionals. Lilburne follows this with an overview of medieval history, his main source being Daniel, although he also quotes Sir Edward Coke’s commentaries on English law.⁸ He describes John and his son Henry III as seeming like ‘Monsters rather then men, Roaring Lions, Ravening Wolves, and salvadge Boares (studying how to destroy and ruine the people) rather then Magistrates to govern the people with justice and equity’. John was nevertheless forced to concede to ‘the GREAT CHARTER, made to keep the Beame right betwixt SOVERAIGNTY and SUBJECTION’ (), a phrase directly quoted from Daniel.⁹ Also following Daniel, Lilburne suggests that the English Middle Ages did have a good king, in the person of Edward I, who ratified Magna Carta and agreed to uphold its principles. Even then, Lilburne believes that laws before the Conquest were better. Concluding his ‘true relation, of the begetting, the conception, and birth of Magna Charta, The English-Mans Inheritance’, he states in his most direct reference to the Norman yoke: ⁸ In The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, Coke had pointed out that William the Conqueror was not the originator of English law. ⁹ See Samuel Daniel, The Collection of the Historie of England (London, ), .
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yet alas, in my judgment, it falls far short of Edward the Confessors Laws, (for the ease, good, and quiet of the people) which the Conqueror robbed England of, for the Norman practises yet in Westminster-Hall, by reason of their tediousnesse, ambiguities, uncertainties, the entries in Latine, which is not our own Tongue, their forcing men to plead by Lawyers, and not permitting themselves to plead their own causes, their compelling of persons to come from all places of the Kingdom, to seek for Justice at Westminster, is such an Iron Norman yoak with fangs and teeth in it . . . That if we were free in every particular else, that our hearts can think of; yet . . . were we slaves, by this alone, the burthen of which singly will pierce, & gaul our shoulders, & make us bow, & stoop even down to the ground, ready to be made a prey, not only by great men, but even by every cunning sharking knave. ()
In a work also composed in Newgate Prison in February , The Out-crye of the Oppressed Commons, Lilburne asserts that his rights under Magna Carta are being violated; he seems to have had direct access to the text of the charter. The House of Lords has assumed the authority to judge and commit us who are Commoners, which by law they have no authority not in the least to doe, as appeares in the twenty ninth Chapter of Magna Charta, which expresly saith, ‘No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his free-hold, or liberties, or free customes, or be out-lawed, or exiled, or any otherwise distroyed, nor we will not passe upon him, nor condemne him, but by lawfull judgement of his Peers, or by the law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny nor deferre to any man either justice or right.’ ()
Lilburne quotes Sir Edward Coke’s commentaries on English law to prove that law should be administered by commoners, not by lords. Finally, the very title of The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived, Asserted, and Vindicated (June ) emphasizes that historic legal rights need to be ‘revived’, not created. The Diggers were thus able to draw on a tradition that appealed to pre-Conquest English rights and that represented Magna Carta and other later concessions from the Crown as attempts to revive those rights. To the Levellers’ claims for medieval political rights, however, they added an economic theory—again not simply ideal, but grounded in medieval history, which seemed to them to justify a claim to common land.
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.................................................................................................................................. The Diggers were more declaredly a movement than the Levellers. Whereas the title ‘Levellers’ was applied by enemies and Lilburne uses the term with caution,¹⁰ ¹⁰ In A Whip for the present House of Lords OR The Levellers Levelled (), Lilburne confirms that he identifies with the ‘desire that all alike may be Levelled to, and bound by the Law’ (p. ). This would imply that he does not see the Levellers as a movement, but hopes that he is one of many like-thinking citizens who desire political equality under the law.
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the Diggers were willing to self-identify by the label that described what they did. The Diggers’ main goal was to farm common land, providing food for the community and avoiding the oppression of private ownership. The movement was always small, but William Everard seems to have led the initial digging at George’s-Hill in Surrey. Gerrard Winstanley, however, soon took on the role as voice and leader of the movement. Winstanley’s writings consistently quote the Bible, but unlike Lilburne he does not explain the sources of his historical knowledge. As Thomas Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein have pointed out in their edition of his writings (ii. ), Winstanley had a connection to John Lilburne through the Quaker John Fielder; both of them wrote in his defence in Fielder’s publication The Humble Petition and Appeal of John Fielder of Kingston Miller, to the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England (). With no record of his reading we cannot be sure how Winstanley knew about medieval history but his implied understanding of the Norman Conquest closely follows the version that Lilburne describes: namely, that after conquering England William gave the land to his Norman followers, and that laws were written in French to the disadvantage of the English people. Corns, Hughes, and Loewenstein observe that Winstanley’s ideas vary ‘with time and context’; around the time of the execution of Charles I in and the Diggers’ work to farm common ground at George’s-Hill in Surrey, his thought was evolving rapidly. Winstanley soon realised that Parliament’s victory did not change ideas of private property ownership and that the Diggers would have to continue to struggle for the right to farm common land. In contrast with Lilburne, Winstanley hence focuses more directly on issues of property than on systems of government. According to Winstanley, however, the problem of property ownership began at the Fall. He emphasizes that once ‘Adam’ (humanity) had fallen from Paradise, the desire for ownership and domination replaced the ‘evennesse’ () of God’s original creation, so that The first Adam is the wisdom and power of flesh broke out and sate down in the chair of rule and dominion, in one part of man-kind over another. And this is the beginner of particular interest, buying and selling the earth from one particular hand to another, saying, This is mine, upholding this particular propriety by a law of government of his own making, and thereby restraining other fellow creatures from seeking nourishment from their mother earth. So that though a man was bred up in a Land, yet he must not worke for himself where he would sit down. But from Adam; that is, for such a one that had bought part of the Land, or came to it by inheritance of his deceased parents, and called it his own Land: So that he that had no Land, was to work for those for small wages, that called the () Land theirs; and thereby some are lifted up into the chair of tyranny, and others trod under the foot-stool of misery, as if the earth were made for a few, not for all men. (Works, i. –)
The earth is for Winstanley a ‘common treasury’: for example, in A Declaration to the Powers of England, he explains:
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. In the beginning of time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the Lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another.
Yet here as in a number of Winstanley’s writings there seems to be a second ‘fall’, mirroring the first, namely, the property laws put in place by William the Conqueror. His first point marks the beginning of time, but by the fourth he has reached the Norman Conquest: And the last inslaving Conquest which the enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England; and from that time Kings, Lords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and the violent bitter people that are Freeholders, are and have been successively. The Norman Bastard, William himself, his Colonels, Captains, inferior Officers, and common Souldiers, who are still from that time to this day in pursuit of that Victory, imprisoning, robbing and killing the poore inslaved English Israelites. (ii. )
Even his choice of biblical examples frequently serves as a typological expression of the Norman Conquest and domination by conquerors. He often refers to the bondage of the people of Israel in Egypt and under the Babylonians, and makes particular use of the stories of Cain and Abel and of Esau and Jacob and the question of birthright. Following the Bible, Winstanley assumes the right of the younger brother to occupy the land, characterizing Esau as the ‘man of the flesh’ and Jacob as guided by spirit; thus Esau becomes identified with the heirs of the Normans and Jacob with the ‘English’.¹¹ Thus in A Declaration to the Powers of England, he exclaims: ‘O thou A-dam, thou Esau, thou Cain, thou hypocriticall man of flesh, when wilt thou cease to kill thy younger brother?’ (ii. ). This idea of birthright is expanded upon in A Letter to the Lord Fairfax (), where he asks: Whether William the Conqueror became not to be King of England by conquest, turned the English out of their birthrights, burned divers townes, whereof thirty towns were burned by him in Windsore Forrest; by reason whereof all sorts of people suffered, and compelled the conquered English for necessity of livelihood to be servants to him and his Norman souldiers? . Whether King Charles was not successor to the Crown of England from William the Conqueror, and whether all Laws that have been made in every Kings Reign did
¹¹ This may seem counter-intuitive. In the Genesis story, Jacob tricks Esau out of his birthright, so the use of the word ‘birthright’ in the sense of who occupied the land first is an inexact parallel; presumably, Winstanley, like John Hare, sees the English as the equivalent of the chosen people and therefore typed by Jacob rather than Esau.
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. not confirm and strengthen the power of the Norman Conquest, and so did, and does still hold the Commons of England under slavery to the Kingly power, his Gentry and Clergie? (ii. )
This is perhaps the most explicit reference to what Winstanley knew about medieval history. In the most part, references to pre-Norman times are vague; unlike Lilburne and others of the time, he makes no mention of kings such as Edward the Confessor. Yet central to his beliefs is the assumption that, before William distributed it to his Norman army, common and waste land was available for the use of all people and so they were able to be free and independent rather than working for others. He follows Lilburne in blaming the Conquest for hierarchy, French laws, and quarter sessions, and adds that the Normans also introduced tithes: ‘William the Conqueror promised, That if the Clergie would preach him up, so that the people might be bewitched, so as to receive him to be Gods Anointed over them, he would give them the Tenths of the Lands increase yearly’ (ii. ). Beyond frequent references to the Norman Conquest and its legal consequences, the only English historical fact Winstanley explicitly mentions is Magna Carta, and even here his references are far fewer than among other reformist writers of his time. In An Appeal to the House of Commons, making a rare but vague reference to pre-Conquest English history, he draws a parallel with one of his favourite biblical examples, Israel’s captivity in Egypt: England, you know, hath been conquered and enslaved divers times, and the best Laws that England hath, (viz. Magna Charta) were got by our Forefathers importunate petitioning unto the Kings, that stil were their Task-masters; and yet these () best laws are yoaks and manicles, tying one sort of people to be slaves to another; Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom, but the common people stil are, and have been left servants to work for them, like the Israelites under the Egyptian Task masters. The last enslaving yoak that England groaned under, (and yet is not freed from) was the Norman, as you know; and since William the Conqueror came in, about six hundred years ago, all the Kings that stil succeeded, did confirm the old laws, or else make new ones, to uphold that Norman conquest over us; and the most favouring laws that we have, doth stil binde the hands of the enslaved English from enjoying the freedom of their creation. (–)
He also makes a passing reference to Magna Carta in his most developed vision of a new society, The Law of Freedom (). The work is addressed to Oliver Cromwell, and in the opening address, Winstanley refers to the late King Charles as the ‘Kingly Conqueror’—typologically, Charles and William of Normandy are one so that ‘whatsoever is recovered from the Conqueror, is recovered by a joint consent of the Commoners’ (ii. ). The Law of Freedom sets out a plan for running a community without buying and selling, and thus, according to Winstanley, with no need for lawyers (ii. –). While money might be needed for international trade, everyone
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within a community will work according to their capabilities, and families will be able to take what they need: ‘In every Town and City, shall be appointed Store-houses for flax, wool, lether, cloth, and for all such commodities, as come from beyond Seas, and these shall be called general Store-houses, from whence every particular family may fetch such commodities as they want’ (ii. ). Such a community will require ‘overseers’ chosen yearly (ii. ). While the elaborate description of how such a community would govern itself may seem utopian rather than medievalist, Winstanley’s main point is that the land lost to the Normans after the Conquest will be reclaimed by the English. The idea of annually elected officials is a commonplace in the radical reformist tradition and clearly echoes claims for the Saxon witanagemot’s annual gatherings. Winstanley never uses the term Saxon, however; central to his argument is that the ‘English’ people were enslaved by the invading ‘Normans’. There can be little doubt that the Diggers’ empowering version of medieval history helped win them some followers. In addition to Winstanley’s Digger community in Surrey, a number of other groups established colonies; John Gurney lists groups in Gloucestershire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, and Nottinghamshire.¹² Yet Winstanley’s repeated appeals to the medieval past failed to win him government support; bullied by local landowners, the Surrey Diggers were unable to maintain their vision of recreating England before the ‘Norman yoak’, and groups elsewhere encountered similar resistance to reclaiming the commons.
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.................................................................................................................................. Although the movement was so brief, the communal experiment ending before the Restoration of the monarchy in , some memory of the reformist principles of the Diggers and similar groups seems to have survived in the radical tradition at least until the turn of the nineteenth century, where the language of the ‘Norman yoke’ remains prominent. E. P. Thompson has gone so far as to argue that a direct influence is possible, since an enthusiastic antinomian such as William Blake could well have found the seventeenth-century texts in private collections or have read reprints of works by John Reeve, Ludowick Muggleton, and others.¹³ Even though we cannot be sure that Blake read the works of Gerrard Winstanley, the two visionaries share some interesting similarities in language and thought. For example, in A Declaration to the Powers of England (), Winstanley asks: what are all those binding and restraining Lawes, that have been made from one Age to another, since that [Norman] Conquest, and are still upheld by furie over the ¹² John Gurney, Gerrard Winstanley, The Digger’s Life and Legacy (London: Pluto Press, ), . ¹³ E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, ), –.
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. people? I say, what are they? But the cords, bands, manacles, and yokes that the inslaved English, like Newgate prisoners, wears upon their hands and legs as they walk the streets; by which those Norman Oppressors, and these their Successors from Age to Age, have inslaved the poore people by, killed their younger Brother, and would not suffer Jacob to arise. (ii. )
Blake’s ‘London’ begins with startlingly similar images of walking city streets under the mental enslavement of the law: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe In every cry of every Man In every Infants cry of fear In every voice, in every ban. The mind-forg’d manacles I hear . . . ¹⁴
This is the only use of the word ‘street’ in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the image of walking the streets is also relatively uncommon in Winstanley’s writings. Among those advocating radical political reform for Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appeals to medieval history are very common. Many of these politicians and authors could, of course, have drawn their own conclusions from a study of history and especially of sources available both to the Levellers and Diggers and to themselves, such as Coke’s commentaries on English law. The repeated returns to the touchstones of the Norman Conquest and Magna Carta, however, suggest that writers in the radical reformist tradition may have had some awareness of seventeenthcentury thought. Tom Paine, for example, represents the Norman Conquest as bringing in a code of oppressive laws that forced the English to try to claim back their rights.¹⁵ Although Paine insists that rights are natural rather than historical, the idea of reclaiming rights shares assumptions with Lilburne and Winstanley. Later in the century, some of the Chartists seem to have known about the writings of John Lilburne, and like the Levellers and Diggers, insisted that they were reclaiming rights rather than simply asserting a natural right to participate in government. The Chartist movement differed from the Diggers’ ideas in arguing that political equality would be the first step to social justice, but as their name suggests, their construction of a five-point ‘Charter’ echoes Magna Carta and, what is more, their insistence on annual Parliaments echoes Winstanley’s belief that official appointments should be made yearly. The image of the ¹⁴ William Blake, Songs of Experience (London, ). ¹⁵ Paine famously wrote in Common Sense, ‘When William the Conqueror subdued England, he gave them law at the point of the sword; and, until we consent that the seat of government in America be legally and authoritatively occupied, we shall be in danger of having it filled by some fortunate ruffian, who may treat us in the same manner, and then, where will be our freedom? Where our property?’
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Norman yoke is especially prevalent in the writings of the long-lived democrat Major John Cartwright. Again, we cannot be sure that Cartwright had direct access to Winstanley’s writings, but he agrees with Winstanley that annual elections are a way to ensure that government remains in the hands of the people as a whole since they ‘will always adhere to the true interests of the nation’.¹⁶ Annual parliaments are the central focus of Take your Choice! (). Again in the radical reformist tradition, Cartwright notes that the ‘all-wise creator . . . made men by nature equal, as well as free’ () but insists that ‘making our parliaments annual, and our representation equal, can neither of them, in any sense, nor without a direct falsehood, be stiled innovations. Both of them were the antient practice of the constitution’ (). His goal is therefore ‘restoring’ the constitution rather than creating one (). Although Take your Choice! does not show the almost obsessive admiration for the Saxons seen in Cartwright’s later writings, Cartwright praises ‘the immortal and blessed Alfred’ (p. xxiv) as the ‘best of all our kings except his present majesty’ [George III]. Even though, acknowledging the legal commentaries of his contemporary Sir William Blackstone, Cartwright knows somewhat more about pre-Norman English government than Winstanley did, key points in the preface to Take your Choice! seem very close to Winstanley’s thinking. For example, using Charles I as the embodiment of the post-Saxon monarchy, Cartwright laments that: ‘The prince will invade the people’s property, in order to enrich his minister; the minister will violate their liberties, in order to render his master absolute. For one Alfred there are a thousand Charles’ (p. xxv). Even more explicitly, he asks, ‘Are we not suffering from the distress and idleness of the poor, and from a visible depopulation; and do we not leave millions of acres uncultivated?’ (p. xvi). Cartwright is probably here referring to the practice of enclosing land to create vast grazing pastures that gave the impression that the rural population was declining, but landowners’ ability to claim rights over land depended on government approval, and Cartwright’s point is that if all men had a vote, the poor would not allow such injustices; perhaps they would even find ways to ‘cultivate’ the land in the Digger tradition. Echoes of the Diggers’ commitment to seeing the land as a ‘common treasury’ can also be found in the nineteenth century. In the French Revolutionary era, Thomas Spence advocated the return of property to the people: ‘Landed Property always was originally acquired, either by conquest or encroachment on the common Property of Mankind.’¹⁷ Like Winstanley, Spence frequently quotes the Bible to show how humanity departed from nature: for example, he observes: the earliest records show, that the earth was immediately ‘filled with violence,’ and that God-like reason was as much employed in the destruction and robbery of fellowcreatures, as in subduing the earth and the brute creation for a more comfortable ¹⁶ Major John Cartwright, Take your Choice! (London, ), p. xii. ¹⁷ Thomas Spence, The End of Oppression; Being a Dialogue between an Old Mechanic and a Young One (London, ).
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. subsistence: Thus in proportion as the comforts of life increased by man’s labour and ingenuity, so did the rapacity of men also increase to rob each other, and societies were as much formed for the sake of strength to plunder others, as for mutual defence. Well and truly then might it be said that ‘the wickedness of man was great in the earth,’ and that ‘all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.’¹⁸
Also like Winstanley, he believed that the end of a class collecting rent would ensure prosperity for all who were prepared to work, although Spence seems to have imagined this coming about not through the peaceful reclaiming of land but by a people’s rising similar to the directly contemporary French Revolution. In ‘democratic Parishes’ () there would be no opportunity for government to be oppressive. Spence is often characterized as an independent and original thinker but he himself acknowledged that he was drawing on an old tradition of rethinking government and property. He may not have known Winstanley’s works directly but in Pig’s Meat, a penny publication marketed to the poor in –, he frequently quotes James Harrington’s Oceana (), which in its description of a model commonwealth rejects the idea of hereditary rule brought in by the Norman Conquest, hence drawing on the Civil War era discourse on the Norman yoke. Like Winstanley, Spence envisions communal ownership of the land at a local level. While much of Pig’s Meat is quoted from other writers, Spence included some of his own verses that in characterizing the English workers as ‘once so free’ shows his medievalist influences. ‘The Downfall of Feudal Tyranny, Severely felt by the Moderns, under the System of Landlord and Tenant’, begins: That conquering blade, who did us invade Ev’n William the Norman by name, Among his proud band he divided our land, Nought leaving but slav’ry and shame . . . These plundering bands, thus strengthen’d by lands, For ages have rul’d us with awe, Whilst we once so free, now without property, From conqu’rors received the law . . . (iii. )
The refrain ‘my poor boys’ strengthens Spence’s identification with the victims of Norman tyranny. Indeed, during the wars against France, he went so far as to claim that the current landlords were worse than their Norman forebears: For they have got more completely into the spirit and power of oppression now than ever was known before, and they hold the people in defiance by means of their armed associations. They are now like a warlike enemy quartered upon us for the purpose of raising contributions, and William the Conqueror and his Normans were fools to them in the art of fleecing. ¹⁸ Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (London, ), ed. H. Dickinson http://www.ditext.com/spence/restorer.html, accessed June .
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Spence’s solution was hence not a piecemeal reclaiming like Winstanley’s, but the complete end of landed property. A later nineteenth-century vision of an ideal community also has many similarities with Winstanley’s. In News from Nowhere (), composed in the medieval form of a dream vision, William Morris shows his commitment not just to medieval politics and economics but also to style. When ‘William Guest’, a dreamer from the nineteenth century, finds himself in the peaceful, prosperous, and healthy England of the future, he asks how it is governed and receives the answer ‘the whole people is our parliament’.¹⁹ Like the Diggers, the English of the future see most law, and all lawyers, as serving to protect private property ownership. And like the Diggers’ and Spence’s ideal, the people and land are divided into ‘areas of management, a commune, or a ward, or a parish’ (). Potentially contentious issues are dealt with at ‘the next ordinary meeting of the neighbours, or Mote, as we call it, according to the ancient tongue of the times before bureaucracy’ (). ‘Guest’ has by this time already been given the items he wants in shops, and his informant Hammond now explains further, ‘The wares which we make are made because they are needed; men make for their neighbours’ use as if they were making for themselves, not for a vague market of which they know nothing’ (). This seems very similar to Winstanley’s idea of families taking what they need from storehouses in The Law of Freedom because ‘Commonwealths Government governs the Earth without buying and selling’ (ii. ). Morris’s combination of medievalism and communism clearly partakes of the Digger tradition, although as John Gurney has remarked, he shows no direct evidence of having read Winstanley’s works (Gerrard Winstanley, ). It does raise the question, though, of whether in his London reading Karl Marx himself came across Digger ideas. While Marx sees society as progressive and Winstanley is seeking to reverse the fall both of the nation and of humanity, their models for communal property ownership are startlingly similar. Gurney notes that following the Revolution the Russian Leninists acknowledged Winstanley as one of their forerunners (Gerrard Winstanley, ). Many later small-scale communes have also drawn inspiration from Digger writings. The Digger movement thus provides a significant bridge between the recreation of a vision of a historical medieval past and the dream of an earthly paradise.
S Chandler, Alice, A Dream of Order (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, ). Corns, Thomas N., Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (eds), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Gurney, John, Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy (London: Pluto Press, ).
¹⁹ William Morris, News from Nowhere and Selected Writings (London: Penguin, ), .
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.
Hill, Christopher, ‘The Norman Yoke’ (). Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, , repr. ), –. Simmons, Clare A., Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). Thompson, E. P., Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, ).
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E in the reign of Queen Victoria, the prominent printer Richard Taylor published a fresh edition, in three volumes, of Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry. This influential work had originally appeared in – and Taylor’s edition of was the second to update it, after a version produced by the antiquarian Richard Price in . Price had already included many new notes, and had updated and corrected Warton; Taylor, for his new edition at the dawn of the Victorian age, included many more notes, most of them by the leading antiquarians of the time. The antiquarians and litterateurs of Victoria’s reign were prone to complain about Warton’s History (like many works embarking on a new field, it was full of mistakes and speculations that proved to be unwarranted). But clearly, they could not do without it. was a good time to go into the market with a fresh look at medieval literature (Warton’s book, despite the implicit claims of its title, was largely a work on medieval poetry). In many ways the s in Europe (and particularly in Britain) would prove to be the crucial decade for what we now know as ‘medievalism’. This was the decade when Gothic Revival architecture established itself as the prime idiom for ecclesiastical and civic building in Britain. It was the time when Augustus Pugin would advance his ideas on such architecture, even as the walls of the new, neo-Gothic Houses of Parliament designed by him and Charles Barry rose at Westminster. At the same time in France, Prosper Mérimée was in charge of the Commission des monuments historiques, which drove the restoration of the cathedral of Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle in Paris by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In the sphere of art, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in , while the medievalist historical novel was reinvented by Edward Bulwer Lytton. This was also a decade of working-class unrest and the mass movement known as Chartism. For diverse figures on right and left, from Benjamin Disraeli to Thomas Carlyle, medieval feudalism and chivalry appealed as offering answers to a
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troubled industrialized modernity. Indeed the word ‘medievalism’ itself came into currency in the s, initially as a derogatory synonym for Anglo-Catholicism, and soon with much wider applications.¹ In a strict sense, ‘medievalism’, with all its varied meanings, was a Victorian invention, originating in the first Victorian decade. The turn to the medieval in the period was, as the example of Taylor’s re-edition of Warton suggests, based firmly on the prior work of the s and s. The major figures considered in this chapter—Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy, and Joseph Ritson—were all dead before the future Queen Victoria was born in and therefore, so far as Victorian medievalism is concerned, belong firmly to the prehistory. But the survival and continued vitality of their works ensured their ongoing importance in the context of the Victorian reinvention of the medieval. They had fundamentally reoriented thought about the medieval period. After the English Reformation, whenever the term ‘Middle Ages’ was used or the period it denoted invoked, it was in the negative sense established by Reformation and humanist thought. With Warton and Percy, this changed, and the fact that in the nineteenth century (as still today) there was a positive conception of a romantic Middle Ages to counterpose to a barbaric Middle Ages was largely due to their work and that of their immediate followers, pre-eminently Walter Scott. They were not always greatly original, but were deeply influenced by French and German scholars who preceded them (such scholars as Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye in France, and the German Friedrich von Schlegel). Nevertheless, Percy, Warton, Ritson, and Scott established the outlines from which a broader British medievalism, in the Victorian period, could grow.
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.................................................................................................................................. In Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, cultures which had come to view themselves as the pinnacle of civilization began to look away from their own sophistication and towards the primitive in all its forms.² Inevitably, even as Enlightenment civility was celebrated, some lamented a loss of simplicity and their own distance from the state of nature. So they turned to distant worlds: to the Americas, or the Pacific where, in Tahiti in , the aristocratic mariner Louis-Antoine de Bougainville admired what he thought of as an Edenic island and brought a Tahitian native back to Paris as a kind of exhibit of man in his natural state. Cultures also looked to their own wild margins, as did Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in their celebrated tour of ¹ OED s.v. medievalism; see further David Matthews, ‘From Mediaeval to Mediaevalism: A New Semantic History’, RES / (): –. ² On the British case, see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), and on a rise in national optimism after the Seven Years War, see ch. .
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the Hebrides and Western Isles, an account of which was published in . People also looked to the past: in mid-eighteenth-century Britain the fabricated Ossian poems from a distant, imagined Celtic past enjoyed their spectacular success. Closer to hand were the ballads of late medieval and early modern Britain, some of them available in early printed pamphlets or manuscripts, others needing to be transcribed from the words of their singers. The turn to the primitive was a broad-ranging movement with many outcomes; a focus on the Middle Ages was just one strand, but perhaps among the most influential. In this context, Thomas Warton is interestingly subtle. Like anyone of his time, he had inherited the image of the Middle Ages as a time of barbarity. In the first sentence of the preface to his History of English Poetry, he noted that it was natural that ‘an age advanced to the highest degree of refinement’ should be curious about ‘the transitions from barbarism to civility’.³ There is no doubt that Warton was attracted to medieval literature, which he began to discover in the manuscripts of the libraries in Oxford where he was professor of poetry. But for him the Middle Ages were in fact poised between two moments, as a long phase of transition between classical civilization and the first glimmerings of modernity. By the time of Chaucer, in Warton’s view, the pageantry associated with chivalry had ‘contributed to introduce ideas of courtesy, and to encourage decorum’. At the same time, ‘the national manners still retained a great degree of ferocity, and the ceremonies of the most refined courts in Europe had often a mixture of barbarism, which rendered them ridiculous’. Warton concluded, ‘This absurdity will always appear at periods when men are so far civilised as to have lost their native simplicity, and yet have not attained just ideas of politeness and propriety’ (HEP i. ). Warton does not outrightly condemn the Middle Ages, but he is far from being an uncomplicated champion of the period. He highlights the problem that curious and interesting as humans in an early state are, they are likely also to be barbarous and alien when taken from their context. Clearly, chivalry helps him negotiate this problem, as it is chivalry, in his view, that helps refine cultures (and allows poetry). Warton had two important predecessors in this regard. One of them, Richard Hurd, had advanced an extensive theory in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance in . For Hurd, chivalry was the natural system of restraint that would emerge in response to feudalism. Romance, in turn, was the literary expression of this system. The other predecessor was Thomas Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry () was a famous anthology of ballads and romances which was probably even more broadly influential than Warton’s history. This work gave large numbers of readers access to early poetry and was immediately successful; a second edition followed in , with two further editions in Percy’s lifetime and a long afterlife throughout the nineteenth century. Much more than a simple collection of poems, it was itself a literary history, which has been described as ‘the seminal, epoch-making work of English Romanticism’.⁴ ³ Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, vols (London, –), i, p. i. Hereafter HEP. ⁴ Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), .
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There were many collectors of ballads and other old poems in the period immediately succeeding Percy’s and Warton’s publications. John Pinkerton was one who looked in particular to Scotland. Another who did this, under the influence of Percy, was the young Walter Scott, whose own ballad anthology, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (–), was a form of homage to Percy. Equally prominent among the immediate successors of Percy and Warton was a major scholar who reacted violently against their work. Joseph Ritson was an impoverished lawyer, originally from the north-east of England, who announced himself to the scholarly world with an astonishing attack on Warton’s History in , in which he aimed to ‘expos[e] to the public eye a tolerable specimen of the numerous errors, falsities, and plagiarisms, of which you have been guilty’.⁵ This kind of intemperate language meant that, although Ritson was often right in his specific criticisms, he was largely rejected by the scholarly establishment, which sided with Percy and Warton. Nevertheless Ritson, before his early death in , produced a series of important collections of medieval poetry, contributing a great deal to the study of Middle English romance and to the then scarcely known field of Robin Hood ballads. What all of these works did was twofold. They provided a corpus of early verse where previously there had not been one. In the space of a few decades, between Percy’s Reliques in and Scott’s Minstrelsy in along with Ritson’s Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës in the same year, a very large corpus of ballads, romances, and related literary materials came on to the market, framed as polite letters for consumption by middle-class readers. For many such readers, no doubt, that was enough. But the second thing the anthologists did was to spark the beginnings of English literary history. Warton’s work was avowedly a literary history, but so too were the anthologies by Percy, Scott, and Ritson. In their introductory essays and their scholarly notes these authors were committed to a new literary history, and took medieval literature seriously in a way that had not been done since the Elizabethans. Many medieval works had not been read since the mid sixteenth century, so that medieval literature was itself like an undiscovered territory ready to be enjoyed and colonized. Percy and Warton led the explorers.⁶ This was a novel move at a time when scholars and writers were usually guided by classical literature. In their new literary history of the British Middle Ages, Warton, Percy, and others showed themselves sympathetic to the past they were uncovering.⁷ One of Percy’s scholarly essays in the Reliques, for example, was on alliterative poems (of the kind represented by the fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision, Piers Plowman); this essay is today recognized as the first to identify, name, and with ⁵ [Joseph Ritson], Observations on the Three First Volumes of The History of English Poetry. In a Familiar Letter to Their Author (London, ), . ⁶ On the development of the study of romance in this period see Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, ). ⁷ On the political character of Warton’s and Percy’s work see Philip Connell, ‘British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, / (): –.
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some accuracy describe the characteristics of alliterative verse, which for a long time previously had barely been comprehended. Whatever the wild speculations, promoted by Percy and Warton (and tirelessly debunked by Ritson), about a world of protected bardic minstrels, these scholars did an enormous amount simply in bringing previously unknown texts to light and showing, for example, how such a work as Spenser’s Faerie Queene was indebted to and self-consciously reliant on a prior tradition. But their sympathy for medieval literature had strict limits. Warton’s work best shows how it was possible to be an admirer, but a very reserved one, of medieval culture. His History of English Poetry was a monument to medieval literature to which generations of readers were indebted. But, as passages cited above show, unlike some of his Victorian successors, he was not finally enamoured of medieval chivalry—a system which existed, after all, to mitigate the undoubted barbarism of the period. There is a deep affective streak running through the History of English Poetry but it does not arise, as it would for some later writers, from an uncomplicated admiration for chivalry and romance. While, as James Simpson puts it, the Middle Ages are positive for Warton because they are dominated by the imagination, which is good for poetry, the period is also marked by ‘the superstitious practice of papish religion’ which is ‘detestable and idolatrous in itself ’, even if it must ‘be suffered for its positive imaginative effects’.⁸ Warton’s objections to the period run even more deeply than his rejection of Catholicism. He felt that ‘We look back on the savage condition of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority; we are pleased to mark the steps by which we have been raised from rudeness to elegance’ (HEP i, p. i). The Middle Ages are attractive because of their ‘rudeness’, their difference, which lies in their simplicity. But at the same time, in Warton’s view, we would not want to return to that rudeness from our present sophistication. Much as various mariners enjoyed Tahiti, afterwards they sailed away. When looking at a historical period, just as a geographical location, the state of rude simplicity is best contemplated from the comforts of the eighteenthcentury study. Like Warton, Thomas Percy shows abundant enthusiasm for his ballads and romances but at the same time keeps some distance to works he referred to as ‘the barbarous productions of unpolished ages’.⁹ Early in the first volume of the Reliques Percy presented the ballad of ‘Sir Cauline’, which he took from a severely damaged manuscript version. In fleshing out the story with stanzas of his own composition Percy shows a good understanding of medieval romance in a tale of star-crossed lovers, Sir Cauline and Christabell. Like Warton after him, Percy is clearly attracted by the conventions of chivalry as found in medieval romance. In his ballad a princess loves a
⁸ James Simpson, ‘The Rule of Medieval Imagination’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – (). ⁹ Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vols (London, ), i, p. vi. The words are from the dedication, believed to have been written by Samuel Johnson; the sentiments are probably those of Percy as well as Johnson.
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knight who is socially beneath her; the knight performs tasks to make himself worthy; the pair are separated by an angry father until the knight proves himself through defeating a monstrous enemy who threatens the father’s realm. To this point, ‘Sir Cauline’ is an accurate pastiche of a medieval romance. What then happens is unlike any medieval romance, however. After he has defeated his foe the victorious knight Cauline expires in the lists from his wounds and Christabell dies of grief beside him. Percy, like Warton, is attracted to tales of bravery and chivalry but he does not always let them wipe away the streak of violence he sees in medieval culture. It is significant that the ending of ‘Sir Cauline’ was entirely Percy’s own invention; as an editor, he was a notorious tinkerer and improver. In the case of the damaged ‘Sir Cauline’ he had little choice but to improve, and in doing so he created pathos and tragedy arising out of violence, not the ameliorative marriage and happy long life that usually concludes a medieval romance. It was possible indeed to see the ballads and romances as having quite dark shades. J. G. Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and first biographer, lauded the way in which Scott, when presented with a number of variant forms of a ballad, would instinctively put together the ‘correct’ version for his Minstrelsy; he had a ‘knowledge of old manners and phraseology’, Lockhart claimed, together with ‘a manly simplicity of taste, such as had never before been united in the person of a poetical antiquary’. Scott, ‘with instinctive tact’, would recreate ‘the primitive diction and imagery’ of the original and discard corruptions. [He] produced strains in which the unbroken energy of half-civilized ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their wild rude humour, are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror, interrupted by hardly a blot of what deserves to be called vulgarity, and totally free from any admixture of artificial sentimentalism.¹⁰
This passage distils a great deal of what was at stake for literary scholars in the period. It was by then widely known that Thomas Percy had tended to improve his ballads, and a new generation of editors was under greater pressure to be more faithful to the actual record. Hence Lockhart presents Scott here as a natural philologist. At the same time, writing long after Scott had established himself as a successful poet, Lockhart portrays his subject as the inheritor of the medieval bardic tradition (a tradition almost Homeric, in Lockhart’s view). It is the attitude to the premodern past that is of interest here: mixed in with the attraction for ‘stern and deep passions’ is an apprehension bordering on terror in the face of old literature’s ‘cruel tragedies’ and ‘wild rude humour’. Lockhart, writing at the very beginning of the Victorian period, recalls the Enlightenment view of the Middle Ages as attractive but alien, with the potential to terrify. But it is terror in the sense made popular by another key figure of the late ¹⁰ J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, vols (Edinburgh and London: Robert Cadell; John Murray and Whittaker & Co., –), i. –.
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eighteenth century: if ‘the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person’, wrote Edmund Burke in his essay on beauty and the sublime, it is ‘capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’.¹¹ This perceived capacity for terror led in another direction. Horace Walpole had early recognized it in his novel, Castle of Otranto (), which created a taste for the Gothic, that, more than any other genre, took from the Middle Ages the notion of a sublime terror. This strand led also to the Romantic poets who seized selectively on the late eighteenth-century vision of the Middle Ages to produce their own version of the medieval, pioneering the modern sense of the Gothic. The title of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’ shows Percy’s influence, which extends to the figure of the bard Bracy, who is not simply the minstrel of Sir Leoline’s castle but is entrusted with an important errand and reveals himself to be a seer of visions: an exalted version of the medieval minstrel owing more to Percy’s vision than any medieval evidence. As a modern ballad, ‘Christabel’ fully brings out aspects of an imagined Middle Ages which result from an investment in ballad and romance to the exclusion of other forms: this is a world in which a sort of delightful horror is not far away, a scene of portents, danger, and, more explicitly than in Percy’s work, a thinly veiled dangerous sexuality. In the medieval romances uncovered by Thomas Warton, knights chastely rescue their intended brides; in ‘Sir Cauline’ as refashioned by Percy, a knight and his lady expire chastely side by side. Coleridge removes the knight in shining armour from the scene altogether in ‘Christabel’, highlighting instead the vulnerable feminine on the one hand through the virginal Christabel herself, and an aggressive, dangerous and overtly sexualized femininity on the other through the mysterious Geraldine, between which men are apparently helpless. These then are aspects of medievalism in the late eighteenth century. In the next section of this essay I return to the ways in which this inheritance was received by the Victorians.
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.................................................................................................................................. Thomas Fosbroke, an impoverished parson in rural England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, published works of antiquarianism from which he hoped to make a little money. In he produced the second edition of a work on monasticism in the Middle Ages and in it, as if by accident, he coined the adjective ‘medieval’. While there does not appear to have been anything deliberate in this coinage, it reflects a context in ¹¹ Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. th edn (London, ), .
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which the word ‘Gothic’ was no longer thought appropriate as a general adjective for the Middle Ages.¹² ‘Gothic’ now had many very specific associations, many of them negative. ‘Medieval’, a new word, had none, and this neutral adjective came into increasing use in the early decades of the post-Napoleonic peace, when the Middle Ages took on a new guise. Certainly the Middle Ages could still be thought of as ‘Gothic’ (in Walpole’s or Percy’s or Coleridge’s sense). But scholars now preferred the term ‘medieval’, as a way of describing a historical period without ascribing a particular character to it. One of the defining texts for the period was Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (), a novel in which we find what is in some ways the typical scene of romance as it was filtered through the work of Percy and Warton. Rowena, a pure and virtuous young woman, is oppressed and abjected before being finally rescued by her knight. Rowena is contrasted with the Jew Rebecca, who at one stage cares for and heals the knight Wilfrid of Ivanhoe. But the more directly opposed female figure is arguably the relatively minor character Ulrica, a woman who has been wronged in the past and now lives incarcerated in the castle of Torquilstone where she appears in the middle of the action as part prophetess, part poet, part mad Gothic ghost who perishes in the flames at the siege of the castle. Through Ulrica and the villain Brian de Bois Guilbert, Ivanhoe gestures towards the kind of Gothic Middle Ages seen in The Castle of Otranto and glimpsed (but left open due to incompletion) in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. Ivanhoe, however, is not heavily invested in this vision. With Ulrica’s destruction in the narrative to a great extent the vision of a Gothic Middle Ages also leaves it. With the shift in literary genre represented by Ivanhoe, away from the latter-day ballad seen in ‘Christabel’ to the novel as a major literary form for representing the Middle Ages, there was also a shift towards historical realism. The medievalist novel usually aimed to present a realistic Middle Ages, often with politics at its heart. This is true in Scott’s own revisiting of the Middle Ages in Quentin Durward () and in Victor Hugo’s celebrated Notre-Dame de Paris, published in France in and soon translated into English. The tendency is even more marked in the work of their English heir, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his novel The Last of the Barons (), the main female character, Sybil Warner, is marked out for tragedy. She is periodically oppressed in the course of the narrative by a group of malign female figures, a travelling troupe of dancers called tymbesteres. But this Gothic subplot remains minor in the novel, and Lytton’s chief interest is in the realistic depiction of a masculine world of political machinations in the Wars of the Roses. His novel seeks to explain the rift between the earl of Warwick and Edward IV, in a very explicitly described context in which Lytton sees the beginnings of a shift from feudalism to middle-class commercialism as taking place in the period. Warwick is the last of the barons of the title, and with him dies the last vestige of chivalry, which Lytton, in his context in the rebellious s, regards as regrettable. When he describes the Battle of Barnet, it is no less than the future of England that is at stake, as
¹² See further Matthews, ‘From Mediaeval’.
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the forces of a crass commercialism are no longer held back by the softening influence of ethical chivalry. In such a guise, the Middle Ages had become much less alien by the s, much more obviously continuous with the present day and bearing lessons for the present. Not long before the publication of Lytton’s novel, a group of aristocrats had staged the famous Eglinton tournament in Ayrshire, a full-scale re-enactment of medieval pageantry, clearly inspired by the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche in Ivanhoe. Re-enactment obviously suggests a form of continuity with what is being re-enacted; it presupposes an original which can be performed again. This is rather different from the sublime and remote Middle Ages glimpsed in Percy’s work and the poetry of the younger Scott. It suggests that by the s the British Middle Ages were becoming domesticated. This is true in one quite literal sense: Gothic Revival architecture was everywhere in the s. Old medieval churches were being repaired in new medievalist forms, or replaced altogether by neo-Gothic ones, and hence in this respect the image of the Middle Ages was becoming quite commonplace. As we have seen, in the s Warton’s history remained popular as did Percy’s Reliques. But their clear sense of superiority to the period is now compromised by a new attitude: in early Victorian writing, even if the Middle Ages remains in many ways alien, there is often a strong sense of continuity with the period. Significantly, the first glimmerings of modern medieval studies can also be seen in this period. A new generation of scholars was drawn to romance under the influence of Warton, but less because of an attraction to the beautiful and sublime than because of an interest in what they saw as their own past. There was coming to be a national interest in this past and national pride in a sense of continuity. Increasingly in the early Victorian period scholars read romances as if they were realist novels and deduced realistic details from them. What interested Frederic Madden, in his great edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight published in , was not the poem’s intricate plot or dazzling poetry, but its detailed depiction of castles, armour, and clothing and its reference to courtly Christmas games. Madden valued the poem not as a constructed textual artefact but as a clear window on the past. At the same time, another and decidedly non-scholarly approach to the romances was simply to take them and the chivalry they portrayed at face value. Kenelm Henry Digby published an influential work entitled The Broad Stone of Honour in with the subtitle ‘Rules for the Gentlemen of England’; it appeared in an expanded version (soon after its author’s conversion to Catholicism) in – with the subtitle ‘The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry’. In this work Digby unsubtly and persistently maintained that chivalry, as portrayed in medieval romance, could be regarded as a viable model for modern-day conduct. There is no longer any sense that a line ought to be drawn between the Middle Ages and ourselves, because the author is not concerned about the barbarism of the medieval period. This work might be an extreme example, but it is also an instance of a more general tendency among adherents of the period. Where there is continuity between the Middle Ages and the present, there is no longer much to fear in the Middle Ages.
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Of course it is easy to exaggerate the extent to which the Middle Ages had become popular. The spread of neo-Gothic buildings was not welcomed by all, and in the wake of Catholic Emancipation in and the Oxford Movement’s tracts in the s (which looked back to the medieval Catholic past of the Church), there was a widespread reaction against a turn to the medieval past. One of the reasons that the term ‘medievalism’ became so widely used in the s was because it was a handy derogatory term to be applied to those in the Oxford Movement and anyone else who appeared to be turning to the barbaric past of the Catholic Middle Ages. It is significant, nevertheless, that by the end of the decade the word ‘medievalism’ could be used in a much less judgemental way (to describe the whimsy of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings, for example). There was then a domestication of the medieval at this time, a reclaiming of the period to make it part of the story of British history.
C: ?
.................................................................................................................................. To this point I have argued that the s was a pivotal period in British understandings of the Middle Ages, and that the context for this can be traced back to the antiquarian efforts of Percy, Warton, Hurd, and after them, Ritson and Scott. To close the chapter, I want to look at an alternative way of thinking about this narrative. I begin by briefly recounting a very well-known story: we owe to Thomas Percy himself an account of how he rescued what became known as the Percy Folio (the inspiration for his Reliques) from a friend’s house where the servants were using it, half a page at a time, to light the fire. Percy wrote this story down himself on the manuscript, now British Library, Add. MSS. . He had particular motivations in telling it: despite the success of the Reliques, readers were increasingly critical of Percy’s considerable editorial liberties. It became important to Percy to point out that the manuscript was incomplete and required the kind of intervention which he made with ‘Sir Cauline’. The manuscript was about a century old when Percy came across it in this fashion. It had been read by different people, who annotated it; it might also have been associated with performance of the material it contained. It was probably once part of a larger library and it seems clear that before it was judged by one provincial middle-class household in the s to be scrap paper, it had been valued. The manuscript today consists of about pages and it has been calculated that about an eighth of the material originally present is missing, torn out by the culpable maids, which suggests that it had not been lying in the parlour very long. Whatever the history of the manuscript and however much it might once have been valued, when Percy happened on it around , it was clearly a relic of a forgotten culture to which no prestige attached.¹³ In that context, Percy was the right person to ¹³ On the manuscript as a relic see further Groom, Making, –.
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find it. At the time he was a recent Oxford graduate steeped in the classics, but he was also of humble provincial origins, the son of a grocer. He could recognize the appeal of popular ballads, but he was also the man to refashion those ballads to make them fit for the drawing rooms of Georgian England. Much later, Frederick Furnivall perceived this, ironically suggesting that Percy had regarded the manuscript ‘as a young woman from the country with unkempt locks, whom he had to fit for fashionable society’.¹⁴ The Percy Folio, as an object, might be unique, but the culture of popular ballads and romances which it represented was not. Hence, to frame the story of the ballad revival from the s in the way that I have done here does not quite capture the entire story. As Albert Friedman wrote more than fifty years ago, the ballad ‘revival’ was not in fact ‘the “making to live again” of the ballad’, but rather ‘the translation of the ballad from an active life on the popular level to a “museum life” on a higher level’.¹⁵ It certainly makes sense, as I have argued here in the context of histories of the medieval revival, to see the s as crucial. We now tend to think, after Linda Colley, of the eighteenth century as the period in which ‘Great Britain’ was brought into being (with the Act of Union of ) and in which a new national culture espoused classical, ‘Augustan’, Enlightenment, and rationalist values.¹⁶ The Middle Ages, by contrast, were in retreat; in the eighteenth century, there were no new publications of the foremost writers of the late Middle Ages: no editions of the work of John Gower, William Langland, or Thomas Malory and, before , very little Chaucer. What happened from the s was the inevitable reaction. Yet from another point of view, medieval literary culture was quite simply abundant in eighteenth-century Britain. There were hundreds of copies available of the Middle English romances of the heroes Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick, for example, while the late medieval narrative of the wonders of foreign lands, Mandeville’s Travels, was also easily available. Many of these texts were available in cheap productions which had drifted a long way from their Middle English origins, but it was nevertheless possible to buy what was, for the time, a perfectly scholarly edition of Mandeville’s Travels, issued in , just as there were reliable editions of the Middle English chronicles of Robert Mannyng of Brunne and ‘Robert of Gloucester’, produced by Thomas Hearne at the same time (, ). In what sense, then, can we say there was a medieval ‘revival’ in the s? What makes this revival stand out is the influence that such texts as the Reliques had on the Romantic movement, and particularly the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In one direction the medieval revival is privileged because it leads to the story of the canon of
¹⁴ John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall (eds), Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, vols (London, –), i, p. xvi. ¹⁵ Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), ; see further on this Groom, Making, –. ¹⁶ Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation –. nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).
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English literature. Secondly, the work of Warton, Percy, and Ritson in particular is part of the story of English literary history: the beginnings of the university study of English literature are bound up with them. Nevertheless, the notion of a medieval revival has less to tell us about the progress of medievalism as such than has been thought, or at least, it obscures important aspects of that story. Such publications as Percy’s, Warton’s, and Hurd’s represent not the discovery of something forgotten, but rather the translation of something that had been there all along into elite culture. In this context, what Thomas Percy did was not to discover something new, but to take something entirely commonplace—the popular culture of the day—and to confer distinction on it, recasting it for elite literary culture. He himself was quite aware of this. His reference in the preface to the Reliques to the material he had collected as a set of ‘barbarous productions’ might be a modesty topos, but it also points to what could all too easily be said about the verse and its blend of ‘polite culture and street culture’ (Groom, Making, ). The point of the story about the discovered manuscript is perhaps not the providential rescue of a precious source, but that Percy was the man—the son of a small-town grocer but well educated—best placed both to recognize popular culture when he saw it, and also to shift it into an elite form. Indeed, through his education and his own shift from provincial commerce to the established Church of England, this translation was one he was familiar with himself. What is important about the medieval revival of the late eighteenth century, then, and what made it so important to the later Victorian revival, is first the wonder it provoked, the sense of an alien world that both attracted and repelled, which was what Romantic poets and Gothic novelists took up. In this sense, the medieval past was like an exotic and undiscovered territory. But secondly, the opposite tendency was also important; the way in which this revival made popular culture acceptable within elite culture, allowing the understanding of the Middle Ages in terms of continuity with modernity. In the Victorian age, with its rapid and frightening transformation of landscape, cities, and society, that apparently timeless and simple past began to look very appealing: not a distant country at all, but a familiar place in an attractively more primitive guise.
S Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation –. nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Connell, Philip, ‘British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later EighteenthCentury England’, Historical Journal, / (): –. Friedman, Albert B., The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Groom, Nick, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Johnston, Arthur, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, ).
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Matthews, David, ‘From Mediaeval to Mediaevalism: A New Semantic History’, RES / (): –. Simpson, James, ‘The Rule of Medieval Imagination’, in James Simpson, Jeremy Dimmick, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Spadafora, David, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).
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N book better embodies the anxiety that gnawed at nineteenth-century antiquarians, historians, and literary critics than J. A. Giles’s Six Old English Chronicles, of Which Two Are Now First Translated from the Monkish Latin Originals, published in .¹ This eminently useful volume provides accessible English versions of a number of influential chronicles. Æthelweard’s tenth-century Latin Chronicon fills in some gaps from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Asser, a tenth-century Welsh monk, wrote a Life of King Alfred that is still regarded as the most detailed early account of that monarch. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae got its very first English translation in the volume, and made possible a new scrutiny of the early modern chronicles. English versions of ‘Gildas Sapiens’ and the Historia Brittonum attributed to the ninthcentury Welsh monk Nennius, too, were now available in the vernacular. Rounding out the volume was a translation of one of the most celebrated works of medieval chorography, the De situ Britanniae of Richard of Cirencester, a fourteenth-century account of travels around Britain that had received the imprimatur of one of the eighteenth century’s greatest antiquarians, William Stukeley. Richard’s book was for the first time widely available in the vernacular, but it had already proven its value. Charles Bertram, who discovered and published the manuscript, himself had declared that Richard ‘is not to be classed with the most inconsiderable historians of the middle age . . . It is considered by Dr Stukeley, and those who have inspected it, as a jewel, and worthy to be rescued from destruction by the press.’² Historians had therefore been using it for decades. Martin Folkes draws on Richard of Cirencester in his Tables of English Silver and Gold Coins (–), noting the
¹ J. A. Giles (ed.), Six Old English Chronicles, of Which Two Are Now First Translated from the Monkish Latin Originals: Ethelwerd’s Chronicle; Asser’s Life of Alfred; Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British History; Gildas; Nennius; and Richard of Cirencester: Edited, with Illustrative Notes (London: H. G. Bohn, ). ² Six Old English Chronicles, p. xx.
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occurrence of ‘near names of towns, &c. unheard of before’.³ Richard Gough uses Richard’s map in to date other early works of cartography.⁴ In the same year Thomas Llewellyn draws on Richard for information about the early settlement of Somersetshire.⁵ In William Enfield learns from Richard that ‘The county about Leverpool . . . formerly constituted a part of the kingdom of the Brigantes.’⁶ Even Edward Gibbon uses it for some of his famous notes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Gentleman’s Magazine includes letter after letter from amateur antiquaries, correcting the record by invoking Richard’s work. The pace gains further momentum in the nineteenth century, by which time Richard of Cirencester has become one of the standard sources for the early history of Britain. Richard of Cirencester’s De situ Britanniae had only one significant drawback: it was pure fiction. Bertram concocted the whole thing. But a century had passed between the work’s announcement in and its debunking in , and it would be another twenty-three years before its status as a forgery was widely accepted. The damage had been done. The phoney Richard was sharing a volume with authentic texts, and countless works of antiquarian research suddenly came under suspicion, and the basis of understanding early British history was in doubt. This episode is a reminder that the prospect of deception hung over every inquiry made by antiquarians, historians, literary historians, and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Traps like these awaited everyone discussing medieval literature in the nineteenth century, when almost any edition of medieval texts might be a hoax—or, even more confusing, a blend of the genuine and the bogus. ‘In practice,’ writes Christopher N. L. Brooke, ‘for most historians, dodging the forger is an occasional exciting hazard, not a normal part of his daily routine.’⁷ That may be true today, when most significant works have been picked over by experts through the course of decades or even centuries. Such was not the case, though, through most of the nineteenth century, when to study the works of the Middle Ages was to venture into uncharted waters. And much of the nineteenth century’s engagement with the works of the Middle Ages can
³ Martin Folkes, Tables of English Silver and Gold Coins: First Published by Martin Folkes, Esq; and Now Re-Printed, with Plates and Explanations, by the Society of Antiquaries (London, –), n. ⁴ Richard Gough, Anecdotes of British Topography; or, An Historical Account of What Has Been Done for Illustrating the Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland (London, ), . ⁵ Thomas Llewellyn, An Historical Account of the British or Welsh Versions and Editions of the Bible: With an Appendix Containing the Dedications Prefixed to the First Impressions (London, ). ⁶ William Enfield, An Essay towards the History of Leverpool, Drawn up from Papers Left by the Late Mr George Perry, and from Other Materials Since Collected, by William Enfield: With Views of the Principal Public Structures, a Chart of the Harbour, and a Map of the Environs. nd edn (London, ), . ⁷ Christopher N. L. Brooke, ‘Approaches to Medieval Forgery’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, (–) –, at .
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be understood only against a background of the fakes, frauds, forgeries, counterfeits, and hoaxes that had been piling up over the previous century. The medieval canon was growing quickly in the decades leading up to the Victorian era. When Thomas Warton’s milestone History of English Poetry appeared in , with its learned comments on Thomas Hoccleve, John Gower, and John Lydgate, most of the audience had likely never read a word of any of them. The contours of the history Warton recounts are far from our own conception of the high points of medieval literature. With the exception of Chaucer’s works,⁸ very few medieval texts—even those we might expect to find in today’s undergraduate anthologies—were familiar before . Beowulf, for instance, was entirely unknown to all but a few antiquarians until Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin published De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV: Poëma danicum dialecto anglosaxonica in , and even then it was inaccessible to a popular audience before John Mitchell Kemble’s translation of The Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf in . It goes unmentioned in Warton’s History. Layamon’s Brut, likewise, was very little known before Sir Frederic Madden’s edition of . (‘This curious work never was, and probably never will be, printed’, wrote George Ellis in . Isaac Disraeli was there to correct him: ‘but we live in an age of publication, and Layamon is said to be actually in the press’.⁹) Even many medieval works that had been ‘discovered’ earlier were hardly familiar among the educated public. Piers Plowman, for instance, appeared in print in and —and then not again until .¹⁰ John Gower’s Confessio Amantis appeared in , , and —but not again until .¹¹ The texts were known to exist, but little more than that. The pattern is similar for many major English writers of the Middle Ages. Most medieval literature was terra incognita until, and even into, the Victorian era. This significant expansion of the medieval canon made the era an attractive target for all manner of fakers. A centuries-old provenance can give a modern work a kind of authority, a distinction guaranteed by its supposed antiquity: this makes the fakery more desirable. Apparent antiquity also makes it less likely that a reader will be able to spot the imposition: this makes the fakery more practicable. Forge a poem by someone recently dead, and plenty of people will eagerly point out anomalies. Forge a poem by a third-century Scottish bard, an eighth-century Saxon translator, or a fourteenthcentury Welsh poet, and who can say with authority that it is inauthentic? As
⁸ Chaucer’s works were reasonably well known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the Canterbury Tales appeared in print in , with major editions either of the Middle English text or a modern adaptation in , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , and . ⁹ George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, to Which Is Prefixed an Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the English Poetry and Language. rd edn, vols (London: G. and W. Nicol, ), i. ; Isaac Disraeli, Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature. vols (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, ), i. n. ¹⁰ See Charlotte Brewer, Editing ‘Piers Plowman’: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ¹¹ The Confessio Amantis of John Gower, ed. Reinhold Pauli, vols (London: Bell & Daldy, ).
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G. Kitson Clark remarks, ‘The probability that official documents may have been forged or tampered with increases the further you go back into the middle ages.’¹² Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forgers learned these lessons. If we adopt the era’s own expansive conception of ‘Dark’ or ‘Middle Ages’—nearly anything in Europe before what we have come to call the Renaissance that was not considered part of classical antiquity, including works in Latin, Old English, Middle English, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old French, and other languages—we see that many of the great literary forgeries had to do with medieval texts. The two most high-profile eighteenth-century attempts to expand the canon of the vernacular literature of Great Britain were the Ossianic poems published by James Macpherson, supposedly dating from around the third century, and the Rowley poems by Thomas Chatterton, dating from the fifteenth. The catalogue of spurious medieval texts does not stop there. Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) ‘discovered’ many medieval Welsh texts, which appeared between and . William Henry Ireland is most famous for the so-called Shakespeare Papers, and the pseudo-Shakespearean Vortigern is the most notorious document to emerge from the imposture. But Ireland too ventured into the Middle Ages, most notably with an unpublished manuscript poem, The Divill and Rychard. The full title proclaims its origin in the late fifteenth century: ‘The Divill and Rychard: As itt was donn onn Sonday last att the Pallace att Westmynster by the Clarkes and Boyes of Powles fore owre Gracyouse Valarowse most noble renownedd and puyssant Kyng Henry VII. on his Crownatyon afterr the Kylling owre late usurpyng Tyraunte Rychard III att the Courte beying atte thys syghtern. . S. W. H. I. Apr .’¹³ Fakes were not exclusively textual. Giovanni Bastianini forged many statues, some incorporating genuine fifteenth-century marble, others created from scratch.¹⁴ At the end of the nineteenth century, Luigi Parmiggiani (or Parmeggiani), also known as Louis Marcy, ‘made a number of spectacular sales of forged mediaeval works of art, amongst others the sales to the Victoria & Albert Museum which helped precipitate the select committee inquiry, as well as to the British Museum’.¹⁵ The ‘Spanish Forger’—whose identity is still unknown—turned out dozens, perhaps hundreds, of miniatures and illuminated manuscripts at the end of the Victorian era.¹⁶ Any museum with a significant collection of medieval art is certain to have many identified forgeries now consigned to storage, and most probably have as-yet-unidentified forgeries hanging on walls. There were also potential fakes, less clear-cut than the Ossianic or Rowleyan poems, but still hovering at the border between authenticity and inauthenticity. Nineteenthcentury ‘repairs’ and ‘restorations’ of medieval paintings and statues, though perhaps ¹² G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London: Heinemann, ), . ¹³ BL, Add. MS , fols r–r. ¹⁴ Carol Helstosky, ‘Giovanni Bastianini, Art Forgery, and the Market in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Journal of Modern History, / (): –. ¹⁵ David Phillips, Exhibiting Authenticity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ¹⁶ See William Voelkle with Roger S. Wieck, The Spanish Forger (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, ).
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done with the best of intentions, often introduced modern elements into genuine old works; Macpherson and Iolo Morganwg did their own ‘restorations’ of authentic medieval texts. In the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Thomas Percy insists on a high degree of fidelity to his source material, even to the point of suggesting he was too faithful, leading to pedantry: ‘The desire of being accurate has perhaps seduced him into too minute and trifling an exactness . . . Where any thing was altered that deserved particular notice, the passage is distinguished by two inverted “commas.” And the Editor has endeavoured to be as faithful, as the imperfect state of his materials would admit.’¹⁷ From our point of view, though, Percy was reckless, and his treatment of his sources would not pass muster among editors today. His silent ‘improvements’ to his manuscript sources may amount to a kind of fakery. Even when he was being scrupulous with his sources, he found himself wrestling with fakes. Percy included ‘Hardyknute’, then widely believed genuine, albeit with a headnote that ‘this fine morsel of heroic poetry hath generally past for ancient’, but he put it at the end of his collection ‘that such as doubt of its age may the better compare it with other pieces of genuine antiquity’.¹⁸ Some fakes were never seriously intended to deceive, but still ran the risk of misleading credulous readers. The Book of Jasher is more prank than hoax; Jacob Ilive left many hints in that this ‘ancient text’ translated by the eighth-century monk Alcuin was not meant to be taken seriously. Still some were taken in. The humourless Thomas Hartwell Horne, for instance, citing the disappointment of friends who took the book for authentic, pulls no punches in his Manual of Biblical Bibliography (): ‘In the hope of preventing future unwary purchasers from being similarly misled, he now subjoins a few specimens of the falsehoods, anachronisms, and contradictions of the Holy Scriptures, which characterise this nocturnal production of the non-sane infidel author, Jacob Ilive.’¹⁹ An edition that took Ilive’s jeu d’esprit seriously appeared in Bristol in , and as late as the Rosicrucians regarded the comic imitation as a work of divine inspiration. Very old forgeries were still circulating in the nineteenth century. Ingulf ’s Historia Monasterii Croylandensis was widely cited in the period; though it purported to be by an eleventh-century abbot, it was in fact from the thirteenth or fourteenth century— authentically medieval, but a fake nonetheless.²⁰ As Thomas Hoving writes of the visual arts, ‘every day we’re learning that lots of antiquities we thought were faked in the late
¹⁷ Thomas Percy (ed.), Reliques of Ancient Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric Kind): Together with Some Few of Later Date, vols (London, ), i, p. xii. ¹⁸ Reliques, ii. . See also Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ¹⁹ Thomas Hartwell Horne, A Manual of Biblical Bibliography: Comprising a Catalogue, Methodically Arranged, of the Principal Editions and Versions of the Holy Scriptures (London: T. Cadell, ), . ²⁰ Ingulf is cited as support for the authenticity of Rowley’s poems in Jeremiah Milles’s edition. See Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, in the Fifteenth Century, by Thomas Rowley, Priest, &c.: With a Commentary, in Which the Antiquity of Them Is Considered, and Defended, ed. Jeremiah Milles (London, ), n.
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nineteenth century are actually forgeries of earlier times’.²¹ And folklorist Charles Martin points out some of the problems with early collections of medieval documents: The first important collection of Anglo-Saxon documents was a six-volume study, Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saonici, edited by J. M. Kemble and published between and . Most of the , documents included are royal charters. . . . All of the documents . . . are not originals, however. A few are extant originals, some are duplicate copies of lost originals . . . others are later copies . . . and still others are outright forgeries.²²
Kitson Clark even refers to ‘what may be called innocent forgery, as when a monastery conceived itself to have received certain rights from a dead king, but could not find the actual document conferring the grant among its muniments, and therefore supplied the loss’.²³ Students of literary falsehood are usually careful to distinguish actual fakes from pseudepigrapha, works bearing false authors’ names, though perhaps arising from error rather than mens rea. From the point of view of the nineteenth century, though, it mattered little when the confusion was introduced. Any text or artefact that was inconsistent with its declared provenance threatened to lead Victorian readers astray. As Thomas B. Shaw put it in , In criticising Chaucer’s works, we are at the outset met by the difficulty of distinguishing among the many mediæval poems ascribed to him those which are genuine . . . we may consider as doubtful the Romaunt of the Rose (of which however some translation was certainly made by Chaucer), The Court of Love, The Complaint of the Black Knight (probably by Lydgate), The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, Chaucer’s Dream, The Flower and the Leaf.²⁴
New fakes of medieval works from this era continue to turn up even now. In Barbara Palmer revealed John W. Walker’s records of performance of the Towneley Plays were mostly Victorian forgeries.²⁵ And in an important study based on primary archival research, Lawrence Warner has shown the role a faker, William Dupré—a ‘distant disciple of Chatterton’—played in establishing the canon of William Langland in the s.²⁶ Dupré’s forged medieval manuscripts were exposed, after which Dupré
²¹ Thomas P. F. Hoving, ‘The Game of Duplicity’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, / (Feb. ): –, at . ²² Charles B. Martin, ‘Anglo-Saxon Diplomatics: An Introduction to Sources’, South Central Bulletin, / (Winter ): –, at . ²³ Kitson Clark, Critical Historian, . ²⁴ Thomas B. Shaw, A History of English Literature, ed, William Smith (London: John Murray, ), –. ²⁵ Barbara Palmer, ‘ “Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle” Revisited’, Comparative Drama, (): –. ²⁶ Lawrence Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
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appealed for assistance to George Chalmers, one of the central combatants in the dispute over William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare Papers. Romantic and Victorian critics were all too aware of how much deception lurked in the ostensibly medieval works they read. ‘The present age,’ wrote Vicesimus Knox in , ‘it must be owned with regret, is an age of literary deception.’²⁷ Many surveys of the history of the English Middle Ages are filled with warnings about the number of hoaxes threatening to waylay innocent explorers. Credulous medieval writers, according to Joseph Berington in , ‘would not hesitate to prefer forged decretals, or the diploma of Constantine, to the sober and really genuine productions of the most enlightened age’.²⁸ Henry Hallam in bemoaned the absurd religious beliefs of the Middle Ages, noting that ‘In most cases, they were the work of deliberate imposture.’²⁹ Lamenting the difficulties of writing about the medieval Church, Sharon Turner complained in of ‘So much imposture, so many errors, so much fanaticism, and such fierce passions’, that it is hardly possible to say anything with confidence.³⁰ In , Robert Thomas Hampson advised historians ‘to subjoin the diplomatic doctrine of dates as employed in distinguishing the genuine from the forged charters of former times’.³¹ As James A. Jeremie wrote in of the time of the Church fathers, ‘forged writings were largely circulated and injudiciously received by the Christians’.³² Even major authors’ canons may have contained fraudulent patches: writing in about ‘A Praise of Women’, Charles Deshler observed, This Poem is usually printed with Chaucer’s works, and was considered genuine, till the judicious Tyrwhitt invested it with doubts. And although this eminent critic is of the opinion that it ought not to be imputed to him, . . . yet we cannot but observe in it many of the characteristic peculiarities both of style and thought, which distinguish Chaucer. At all events, and if it be a forgery, it will still serve as an illustration of Chaucer, since the copyist was obliged to conform as closely as possible to the sentiments of the author whom he counterfeited.³³
²⁷ Knox, ‘On the Prevailing Taste for the Old English Poets’, in Essays Moral and Literary. New edn, vols (London, ), i. . ²⁸ Joseph Berington, A Literary History of the Middle Ages: Comprehending an Account of the State of Learning, from the Close of the Reign of Augustus, to Its Revival in the Fifteenth Century (London: J. Mawman, ), . ²⁹ Henry Hallam, View of the State of Society in Europe during the Middle Ages, vols (London: John Murray, ), ii. . ³⁰ Sharon Turner, The History of England during the Middle Ages, vols (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, ), v. . ³¹ Robert Thomas Hampson, Medii Ævi Kalendarium; or, Dates, Charters, and Customs of the Middle Ages, with Kalendars from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century; and an Alphabetical Digest of Obsolete Names of Days: Forming a Glossary of the Dates of the Middle Ages: With Tables and Other Aids for Ascertaining Dates. vols (London: Henry Kent Causton & Co., ), i. . ³² James A. Jeremie, with J. B. S. Carwithen and A. Lyall, Christianity in the Middle Ages: Being the History of the Church from the Second to the Twelfth Century (London and Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co., ), . ³³ Charles Deshler (ed.), Selections from the Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: With a Concise Life of That Poet, and Remarks Illustrative of His Genius (New York and London: Wiley & Putnam, ), .
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(He was apparently taken in by a pseudepigraphal work.) Even so distinguished a critic as Edmund Gosse fretted over the authenticity of The Kingis Quair in , and was able to offer only a half-hearted conclusion that it was ‘probably authentic’.³⁴ This self-consciousness about the risk of encountering forgeries led some editors and scholars to advertise their strict adherence to the truth, as if to anticipate accusations of falsification. We see it as early as Thomas Percy, whose preface to Five Pieces of Runic Poetry () is a not-so-oblique comment on James Macpherson: ‘The Editor was in some doubt whether he should subjoin or suppress the originals. But as they lie within little compass, and as the books whence they are extracted are very scarce, he was tempted to add them as vouchers for the authenticity of his version.’³⁵ The declaration signals his determination to be scrupulous with his sources. James Henry Dixon’s collection of Early English Poetry, Ballads and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages for the Percy Society () includes an even more explicit boast: ‘Nor will there be discovered in our pages a solitary “modern antique,” or literary forgery.’³⁶ It takes no small measure of temerity to make the claim, though Dixon’s confidence seems misplaced when we notice the name ‘J. Payne Collier’ five pages earlier, listed among the ‘Council of the Percy Society’. Does it matter whether a document is a fake? It is possible to defend a wide range of answers to this question, depending on who is reading it and to what end. In the literary culture of the nineteenth century, though, it mattered very much, at least to some people. This era’s vernacular criticism was particularly concerned with historicism: the conviction that a work of art derived its significance, and at least some of its merit, from its place in history. To a historicist critic, two literary texts, one from , the other from , must be interpreted and evaluated differently, even if they are literatim identical. Placing a text in its historical moment, therefore, is a necessary precondition for reading it. Thomas Tyrwhitt, for instance, opens his edition of The Canterbury Tales () with this statement of historicist principles: ‘In order to make the proper use of these Mss., to unravel the confusions of their orthography, and to judge between a great number of various readings, it was necessary to enquire into the state of our language and versification at the time when Chaucer wrote.’³⁷ Establishing the culture that produced a text would provide the appropriate set of criteria by which to analyse and evaluate it. A text that claimed a false provenance for itself therefore was claiming the right to be judged by inappropriate standards. One of the reasons fakers claimed antique provenances for their works, then, is because it invited audiences to read them in a way they otherwise would not. Even the most banal observations could seem profound if they antedated all the other banal observations. Others may have done similar things, but my candidate did them first,
³⁴ Edmund Gosse, A Short History of Modern English Literature (London: Heinemann, ), . ³⁵ Thomas Percy (ed.), Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, tr. from the Islandic Language (London, ), sig. Ar. ³⁶ James Henry Dixon (ed.), Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages: Edited from Original Manuscripts and Scarce Publications, xvii (London: Percy Society, ), p. x. ³⁷ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt, vols (London, –), i, p. i.
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and therefore deserves to be celebrated. The poet, for centuries imagined as a master of imitation, is newly conceived among the Romantics as an innovator. Priority assumed ever greater importance in literary criticism, perhaps as a result of Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (). The emphasis on originality, on being first, is summed up in Young’s assertion that ‘Originals are, and ought to be, the great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion; Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before.’³⁸ As a result, one of the little-acknowledged keywords of Romantic-era literary history is first. It is difficult to turn more than a few pages of Warton’s History without coming across some claim of priority: ‘The first poet whose name occurs . . . in this annals, is Robert of Glocester’ (i. ); ‘in this Roman d’ Alexandre verses of twelve syllables were first used’ (i. ); ‘their troubadours were the first writers of metrical romances’ (i. ); ‘Cinthio Giraldi supposes, that the art of the troubadours . . . was first communicated from France to the Italians’ (i. ); ‘It is certain, that these were the first of our dramatic exhibitions’ (i. ); ‘it is not quite certain, that Longland was the first who led the way in this singular species of versification’ (i. ); and so on. He was not alone. Percy collected the ballads in his Reliques, displaying them ‘not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature, shewing the first efforts of ancient genius, and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages’.³⁹ Thomas Tyrwhitt is likewise eager ‘to distinguish the parts [of The Canterbury Tales] where the author appears as an inventor, from those where he is merely a translator, or imitator’ (i, p. ii). Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets praises Abraham Cowley as ‘the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode’, John Milton as ‘the first Englishman who, after the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classick elegance’, and John Dryden as ‘the first who joined argument with poetry’.⁴⁰ Of course histories have always had interest in the origins of the institutions they chronicle, but the attempt to understand literary history as a series of firsts is distinctive in the later eighteenth century, and only grew over time. A writer, therefore, who claimed priority without having earned it was determined to hoodwink the critics, and the threat was greater than the improper interpretation or valuation of a single text. Because knowledge builds on knowledge, a fake that managed to elbow its way into a literary history threatened to distort the interpretation and evaluation of every other text. If the canon of texts from which we derive the criteria for historicist judgements of the Middle Ages includes fakes, then all judgements based on those criteria are suspect. The metaphor of counterfeit money, widely understood to taint the entire monetary supply, was often invoked, as when George Chalmers, one of the central figures in the
³⁸ Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ (London, ), . ³⁹ Percy, Reliques, i, p. vi. ⁴⁰ Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, –), xxi. , , .
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disputes over the Ireland Shakespeare Papers, complained in : ‘The principal laws relative to counterfeit Coin having been made above a century ago,’ he writes, ‘the tricks and devices of modern times are not in many instances provided for, and hence it is that the Country is deluged with base Money.’⁴¹ A literary economy deluged with base metals was unsustainable. There can be no question that the fabrications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries damaged scholarly inquiry: they delayed the development of some areas of knowledge and they put inquirers off some subjects for a while. They forced inquirers to second-guess all their source material, and it is possible that a fear of being deceived was enough to discourage someone from announcing new insights. It is tempting to think that, had antiquarians not wasted the s arguing over the authenticity of Chatterton’s Rowley poems, they might have spent time on more serious research into authentic fifteenth-century poetry. But the forgeries also had benefits—they always do. In the words of Anthony Grafton, one of the pioneers in the study of literary fakes, For , years and more, forgery has . . . stimulated vital innovations in the technical methods of scholars . . . forgery has stimulated, both in the forgers who tried to create convincing documents and in the critics who tried to unmask them, the development of a richer sense of what the past was really like. Forger and critic have been entangled through time like Laocoon and his serpents; the changing nature of their continuous struggle forms a central theme in the development of historical and philological scholarship.⁴²
Fake medieval documents, whatever their provenance and whatever variety of fakery they embodied, encouraged critics to examine their evidence with an unprecedented degree of attention. Forgers, in other words, taught the critics how to read Chaucer and Langland. Fakers provided crash courses in certain kinds of textual analysis, and forced detectors to develop new and increasingly sophisticated techniques. The two sides were engaged in a battle of escalating sophistication, as sometimes one pulled into the lead, sometimes another. And so it may well be the case that the investigation of fakes, rather than wasting the time of the inquirers, actually spurred them on to their best work. The most powerful weapon in the detectors’ arsenal was the anachronism.⁴³ According to a historicist conception of cultural development, a work should reflect the age in which it was produced; if it contains things incompatible with the age in which it is said to have been produced, it must be a fake. And so critics scrutinized documents looking
⁴¹ George Chalmers, Facts and Observations Relative to the Coinage and Circulation of Counterfeit or Base Money, with Suggestions for Remedying the Evil (London, ), . ⁴² Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. ⁴³ I discuss the role of anachronisms in eighteenth-century discussions of forgery in Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), ch. .
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for slips in chronology. All the major varieties of anachronism-detection show up in the case of England’s best-known faker of medieval works, Thomas Chatterton, whose poems were published ‘as the supposed productions of , a priest of Bristol, in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV’.⁴⁴ Thomas Chatterton lived and died in the eighteenth century, and his ‘discovered’ poems prompted little attention during his lifetime. After his death, though—an apparent suicide at the age of —there was a wide-ranging discussion of the authenticity of the works he published.⁴⁵ His pseudomedieval productions hung over the reception of medieval texts well into the nineteenth century. Major editions of and works about Chatterton appeared in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and , along with dozens of reissues and minor editions. No actual fifteenth-century poet had half the influence of this fake fifteenth-century poet, and certainly none did more to advance literary scholarship. From the time of their first collected publication, authenticity was a concern with the Rowleyan poems. In Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century ()—the title itself advertises doubt— editor Thomas Tyrwhitt opens his preface with both a declaration of their putative date and an indication of his concerns about accurate transmission: The Poems, which make the principal part of this Collection, have for some time excited much curiosity, as the supposed productions of , a priest of Bristol, in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV. They are here faithfully printed from the most authentic MSS that could be procured. . . . Nothing more therefore seems necessary at present, than to inform the Reader shortly of the manner in which these Poems were first brought to light, and of the authority upon which they are ascribed to the persons whose names they bear.⁴⁶
He concludes by offering no definitive verdict—‘It may be expected perhaps, that the Editor should give an opinion upon this important question; but he rather chooses, for many reasons, to leave it to the determination of the unprejudiced and intelligent Reader’⁴⁷—but the seeds of doubt have clearly been planted. The ensuing dispute over the authenticity of the Rowley poems is one of the emblematic scholarly disputes of the Romantic age, occupying dozens of pamphlets and magazine articles beginning in the s and continuing for decades—as late as , an editor could write that ‘The controversy concerning the authenticity of
⁴⁴ Thomas Chatterton, Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (London, ), p. v. ⁴⁵ Current thinking has entertained the possibility, even the probability, that the self-administered arsenic was intended as a treatment for a sexually transmitted disease, not as a suicide attempt. In legend, though, Chatterton was a tragic but glorious suicide. ⁴⁶ Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol (), p. v. ⁴⁷ Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol (), p. xiii.
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the Poems ascribed to , has called for the abilities of the most competent judges . . . but no decision, which can be regarded as final, has hitherto been given.’⁴⁸ The resulting controversy is valuable for showing how Romantic-era readers understood the relationship between literature and history, and established the modes according to which older texts would be read through the nineteenth century. Anachronisms were the most common means of challenging the authenticity of the Rowley poems, though what sorts of anachronism exercised critics varied. The easiest sort of textual anachronism to detect today is probably the lexical. Tools like the Oxford English Dictionary enable us to say with reasonable confidence that the word drawing in the Rowleyan poems—‘a drawynge of Geoffreis Logge’—is unlikely to be fifteenth-century in origin, since there is no other evidence of this sense of the word before . Before June , though, when the fascicle of A New English Dictionary containing the part of the alphabet running from doom to dziggetai appeared, few critics had the temerity to make such claims. A few dedicated antiquarians with prodigious memories might sometimes hazard that sort of negative statement, but they left themselves open to embarrassment if their opponents were able to turn up even a single counterexample. Orthography provided another hunting-ground for anachronisms, though the variability of spelling in authentic documents from the Middle Ages made it easier for fakers to improvise their own eccentric spellings. Chatterton gave his forgeries an air of antiquity by cloaking modern words in pseudo-antique spellings. It is easy to be cynical about their approach to old orthography: take your text; double every consonant that can be doubled; change i’s to y’s and vice versa; sprinkle silent e’s liberally; be a little more sparing with silent h’s. When the forgers went too far, though, critics were ready to argue that orthography could betray deception. This led to discussions about the degree of variability in actual medieval and early modern texts, as when John Wyatt noted that ‘The orthography of that age was . . . little reducible to any fixed standard . . . But that a vast superfluity of letters is generally observable, no man at all conversant with antient writings can doubt.’⁴⁹ For supporters of Chatterton it was an article of faith that no spelling, however outré, was too eccentric to be from the fifteenth century. The sceptics’ case depended on establishing the true limits of medieval orthography and developing the rudiments of an understanding of textual transmission in English manuscripts—genuinely new territory. Because they lacked authoritative tools for dating individual words and spellings, investigators of potential fakes were forced to fall back on modes of expression and poetic form, and those are much more difficult to quantify. Early in his book on
⁴⁸ Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, ed. L[ancelot] S[harpe] (Cambridge, ), p. v. ⁴⁹ John Wyatt, A Comparative Review of the Opinions of Mr James Boaden . . . and of James Boaden, Esq. (London, []), .
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Chatterton, Edmond Malone—one of the great champions of historicist reading— identifies four fronts on which he plans to challenge Chatterton’s supporters: I will confine my observations to these four points. . The versification of the poems attributed to Rowley. . The imitations of modern authours that are found in them. . The anachronisms with which they abound. . The hand-writing of the Mss.—the parchments, &c.⁵⁰
Chatterton’s metre was one of the central concerns, not just for Malone but for many in the disputes of the s and s. The argument advanced by Malone and other sceptics was that the metre of Rowley’s poetry was too mellifluous, too regular, to be a product of the fifteenth century. Even if Chatterton’s poetry is ‘disfigured by old spelling’, Malone argues, the verse flows ‘as smoothly as any of Pope’s’, and that, for Malone, is ‘a matter difficult to be got over’.⁵¹ Another reader believed the excellence of the versification was the first indication of fraud: ‘On our first opening these Poems,’ the writer for the Monthly Review observed, ‘the smooth style of the harmony, the easy march of the verse, the regular station of the cæsura, the structure of the phrase, and the case and complexion of the thoughts, made us presently conclude they were Mock Ruins.’⁵² Another who deployed this mode of argument was Horace Walpole, generally cast as the villain in the Chatterton story, though he does not deserve that role. ‘I told him also,’ Walpole recalled to a friend, ‘that I had communicated his transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed MSS. I mentioned their reasons, particularly that there were no such metres known to the age of Richard I—and that might be a reason with Chatterton himself to shift the era of his productions.’⁵³ Implicit in these arguments is a conception of the development of English prosody, from the crude and hobbling metres of the Middle Ages to the smooth and flowing numbers of Walpole’s own century. The change had not begun to happen in the fifteenth century; only with figures like the Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey, and later Edmund Waller did English versification achieve what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers saw as its proper footing. ‘And here let me remark how incredible it is’, writes Walpole, that Rowley, a monk of a mere commercial town, which was all Bristol then was, should have purified the language and introduced a diversified metre more classic than was known to that polished courtly poet, Lord Surry; and this in the barbarous
⁵⁰ Edmond Malone, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley. nd edn (i.e. st collected edn) (London, ), . ⁵¹ Malone, Cursory Observations, . ⁵² Monthly Review, (Apr. ): . ⁵³ Walpole to Bewley, in Letter to the Editor, cited in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, –), xvi. .
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and turbulent times of Henry VI and that the whole nation should have relapsed into the same barbarism of style and versification, till Lord Surry, I might almost say, till Waller, arose. I leave to better scholars and better antiquaries to settle how Rowley became so well versed in the Greek tragedians. He was as well acquainted with Butler, or Butler with him, for a chaplain of the late Bishop of Exeter has found in Rowley a line of Hudibras.⁵⁴
Walpole read the opening of The Battle of Hastings II—‘Oh Truth! immortal daughter of the skies, | Too lyttle known to wryters of these daies’—and scribbled in the margin of his copy, ‘Is it credible that these shou’d not be modern lines?’⁵⁵ Even Rowley’s defenders, like Jacob Bryant, had to address the too-good-to-be-true prosodic mastery, grudgingly admitting, ‘I have had my scruples upon this head.’ He was left with a not very convincing explanation: although Rowley’s versification was better than anything else yet discovered in the fifteenth century, still, ‘In every age there will be a difference among writers; and whatever number of poets there may be found, it is a great chance, but there will be some one person more eminent than the rest.’⁵⁶ The notion of progressive ‘improvements’ in prosody is consistent with a more general sense that literary taste was improving over time. It was widely assumed, especially in the early eighteenth century, that literature was improving—perhaps not since classical antiquity, although there were diverse opinions on this, but certainly since the Middle Ages. A few isolated geniuses may have transcended their age; this was the usual way to account for Chaucer. But even the geniuses were still marred by the bad taste of their culture. This attitude can be seen in some of the arguments over Chatterton’s authenticity. Walpole was one of many to raise this question: An amazing genius for poetry, which one of them possessed, might flash out in the darkest age—but could Rowley anticipate the phraseology of the eighteenth century? His poetic fire might burst through the obstacles of the times; like Homer or other original bards, he might have formed a poetical style—but would it have been precisely that of an age subsequent of his own by some hundred years? Nobody can admire the poetry of the poems in question more than I do—but except being better than most modern verses, in what do they differ in the construction?⁵⁷
Not everyone, though, was willing to admit that literary taste was progressive, or that modern poetry was superior to that of the Middle Ages. Jacob Bryant, for instance, though he saw the appeal of this sort of argument, was reluctant to embrace it:
⁵⁴ Walpole to William Bewley, May , in Walpole, Correspondence, xvi. –. ⁵⁵ Walpole’s annotations to Poems Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, ed. Jeremiah Milles (London, [i.e. ]), British Library, shelfmark C..i., p. . ⁵⁶ Jacob Bryant, Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley, in Which the Authenticity of Those Poems Is Ascertained (London, ), –. ⁵⁷ Walpole to William Bewley, May , in Walpole, Correspondence, xvi. .
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Many have maintained, that if these poems were of the date supposed, and if poetry had been so much improved, it would never have fallen off afterwards: as there would have been a standard for future composition. . . . But herein, I think, there is much uncertainty: and whoever proceeds upon these principles, may form a very wrong judgment: for this rule of determination is certainly very precarious.⁵⁸
This hesitation is telling, because alongside the belief that literary taste was improving was the contrary belief that it was declining. Hugh Blair made this point in his defence of Macpherson’s Ossianic poems: ‘ancient poems . . . promise some of the highest beauties of poetical writing. Irregular and unpolished we may expect the productions of uncultivated ages to be; but abounding, at the same time, with that enthusiasm, that vehemence and fire, which are the soul of poetry. For many circumstances of those times which we call barbarous, are favourable to the poetical spirit.’⁵⁹ The historicist argument presented by Malone, Warton, and Walpole implied that only scholars could read the literature of the past; more important, it implied that only scholars would want to read inferior poetry redeemed only by historical priority. Not everyone was prepared to accept these claims, and this sort of progressive historicist scholarship provoked a powerful reaction. As Beth Lau observes, ‘The Rowley controversy in many respects was a debate over who had the right to construct and interpret the national literary past.’ The ‘progressive view of English literary history, which claimed that poetry steadily evolved from crude primitive origins to a more advanced, sophisticated state’, was under threat, and those who embraced Chatterton’s fantasy version of medieval Bristol ‘wished to prove that Medieval English poetry was vital and accomplished, perhaps even more so than the supposedly more refined literature that replaced it’.⁶⁰ By bringing historicist criticism into play, forgers taught the world to read medieval literature with an antiquary’s attention, but they also may have taught the world not to care about ‘authenticity’. William Blake defiantly declared he did not care about the evidence that medieval texts were not really medieval: ‘I Believe both Macpherson & Chatterton, that what they say is Ancient, Is so.’⁶¹ Others followed Blake’s lead in embracing an imaginative recreation of a fantasy version of the past. Chatterton’s imaginary Middle Ages inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, and continued to provide material for Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. They created their pseudo-medieval pastiches for an audience that had perhaps grown weary of worrying about these things.
⁵⁸ Bryant, Observations, . ⁵⁹ Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation, in Howard Gaskill (ed.), The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . ⁶⁰ Beth Lau, ‘Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats’, Studies in Romanticism, / (Winter ): –, at . ⁶¹ The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, ), .
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S Bak, János M., Patrick J. Geary, and Gábor Klaniczay (eds), Manufacturing a Past for the Present: Forgery and Authenticity in Medievalist Texts and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Leiden: Brill, ). Brooke, Christopher N. L., ‘Approaches to Medieval Forgery’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, (–): –. Dutton, Dennis (ed.), The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ). Freeman, Arthur, and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Gaskill, Howard (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). Grafton, Anthony, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Groom, Nick, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Groom, Nick (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, ). Groom, Nick, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, ). Moore, Dafydd, Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson’s ‘The Poems of Ossian’: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Ruthven, K. K., Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Stewart, Susan, Crimes of Writing: Crimes in the Containment of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).
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F posterity, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (–) is known primarily for being the first scholar to recognize the significance of Beowulf and for introducing the poem to the world, whereas Rasmus Rask (–) stands as a founder of the science of comparative linguistics. But for their own era, the two men probably were most important as principal founders of Anglo-Saxon and Norse philology. Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin was born at Bær in Hrútafjörður, Iceland, son of county magistrate (sÿslumaður) Jón Teitsson and Elín Einarsdóttir. His father died when he was years old, and he was raised by his maternal aunt þórunn Einarsdóttir and her husband Brynjólfur Jónsson at Ljárskógar in Dalasýsla. He later adopted as his patronym a Latinized version of the name of a paternal ancestor, county magistrate þorkell Guðmundsson (d. ) (Jørgensen : ). Upon graduating from the school at Skálholt in , he continued his studies in Denmark, first at the Metropolitan School, from where he graduated in , and later at the University of Copenhagen, where he completed a degree in philosophy in and a law degree in . It was during this time that he edited the canonical laws of Bishop þorlákr (published ¹) and Bishop Árni (²) and translated Vígslóði, the manslaughter section of Grágás into Latin ().³ ¹ Jus Ecclesiasticum Vetus sive Thorlace-Ketillianum Constitutum An. Chr. MCXXIII—Kristinrettr hinn Gamli edr þorláks oc Ketils Biscupa. Ex Mss Legati Magnæani cum versione latina, lectionibus variantibus, notis, collatione cum jure canonico, juribus ecclesiasticis exoticis, indiceque vocum. ² Jus Ecclesiasticum Novum sive Arnæanum Constitutum Anno Domini MCCLXXV—Kristinrettr inn Nyi edr Arna Biscups. Ex Mss Legati Magnæani cum versione latina, lectionum varietate notis, collatione cum jure canonico, conciliis, juribus ecclesiasticis exoticis, indiceque vocum. ³ Particulam Primam Juris Criminalis Islandici antiqvi latine versi cum qvatuor circa jurisprudentiam domesticam.
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In , Thorkelin was appointed secretary to the Arnamagnaean Commission, which was set up in as a governing body for the Arnamagnaean Foundation, the collection of manuscripts and printed books that Árni Magnússon bequeathed, along with his estate, to the University of Copenhagen on his death in . Thorkelin oversaw the publication of an edition in two volumes of documents concerning Denmark and Norway housed in the Arnamagnaean Collection,⁴ contributed a Latin translation to an edition of Eyrbyggja saga,⁵ and prepared indices and genealogies to an edition of Hungrvaka.⁶ Further publications include Konga-Erfda ok Rikis Stjorn sive Successio Regia et Regni Administratio ex Illustriss. Biblioth. Suhmiana cum versione latina, et lectionum varietate (); Statuta Provincialia Statuta Sinodalia Casus Episcopales Casus Papales Excommunicationes contra raptores predones & rerum ecclesiasticarum invasores Interrogationes in confessione faciendæ (); Analecta qvibus Historia, Antiqvitates, Jura, tam publicum qvam privatum Regni Norvegici illustrantur (); Vathrudnismal sive Odarum Eddae Sæmundiane Una–qvam ex Cod. Membr. Biblioth. Regiæ cum versione latina, varietate lectionum, notis philologicocriticis (); a glossary to an edition of Orkneyinga saga;⁷ Samling af Danske KirkeLove (), which he completed on the death of the previous editor; and Dania et Norvegiae in Sigillis Seculli XIII. Redivivæ Ex Leg: Arna Magnæano (). In , Thorkelin was employed as assistant keeper in the Royal Privy Archives. Three years later, he received the title of ‘professor extraordinarius’ at the university, next in line for a chair on the Philosophical Faculty, and in , he was promised the position of keeper of the Royal Privy Archives, when that position became vacant. Modelling, it seems, his trajectory on that of Jacob Langebek (–), keeper of the Royal Privy Archives in –, who had made research trips to Sweden, Finland, Russia, and other Baltic countries, where he made copies of documents pertaining to Danish history, Thorkelin decided to examine what Danish and Norwegian antiquities might be found in Great Britain and Ireland.⁸ He obtained a paid leave of absence from his positions as secretary to the Arnamagnaean Commission and assistant keeper of the Royal Privy Archives and was awarded a generous two-year travel grant from King Christian VII (–), which was later extended, from a special fund (Fonden ad usus publicos) with the stipulation that he deposit the documents he had discovered in the National Archives on his return to Copenhagen. Thorkelin set sail from Elsinore in the summer of and arrived at London. From this home base, he made frequent trips to Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. While it
⁴ Diplomatarium Arna-Magnæanum, exhibens Monumenta Diplomatica, qvæ collegit et Universitati Havniensi testamento reliqvit Arnas Magnæus historiam atqve jura Daniæ, Norvegiæ, et vicinarum regionum Illustranta. Ex Bibliotheca Legati Arna-Magnæani (). ⁵ Eyrbyggia Saga, sive Eyranorum historia (). ⁶ Hungurvaka sive Historia primorum qvinqve Skalholtensium in Islandia episcoporum (). ⁷ Orkneyinga Saga sive Historia Orcadensium (). ⁸ Kevin S. Kiernan, The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, ), –.
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is unclear if Thorkelin had prior knowledge of the Beowulf manuscript (British Library, Cotton, Vitellius A. xv) before his arrival in England, we know through Humfrey Wanley’s catalogue description that it came to his attention while he was working in the British Museum in October . Believing the poem to be an early Danish epic originally composed in Danish, he commissioned in a copyist, whom Kiernan has identified as James Matthews, accomptant to the Trust of the British Museum, to make a transcript of the poem, known today as Thorkelin A, and later, sometime between and , he himself made another, Thorkelin B.⁹ The transcripts are listed among the manuscripts of the Royal Library in Copenhagen as NkS and to. Thorkelin spent six years in England, Scotland, and Ireland working in the British Museum, the King’s Library of Buckingham House, and other libraries. He had a special gift for friendship and socialized with members of the Royal Society and other influential people, including Whig politician Horace Walpole (–) and George Dempster of Dunnichen (–), a member of Parliament. He may also have socialized with Lord Francis Rawdon, Marquess of Hastings (–), to whom he dedicated Fragments of English and Irish History in the Ninth and the Tenth Century in Two Parts, Translated from the original Icelandic, and Illustrated with Some Notes (), consisting of extracts from Icelandic sagas dealing with transactions between Scandinavians and the British. Members of the social elite were clearly impressed with him, for in , he was made an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, received an honorary doctorate in law from the University of St Andrews, and in , he wrote to his benefactor, Privy Councillor Johan von Bülow (–), that the Archbishop of Canterbury had offered him a keepership of the British Museum—an offer that he declined because of his love for Denmark and the Danish royal house. This devotion is also clear from his encomium about Prince Regent Frederik VI, Sketch of the Character of His Royal Highness the Prince of Denmark (),¹⁰ which two years later was translated into Danish and German. Kristian Eberhard Voss, keeper of the Royal Privy Archives, died in early , and the position was immediately offered to Thorkelin, who accepted and returned to Denmark the same year. He also resumed his position as secretary to the Arnamagnaean Commission and held both positions until his death. The year after his return to Copenhagen, Thorkelin married Gunhild Cecilie Hvidsteen (née Dybe), a prosperous widow. Her late husband, Poul Christensen Hvidsteen, had owned a brewery, which Thorkelin took over and operated. The couple had six sons, but three died in infancy, and only one survived Thorkelin.¹¹
⁹ Kiernan, Thorkelin Transcripts, –, . ¹⁰ The complete title of the work is Sketch of the Character of His Royal Highness the Prince of Denmark. To which is added, a Short Review of the Present State of Literature and the Polite Arts in that Country. Interspersed with Anecdotes. In Four Letters, by a Gentleman Long Resident in Copenhagen to a Friend in London. ¹¹ E. H. Harvey Wood, ‘Letters to an Antiquary: The Literary Correspondence of G. J. Thorkelin (–)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, ), .
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Thorkelin brought with him to Denmark a respectable number of Danish and Norwegian antiquities, though it is difficult to ascertain just how much material Thorkelin copied and had copied for him during his fieldwork abroad. Some of his copies were recatalogued under new bindings, others were dismembered and rebound with new shelf marks, and yet others were recopied by him in Copenhagen.¹² Most importantly, however, he brought with him the two transcripts of Beowulf and the idea of publishing an edition of the poem based on the two transcripts.¹³ The edition was not published until under the title De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV. Poēma Danicum Dialecto Anglosaxonica. Ex Bibliotheca Cottoniana Musaei Britannici. The delay was due in part to the British bombardment of Copenhagen in the fall of , which destroyed Thorkelin’s home and all of his work on the edition and forced him to begin anew, and in part to the fact that his position as keeper of the Royal Privy Archives was not conducive for research, though he wrote the short treatise Beviis, at de Irske, ved Ostmannernes Ankomst til Irland i det ottende Aarhundrede, fiortiene en udmærket Rang blandt de meest oplyste Folk i Europa paa de Tider,¹⁴ translated the New Testament into Icelandic,¹⁵ contributed an introduction to an edition of Egils saga,¹⁶ wrote the article ‘Auswahl von Wörtern, welche die Schotten, Isländer und Dänen mit einander gemain haben’,¹⁷ and prepared an edition and Latin and Danish translations of the Gulaþingslög of King Magnús lagabætir!¹⁸ Moreover, Thorkelin held a number of responsible posts (he was appointed justitsråd in , etatsråd in , and konferensråd in ), managed the brewery, and was an avid collector of books and manuscripts, all of which would seem to have made demands on his time. Thorkelin’s wife died in , and only two years later, one of his sons, George Dempster, who since had worked as a scribe in the Archives, passed away after a long illness. The tragedies took a toll on Thorkelin’s own health, and during his last years, he worked mostly from home.¹⁹ Thorkelin’s contemporary Rasmus Rask was born in Brændekilde on the island of Funen, Denmark, son of the tailor Niels Hansen Christiansen Rasch and Birthe Rasmusdatter. Rask received his early education at Odense cathedral school, where he was revealed to be a linguistic genius. His studies included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Danish, French, and German; to these he added Old Norse, Dutch, Faroese, ¹² Kiernan, Thorkelin Transcripts, . ¹³ J. R. Hall, ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf: Thorkelin’s () and Kemble’s ()’, in D. G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the Manchester Conference (Cambridge: Brewer, ), . ¹⁴ The treatise was published in Nye Samling af det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter, (). ¹⁵ Þat Nya Testamente vors drottins og endurlausnara Jesu Christi, eptir þeirri annari útgáfu þes á Islendsku (). ¹⁶ Egils-Saga sive Egilli Skallagrimii Vita (). ¹⁷ The article was published in Idunna und Hermode, (). ¹⁸ Regis Magni Legum Reformatoris Leges Gula-Thingenses (published ). ¹⁹ Aðalgeir Kristjánsson, Nú heilsar þér á Hafnarslóð: Ævir og örlög í höfuðborg Íslands – (Reykjavík: Nýja bókafélagið, ), .
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Greenlandic, Gothic, Creole, and English, and also did considerable work on Danish dialects. Upon the completion of his examen artium in , Rask enrolled at the University of Copenhagen, where he studied theology, but he soon abandoned that field in order to devote himself fully to language studies. With the help of Rasmus Nyerup (–), professor, librarian, and provost at Regensen, whom Rask had assisted in his translation of Snorri’s Edda,²⁰ Rask was appointed assistant keeper of the University Library in , though without salary, and received a free place at Regensen. From then on, a steady stream of publications by Rask began to flow. His first articles included studies of runic inscriptions, and by he had completed a grammar of Icelandic (Vejledning til det Islandske eller gamle Nordiske Sprog, ). Although descriptive, the grammar provides some historical explanations, notably an explanation of what Jacob Grimm later named Umlaut. His work on the grammar also led to Den danske Grammatiks Endelser og Former af de islandske Sprog forklarede (completed – and ), in which he explains the simplified inflectional system of Danish by comparing it with the highly inflectional system of Icelandic. Moreover, he made significant contributions to Björn Halldórsson’s Icelandic dictionary (Lexicon Islandico-Latino-Danicum, ). In , Rask entered a competition sponsored by the Danish Scientific Society where each competitor was to submit a study of the origins of Old Norse. His research took him to Sweden (spring ) to study Swedish, Finnish, and Sami, and to Iceland (–) to perfect his Icelandic. While travelling in Iceland, Rask brought together a collection of about manuscripts, many of them noteworthy items relating to modern Icelandic literature and history. He returned via Scotland to Denmark, where he presented the finished work, Undersögelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (), to the committee and won the prize. While abroad, Rask had been appointed amanuensis at the University Library of Copenhagen and promoted to librarian, but his desire to continue his work on the prize essay took him to Asia. For his prize essay had concluded that Icelandic stems from Greek, a derivative of Thracian, which in his view was the root of Greek and Latin, but led him to believe that there were languages in Eastern Europe and Asia that might be even closer to the root. An invitation from Arvid August Afzelius (–) to teach Icelandic in Stockholm offered the possibility of beginning the journey, for which he had received the promise of financial support from von Bülow, and in he left Denmark. He stayed in Stockholm until , where he did some preliminary work on Finnish, Russian, Arabic, and Persian but concentrated primarily on Old Norse; he published a Swedish revision of his Icelandic grammar,²¹ an edition of Snorri’s Edda,²² in collaboration with Afzelius an edition of the Poetic Edda,²³ an Old Norse reader,²⁴
²⁰ ²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁴
Edda eller Skandinavernes hedenske Gudelære (). Anvisning till Isländskan eller Nordiska Fornspråket (). Snorra-Edda ásamt Skáldu og þarmeð fylgjandi ritgjörðum (). Edda Sæmundar hinns Fróða (). Sýnishorn af fornum og nýjum norrænum ritum í sundrlausri og samfastri ræðu ().
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and finally an Anglo-Saxon grammar and reader,²⁵ which was no doubt inspired by his earlier publication of an edition of a section of King Alfred’s geographical treatise²⁶ and his collaboration with Frederik Grundtvig (–) on the latter’s Danish translation of Beowulf.²⁷ Travel funds obtained for him by Peter Erasmus Müller (–), professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, at the presentation of the prize essay to King Frederik VI, to whom it was dedicated, enabled Rask, who on the same occasion had been named professor, to continue his journey through Finland to St Petersburg, where he completed an essay on Finnish,²⁸ studied Russian, and some Persian, Arabic, and Armenian, and did some preliminary work on Sanskrit. Additional travel funds obtained by Müller made it possible in for Rask to travel via Moscow to Astrakhan, where he paused to study Persian and Kalmuck, and from there to Tbilisi, where he wrote a draft of a preliminary continuation of the prize essay.²⁹ From Tbilisi he continued via Tehran, Esfahan, Persepolis, Shiraz, and Bushehr to Bombay, where he sojourned to study Avestan and Pehlevi and purchased, with a grant from the Danish government, a collection of manuscripts in these languages, which he later gave to the University Library. From Bombay, he travelled to north India through Gwalior and Varanasi to the Ganges, sailed down the river to the Danish colony Frederiksnagor (Serampore), and arrived in Madras in , where he studied the Dravidian languages of India and completed an essay in English on Avestan (‘Some Remarks on the ZendAvesta and Zend Language’, Udvalgte Afhandlinger, : –). From Madras he travelled via the Danish colony Trankebar by sea to Sri Lanka, where he stayed for almost a year. Here he worked on Pali and Sinhalese: his writings comprise the chapter on pronunciation in Benjamin Clough’s A Compendious Pali Grammar with a Vocabulary in the Same Language () and a draft of a Pali grammar, Singalesisk Skriftlære (); moreover, he assisted Clough with his two-volume Dictionary of the English and Singhalese, and Singhalese and English Languages (–) and acquired a collection of rare palm-leaf manuscripts in the two languages. Upon his return to Denmark in , he gave these manuscripts to the Royal Library in Copenhagen in return for the financial help he had received from the authorities in the two Danish colonies in connection with a ship accident, which caused him to return to Denmark almost a year later than planned. Despite pressure to continue work on the materials he had brought with him from Asia, Rask turned his attention to runology and began work on a Danish orthography and a Danish etymological dictionary, though his first publication after his return was a ²⁵ Angelsaksisk Sproglære tilligemed en kort Læsebog (). ²⁶ ‘Ottars og Ulfstens korte Rejseberetninger med dansk Oversættelse, kritiske Anmærkninger og andre Oplysninger’ (). ²⁷ Bjowulfs Drape: Et gothisk Helte-Digt fra forrige Aar-Tusinde af Angel-Saxisk paa Danske Riim (). ²⁸ ‘Afhandling om den finniske Sprogklasse’ (Samlede Afhandlinger, : –). ²⁹ ‘Undersøgelse om det gamle nordiske eller islandske Sprogs Slægtskab med de asiatiske Tungemaal’ (Samlede Afhandlinger, : –; Udvalgte Afhandlinger, : –).
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Spanish grammar (Spansk sproglære, ). The reasons for his apparent loss of interest in Asian languages are not clear.³⁰ It appears that he had expected to be appointed professor of Asian languages, but all he managed to secure was a raise. In , Rask was offered a position as librarian at Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, and using the offer as leverage, he again applied for a position at the university and again received only the offer of a raise, though this time with the stipulation that he publish an essay on ancient Asiatic literature. In , the professor of Asian languages died. Rask applied for the position, which was essentially a position in Semitic languages with emphasis on Hebrew, but it was not filled, and instruction in Hebrew was assigned to a lecturer in theology, Matthias Hagen Hohlenberg (–). It seems that Rask then set his sight on a professorship in Semitic, and after having given public lectures on Arabic and written two books on the ancient Egyptian and Hebrew calendars (Den gamle ægyptiske Tidsregning, , and Den ældste hebraiske Tidsregning, ) he once again applied for the professorship, but it seems that his application was not considered. Following Nyerup’s death in , Rask applied for his positions as provost of Regensen and chief librarian, and was offered the latter (Nyerup’s professorship went to Christian Molbech, –). Two years later, in , the professorship of Asian languages again became vacant, for Hohlenberg, who in the meantime had been promoted to professor, was nominated as a member of the board of governors. Rask was offered the position, which he accepted, but being ill from tuberculosis he died less than a year after his appointment. Although Rask’s years in Denmark after his return from Asia were less than ideal in terms of academic appointments, they were productive. The books that he published comprise a Frisian grammar (Frisisk sproglære, ), a work on Danish orthography (Forsøg til en videnskabelig dansk Retskrivningslære, ), an Italian grammar (Italiænsk Formlære, ), a study of Afrikaans (Vejledning til Akra-Sproget på Kysten Ginea, med et Tillæg om Akvambuisk, ), a modern Icelandic reader (Lestrarkver handa heldri manna börnum, ), a Danish grammar (A Grammar of the Danish Language for the Use of Englishmen, ), an Old Norse grammar (Kortfattet Vejledning til det oldnordiske eller gamle islandske Sprog, ), an Old Norse reader (Oldnordisk Læsebog, ), an English grammar (Engelsk Formlære, ), and a Sami grammar (Ræssoneret Lappisk Sproglære, ). He also had a hand in the publication of editions of Icelandic sagas (Fornmanna sögur, – (–), (), (), and ()) through the Royal Nordic Society of Ancient Writings (Det kongelige nordiske Oldskriftselskab), which he had founded in . Works not prepared for publication include grammars of German, Dutch, Portuguese, and French. Some of these were published posthumously in Samlede Afhandlinger (–), edited by his half-brother Hans Kristian Rask (–); others were edited by Louis Hjelmslev in Udvalgte
³⁰ Frederik Rönning, Rasmus Kristian Rask. Et Mindeskrift i Anledning af Hundredårsdagen for hans Fødsel (Copenhagen: Schønberg, ), . Otto Jespersen, Rasmus Rask: I hundredåret efter hans hovedværk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, ), –.
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Afhandlinger (–). Still other manuscripts of studies are in the Royal Library and the University Library in Copenhagen.³¹ Although Thorkelin and Rask were contemporaries and both resided in Copenhagen, they did not collaborate, though certainly their paths crossed. Rask’s letters to von Bülow reveal that he had little respect for Thorkelin personally and professionally. In a letter dated April , a frustrated Rask reported that Guðmundur Pétursson (–) had felt offended that Rask and not he had been selected by the Arnamagnaean Commission to prepare an Icelandic dictionary and had complained to Thorkelin, who accordingly persuaded Christian Cold (–), a member of the Commission, to turn the work over to Guðmundur Pétursson (Breve, : –). In a letter dated June , Rask accused Thorkelin of deliberately keeping the publisher busy so as to delay the publication of Rask’s scholarly works and made reference to a previous run-in with Thorkelin in the University Library (Breve, : –). In a letter dated March , Rask expressed his indignation at the annual report of the activities of the Arnamagnaean Commission, which in his view was a reflection of the Commission’s secretary—full of contradictions, lies, and twaddle to cover up for the lack of accomplishments—and argued that Thorkelin had made himself an object of derision and caused Iceland irreparable harm by his translation of the New Testament (Breve, : –). And in a letter dated December , he claimed that Thorkelin had abandoned all scholarly work in favour of his translation of the New and Old Testaments into Icelandic (Breve, : ). It is possible that these unflattering comments stem from Rask’s bitterness about Thorkelin being awarded the Order of the Dannebrog in , an order of Denmark given to honour faithful citizens for meritorious service. Despite his numerous and ground-breaking scholarly contributions, Rask did not receive such honours in his lifetime. The accolades he did receive were posthumous: on the centenary of his birth a biography was published by Rönning;³² the centenary of the publication of his prize essay was marked by a biography by Jespersen;³³ a Rask-Hjelmslev symposium was held at the University of Copenhagen in on the occasion of the -year jubilee of the university; on the bicentennial of Rask’s birth an exhibition featuring him was held at the University Library, while a collection of essays on him was published by scholars at the University of Copenhagen. Yet Rask was not alone in his views about Thorkelin, for a number of contemporary scholars, including Erich Christian Werlauff (–) and Niels Matthias Petersen (–), voiced similarly negative sentiments, and most of the reviews of Thorkelin’s scholarly works were also quite negative. One of the sharpest criticisms came from Grundtvig, who interestingly and unwittingly caused Thorkelin’s and Rask’s scholarship to intersect. In his review of Thorkelin’s edition of Beowulf, ³¹ See Breve fra og til Rasmus Rask, vols, ed. Louis Hjelmslev (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, ). Breve fra og til Rasmus Rask: Brevkommentar og håndskriftkatalog by Marie Bjerrum (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, ), iii. –. ³² Rönning, Rasmus Kristian Rask. ³³ Jespersen, Rasmus Rask.
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Grundtvig sharply attacked Thorkelin for having misunderstood the poem and blamed him for having made almost as many errors as words in the edition and even more in the Latin translation. Thorkelin answered in kind, denied all charges, and challenged Grundtvig to produce a better translation of the poem, offering him all possible help.³⁴ The debate continued, but eventually the two men came to be reconciled, and Grundtvig began his translation of the poem into Danish with the help of Rask, who procured Thorkelin’s two transcripts for Grundtvig’s use. The two evidently intended to prepare a new, critical edition of Beowulf, but only a few months later Rask set out on his long journey, and nothing came of the edition. In a letter to Nyerup dated January , Rask asked Nyerup to tell Grundtvig not to wait for him, ‘because while the grass grows, the cow dies’ (Breve, : ; my translation). Rask later published his Angelsaksisk Sproglære tilligmed en kort Læsebog, in which a section of Beowulf (lines –) was properly edited for the first time: ‘By careful attention to Thorkelin’s transcription and by careful emendation, Rask was able to produce a text immeasurably superior to Thorkelin’s’.³⁵ For his improvements over Thorkelin’s text, Rask gave credit to Thorkelin, who had let him use his transcripts. Still Thorkelin’s claim to fame remains his work on Beowulf. While his editio princeps of the poem has value only in the sense that it invigorated interest in Anglo-Saxon studies, it also had immediate impact on not only the scholarship of Grundtvig and Rask, but also on that of a number of others including John Conybeare (–), who in made a collation of Thorkelin’s edited text with the manuscript; Frederic Madden (–), who in made his own collation of Thorkelin’s edited text with the manuscript, finding errors that Conybeare had missed; Benjamin Thorpe (–), who in travelled to London to collate Thorkelin’s edited text; and finally John M. Kemble (–), who in transcribed the poem from the manuscript.³⁶ The Thorkelin transcripts, however, have served philologists well until modern times. These transcripts provide more nearly complete texts of the poem than the text as it is now preserved in the Cotton manuscript. The manuscript was damaged in the fire in Ashburnham House, and the crumbling away of its scorched parts had gone far before museum authorities arranged to have it placed in paper frames in . These frames cover many letters, and the Thorkelin transcripts, which were made before the deterioration had begun, restore or help to restore about , letters.³⁷ As a comparative linguist who managed to define the Into-European family as a whole with a clarity and completeness unequalled in his time, Rask exercised a profound influence on Danish philology as an introduction to West Norse studies for several generations of philologists, through his grammars, readers, and editions. His Vejledning til det Islandske eller gamle Nordiske Sprog formed the basis, directly or
³⁴ T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder (eds), Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, ), , . ³⁵ Franklin Cooley, ‘Early Danish Criticism of Beowulf’, English Literary History, (): –. ³⁶ Hall, ‘First Two Editions’, . ³⁷ Kiernan, Thorkelin Transcripts, p. ix.
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indirectly, for all subsequent Old and Modern Icelandic grammars. His editions of Old Norse texts have been superseded, but their importance for their time is not to be passed over lightly. His Angelsaksisk Sproglære tilligemed en kort Læsebog proved very significant for Old English studies, though its full weight was not felt until Thorpe, who from about to had studied at the University of Copenhagen under the direction of Rask, translated an enlarged and revised edition of the grammar into English. It was through his translation, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue with a Praxis (), prepared with the cooperation of Rask, that Thorpe came to introduce English scholars to the ‘new philology’ and came to abandon the Anglo-Saxon typeface (retaining only thorn and eth).³⁸ As scholars, Thorkelin and Rask were foils of one another. One was a gentleman scholar, the other an academic scholar. Common to them was that they were representative of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, and in particular, its belief in the glorious ancient past of the Nordic countries. Their scholarly works, which invigorated interest in, and appreciation of the Germanic past of Britain and Scandinavia, were products of this cultural movement.
S Birrell, T. A., ‘The Society of Antiquaries and the Taste for Old English –’, Neophilologus, (): –. Bjork, Robert E., ‘Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin’s Preface to the First Edition of Beowulf, ’, Scandinavian Studies, (): –. Bjork, Robert E., ‘Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies’, in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (eds), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, ), –. Cooley, Franklin, ‘Early Danish Criticism of Beowulf’, English Literary History, (): –. Fjalldal, Magnús, ‘To Fall by Ambition: Grímur Thorkelín and his Beowulf Edition’, Neophilologus, (): –. Hall, J. R., ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf: Thorkelin’s () and Kemble’s ()’, in D. G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the Manchester Conference (Cambridge: Brewer, ), –. Kiernan, Kevin S., Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript. Rev. edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). Malone, Kemp, ‘Rasmus Rask’, Word Study, (Oct. ): –. Repr. in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, –, vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), i. –.
³⁸ Phillip Pulsiano, ‘Benjamin Thorpe (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York and London: Garland Publishing, ), .
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Shippey, T. A., and Andreas Haarder (eds), Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, ). Wolf, Kirsten, ‘Rasmus Rask (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York and London: Garland Publishing, ), –. Wood, E. H. Harvey, ‘Letters to an Antiquary: The Literary Correspondence of G. J. Thorkelin (–)’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, .
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.................................................................................................................................. T imaginations of all the major British Romantics were haunted by the Middle Ages. Inheritors of the great antiquarian revival of the mid-eighteenth century, they grew up reading Gray and Percy, Warton and Chatterton, Hurd and Home; and having learned from them to appreciate the value of medieval and early modern literature and culture, they took ‘Gothic’ authors such as Chaucer, Spenser, Dante, and Tasso, as well as the anonymous medieval balladeers of England and Scotland, as role models for their own literary ambitions.¹ Looking back on his youth, Wordsworth claimed that as a young man he had feared poetic comparison only with ‘Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton’.² Milton had been viewed as an exemplary English poet ever since his critical reclamation by Addison in –, and Shakespeare had been celebrated almost without reservation since the Shakespeare revival championed by Johnson and Garrick in the s; but the addition of Chaucer and Spenser to Wordsworth’s list bears witness to the change in attitudes which had taken place by his day, and the extent to which the literature of Britain’s ‘Gothic Ages’—a capacious eighteenth-century term which could encompass everything from the fall of Rome to the early seventeenth century—had come to be seen as a valuable cultural resource, rather than merely as so much evidence of what Elizabeth Cooper had referred to, half a century before, as ‘the Gothique Rudeness that was handed down to us by our unpolished Fore-Fathers’.³
¹ On the significance of the figure of the medieval poet for the Romantics, see Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Houndmills: Macmillan, ). ² Cited in Joseph Wittreich (ed.), The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, ), . ³ Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library (London, ), p. xii.
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In the literature of the later eighteenth century, this sense of the medieval epoch as an age of considerable cultural achievement had co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with the older assumption that the ‘Gothic ages’ had been a period of ignorance and cultural decline. As James Watt has stressed, the ‘Gothic’ literature of the s and s was as likely to idealise the medieval past as to demonise it; but, by the mid-s, ‘Gothic’ fiction (i.e. fiction set in the ‘Gothic Ages’) had begun to focus increasingly on the violence and superstition of the medieval past, becoming strongly associated with the themes of fear and horror in the process.⁴ The novelist whose work was most central to this transformation was Ann Radcliffe, who first won major commercial success with her third novel, The Romance of the Forest (). Her romances became the reading matter of choice in Britain during the years which followed the French Revolution, inspiring a host of imitators who attempted to copy her formula—famously mocked by Austen in Northanger Abbey—of beautiful heroines being menaced by evil villains in threatening Gothic locales. Pursued by a variety of wicked clerics and aristocrats who embodied all the very worst traits of ‘Gothic’ civilisation, her sensitive, sentimental heroines experienced every variety of terror, horror, and dread; and thus, in the fiction of Radcliffe and her many imitators, the medieval castle or abbey came to symbolise the violence and injustice of the Gothic past. This sense of the Middle Ages as an epoch of horror and darkness was powerfully reinforced by the new interest in German literature which arose in Britain during the s. With a very few exceptions, such as Klopstock’s Messiah and Goethe’s Werter, German literature had been almost unknown in eighteenth-century Britain, and very few German works had been translated into English; but, in the s, British audiences belatedly started to become aware of the extraordinary literary flowering which had taken place in Germany over the previous decades.⁵ Probably the most influential German works to be translated into English during this period were Schiller’s historical tragedy Die Räuber (, tr. ) and Bürger’s ghost-ballad Lenore (, tr. ), both of which had an immediate and wide-ranging impact; and the same appetite for scenes of medieval terror which had made Radcliffe’s romances so successful also created a market for English translations of German fiction and poetry which dealt with similarly Gothic and horrific themes.⁶ British demand for such fiction soon outstripped the available German supply, resulting in the appearance of a wave of German-themed British Gothic fiction—some of it spuriously claiming to have been translated ‘from the German’—which featured much higher levels of violence, horror, ⁴ James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ⁵ On German literature in eighteenth-century Britain, see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁶ On the impact of Bürger and Schiller, see Diane Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, – (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, ), –; on the influx of German Gothic into Britain, see Watt, Contesting the Gothic, , and Robert Le Tellier, Kindred Spirits: Interrelations and Affinities between the Romantic Novels of England and Germany (–) (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, ), –.
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mystery, and supernaturalism than had previously been common in the genre.⁷ The most famous exponent of this German-style Gothic fiction in Britain was Matthew Lewis, himself a translator of German fiction into English; Lewis shot to fame with his gory Gothic novel The Monk (), but he went on to devote most of his literary career to the writing of plays. The first of these was the enormously successful supernatural drama The Castle Spectre (), which—unlike The Monk—had a medieval setting. Not all of these German-influenced works of Gothic fiction were actually set in the Middle Ages; but their plots often centred around ‘Gothic’ buildings and institutions which dated back to the medieval period. Coupled with the thenpopular Gothic ‘romances’ of Radcliffe and her imitators, this German-style Gothic fiction did much to strengthen the contemporary tendency for British authors to write about the ‘Gothic Ages’ as an era primarily characterized by villainy and violence. The impact of this medieval-themed German literature upon the British Romantics was immense. In , after reading a translation of Die Räuber, Coleridge wrote breathlessly to Southey: ‘My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart? . . . Why have we ever called Milton sublime?’⁸ He went on to write a poem, ‘To the Author of “The Robbers”’ (), in which he described Schiller as a ‘Bard tremendous in sublimity’, and imagined that actually seeing Schiller would be enough to move him to tears; later, in , he would translate Schiller’s Wallenstein into English.⁹ In , Hazlitt was similarly overwhelmed, recalling later that ‘The Robbers . . . stunned me like a blow’, while in Lamb was so struck by Lenore that he wrote enthusiastically to Coleridge: ‘Have you read the Balad [sic] called “Leonora” in the d No. of the “Monthly Magazine”?–. If you have—!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’¹⁰ Walter Scott’s first published works were translations from the German: Translations and Imitations from German Ballads () and Goetz of Berlichingen (), the latter being the first English translation of Goethe’s medieval drama, Götz von Berlichingen (). Blake drew three illustrations for Lenore in , while Coleridge and Wordsworth both set to work on historical tragedies written in imitation of Die Räuber, which would eventually become Osorio () and The Borderers (). Both Wordsworth and Coleridge attempted to learn German—the latter with rather more success than the former—and in they travelled together to Germany in order to improve their ⁷ Examples of British Gothic novels set in Germany, some of them spuriously claiming to be based on German originals, include The Castle of Wolfenbach () and The Mysterious Warning () by Eliza Parsons, The Midnight Bell () by Francis Lathom, and Orphan of the Rhine () by Eleanor Sleath, all of which have earned a kind of immortality by being recommended to Catherine by Isabella in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. On the acceptance of the supernatural in German Gothic fiction, at a time when it was still highly contentious in France and Britain, see Daniel Hall, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, ), –. ⁸ Letter to Southey, Nov. ; S. T. Coleridge, Letters, ed. Earl Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), i. . ⁹ On Coleridge’s relationship with German literature, see Ashton, German Idea, –. ¹⁰ William Hazlitt, ‘Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth’, Lecture VIII, in Selected Writings: –, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, ), v. ; Charles Lamb, letter to Coleridge, July , in Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin Marrs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), i. .
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knowledge of the language; a step which would have seemed bizarre just ten years earlier, when few English writers viewed German as a literary language worth studying.¹¹ This German influence was particularly pronounced in the works both men wrote during the s, and strongly coloured their treatment of medieval material in their subsequent poetry.
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.................................................................................................................................. Of the major British Romantics, only Blake was largely untouched by these literary developments. He had taken an interest in medieval art and architecture at an early age; James Basire, to whom he was apprenticed, worked as an engraver for the Society of Antiquaries, and he set the young Blake to work copying the medieval carvings in Westminster Abbey, which seem to have made a deep impression upon him.¹² His first collection of poems, the Poetical Sketches (), included an ‘Imitation of Spenser’, three pieces with medieval settings (‘Fair Eleanor’, ‘Gwin, King of Norway’, and ‘King Edward the Third’), and ‘Prologues’ for two unwritten historical plays on Edward IV and King John. Near the end of his life, in , he would summarize his views on medieval Gothic art in lines engraved into his anti-Classical polemic, ‘On Virgil’: Grecian is Mathematic Form. Gothic is Living Form¹³
For Blake, the artistic and architectural traditions of medieval Europe represented an ideal of pure Christian art, drawing upon ‘the Sublime of the Bible’, and largely untainted by ‘the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the Sword’ which he saw as disfiguring the neoclassical art of his own day.¹⁴ In he wrote in praise of ‘the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages’, whom he described as poor but holy men, ‘Wandering about in sheep skins & goat skins of whom the World was not worthy’.¹⁵ Against an entrenched cultural narrative which saw the Dark Ages as a period of ignorance and artistic decline, Blake asserted a counter-narrative in which the traditional exemplars of the ‘Dark Ages’, the barbaric Goth and the superstitious medieval monk, were actually far less destructive than the supposedly civilized nations which they had helped to destroy. As he wrote ¹¹ On Wordsworth and Coleridge’s time in Germany, see Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (London: Viking, ), –, and Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), ch. . ¹² G. E. Bentley Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. ¹³ William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman, rev. edn (New York: Anchor Books, ), . ¹⁴ Blake, Poetry and Prose, . ¹⁵ Blake, Poetry and Prose, .
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in ‘On Homer’, ‘it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars’.¹⁶ Blake’s idiosyncratic interpretation of history was rooted in a tradition of radical medievalism which located the glory of medieval Britain in the ‘Gothic liberty’ supposedly enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxons, before their conquest and subjugation under the ‘Norman yoke’ of the feudal system.¹⁷ Thus Blake very deliberately located his imagined golden age of Gothic Christianity not in the late medieval period, when the feudal system was at its height, but centuries earlier, in ‘what we call the Dark Ages’. Rather than praising the feudal warrior-aristocrats beloved by the more conservative British medievalists of his day, Blake articulated a critique of such medieval military heroics as early as ‘Gwin, King of Norway’, in which he wrote: O what have Kings to answer for, Before that awful throne! When thousand deaths for vengeance cry, And ghosts accusing groan!¹⁸
Blake’s ideological opposition to such warlike monarchies and aristocracies was only intensified by the events of the French Revolution, of which he was a passionate supporter; and his first epic, The French Revolution (), celebrated the revolutionaries as destroyers of a tyrannical government which derived its repressive powers from the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages. In place of the medieval knights and kings celebrated by the conservative Gothic literature of the period, whom he saw as having founded the very despotic monarchies against which the revolutionaries were now struggling, Blake praised the hermits, monks, artists, and architects of the Dark Ages, whom he viewed as free and holy men who had devoted their lives to art and faith rather than ‘War and Dominion’.¹⁹ Throughout his career, Blake incorporated medieval design elements into his art; and his use of Gothic arches, stylized foliage, and a proliferation of grotesques and gargoyles all help to connect Blake’s engravings back to the productions of ‘the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals’, whose works he had studied as an apprentice. ‘Gothic’, for Blake, was always a positive term, and never one associated with evil or barbarity. In his view, the true barbarians had been the ‘Greek and Latin slaves of the Sword’ and their medieval and modern successors: civilizations which worshipped wealth, authority, and violence, and thus warred continually upon ‘Gothic liberty’ in both politics and art. As young men, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge also supported the French revolutionaries, and their political sympathies—along with their fascination with German literature such as Die Räuber, a work so fiercely radical that the French National Assembly voted in to make Schiller an honorary citizen of revolutionary ¹⁶ Blake, Poetry and Prose, . ¹⁷ On the ‘Norman yoke’ tradition, see Chapter of the present volume. ¹⁸ Blake, Poetry and Prose, . ¹⁹ Blake, Poetry and Prose, .
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France—strongly coloured their treatment of the Middle Ages in their early works.²⁰ The outbreak of the French Revolution had triggered a sharp debate in Britain over the value of those ‘Gothic’ institutions which had maintained and defined the French Ancien Régime: Edmund Burke, in his anti-revolutionary Reflections, famously lamented that the Revolution demonstrated that ‘the age of chivalry is gone . . . and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’, while the pro-revolutionary writer Helen Maria Williams, who did not share Burke’s assessment of the value of the medieval ‘age of chivalry’, celebrated the ‘sublime’ Revolution as the culmination of Europe’s centuries-long struggle to free itself from ‘the ignorance, the superstition, [and] the barbarous persecution of Gothic times’.²¹ In the years immediately following the Revolution, there was a strong temptation for pro-revolutionary writers such as the young Romantics to follow the lead of radicals like Williams in taking a very negative view of the Middle Ages; the worse the monarchical medieval institutions of Europe could be shown to have been, the more justified the French revolutionaries were in overthrowing them. Such writers found ample inspiration in the then-popular Gothic fiction of Radcliffe, and in the German-style medieval fiction written in imitation of Naubert, Kahlert, and Schiller, all of which generally depicted the feudal civilizations of the ‘Gothic Ages’ as having been dominated by violence and injustice. Most of the earliest medieval-themed works of the young Romantics fit into this radical Gothic mode, in which the feudal aristocracy is depicted as the opponent of all that is best in medieval culture: its art and literature, its piety, and its traditions of ‘Gothic liberty’. Southey’s drama Wat Tyler () directly stages the clash between the people of England and the unjust authority of the medieval monarchy and aristocracy, depicting the Peasant’s Revolt of as a justified uprising against the greed and cruelty of the feudal system. Southey and Coleridge’s epic poem Joan of Arc () rejects the conservative medievalist interpretation of the Middle Ages as a golden age of British heroism, depicting the medieval British armies in France as murderous and cruel, and reserving special opprobrium for Henry V; instead they celebrate Joan, the enemy of Britain, who like Wat Tyler is lauded as a champion of the common people. Wordsworth’s early verse drama The Borderers () depicts the Middle Ages as a period of violence and instability, in which ordinary people are left vulnerable to the depredations of a predatory feudal aristocracy; like Joan and Wat, Wordsworth’s outlaw hero Mortimer fights on behalf of the common people, and, like Joan and Wat, he is ultimately unsuccessful, although his career ends in mournful retirement rather than in death. At this stage in their careers, all three poets primarily wrote about the Middle Ages as a dark epoch in which an oppressive military aristocracy gradually crushed the remnants of Britain’s ‘Gothic liberty’ by force of arms, thus implicitly demonstrating why the descendants and successors of that aristocracy needed to be ²⁰ Peter Mortensen, ‘Robbing The Robbers’, Literature and History, rd ser. / (): –. ²¹ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ; Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France (Delmar, NY: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, ), i/. .
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challenged in the present day. In the context of the s, Southey and Coleridge’s works are fairly straightforward parables about the need for revolutionary action in the face of aristocratic oppression. Wordsworth’s play is much more conflicted about the viability of revolutionary political struggle, reflecting its author’s anguished relationship with the French Revolution; but, like the works of Coleridge, Southey, and Blake, it primarily depicts the feudal aristocratic order as a form of tyranny sustained by violence, undeserving of support in either its medieval or modern forms. Coleridge’s two greatest ‘Gothic’ poems of the period—‘Christabel’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—were much less explicitly ideological. Both were tales of the supernatural, of the sort which had been popularized by Bürger’s Lenore and Scott’s translations from the German; a form which would soon descend to the level of selfparody in Matthew Lewis’s collection of gory, German-style supernatural horror poetry, Tales of Wonder (), but which was still an exciting novelty in . Such poems had introduced the idea, still new and controversial in Britain, of writing poetry featuring explicitly supernatural events, modelled on the supernatural romances of the ‘Gothic Ages’; a trend that was also visible in the novels and drama of the later s, which, under the influence of German models, were starting to flirt with the use of the supernatural, after decades of viewing such material as entirely inappropriate for modern authors. The most appropriate setting for these stories was, of course, understood to be the ‘Gothic Ages’ themselves, when such magical beings had been believed in and written about, and could thus be represented without requiring—to use a phrase invented by Coleridge to describe this very phenomenon—quite as much ‘suspension of disbelief ’.²² Coleridge’s two ‘Gothic’ poems are probably the supreme examples in English of this form of medieval-themed supernatural poetry, growing out of his fascination with both contemporary German literature and with British Gothic fiction.²³ Like Bürger’s Lenore, Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ used both a historical setting and a traditional verse form, namely the ballad; the version of the ‘Rime’ was even written in an approximation of early modern English, as though to suggest that it was, itself, a survival from the ‘Gothic Ages’, like the forged ‘Rowley’ poems of Thomas Chatterton. The feudal social order of the Middle Ages, harshly criticized in Joan of Arc, is depicted relatively sympathetically in ‘Christabel’, and is simply irrelevant to the ‘Rime’; in these works, Coleridge, like Scott, employs medieval settings not because they provide him with an opportunity for ideological critique, but because the influx of German Gothic literature had made it possible to write tales of the supernatural within such settings which it would otherwise be unacceptable to write at all. As Michael Gamer has shown, some early critics attacked the ‘Rime’ precisely because they saw it as an example of the degenerate taste for showy but ultimately meaningless German-style tales of supernatural terror; and Coleridge’s critiques of ²² S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in Works, vii/ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . ²³ On Coleridge’s reading of Gothic fiction, see Arthur Nethercot, The Road to Tryermain: A Study of the History, Background, and Purposes of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ), –.
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Gothic fiction in his reviews for Critical Review, along with Wordsworth’s famous attack on ‘sickly and stupid German tragedies’ in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, should perhaps be understood as attempts by both writers to differentiate their own supernaturally themed works from the German-influenced Gothic literature of the period, which was rapidly coming to be seen as a low-status genre with highly questionable ideological implications.²⁴ It is certainly true that the ‘Rime’ is a vastly superior poem to anything which appeared in, say, Tales of Wonder; nonetheless, both do share a common origin in the craze for fantastical Gothic tales which followed the translation of Bürger’s Lenore into English, which did so much to foster an interest in scenes of medieval magic and terror amongst the young poets of s Britain.
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.................................................................................................................................. As the years of war with France wore on, the youthful radicalism of the early Romantics—the not-so-youthful Blake excepted—increasingly ebbed away. The French Revolution had not brought about the new age of peace and liberty they had hoped for; instead, it had unleashed a seemingly interminable series of wars, which threatened Britain’s very survival as an independent power. In , with French troops massing for an invasion on the far side of the Channel, Wordsworth wrote a series of patriotic sonnets, including this one: It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open Sea Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity Hath flowed, ‘with pomp of waters, unwithstood,’ Road by which all might come and go that would, And bear our freights of worth to foreign lands; That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our Halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.²⁵ ²⁴ Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, –; William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. For Coleridge’s reviews of Gothic fiction, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Constable, ), –. ²⁵ William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems –, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –.
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In this poem, the legend of Britain as an ancient land of ‘Gothic liberty’, the home and origin of ‘British freedom’ from ‘dark antiquity’ onwards, is not placed in opposition to the military feudalism of the later Middle Ages, but united with it. Radical interpretations of medieval Britain as an ancient land of liberty oppressed by a Norman aristocracy are grafted onto a conservative account of medieval Britain in which those very aristocrats are celebrated as national heroes: the ‘invincible Knights of old’ are here figured not as the enemies and abolishers of ‘British freedom’, but as its guardians, and it is precisely because ‘we’ are descended from them that ‘we must be free or die’. What Wordsworth attempts here is the evocation of a national past which can unite rather than divide the people of Britain, placing radical enthusiasts for ‘British freedom’ alongside the sort of people who have old suits of armour hanging in their halls, rather than against them; for, in this time of national emergency, such unity is required if the French are to be repelled. The same point is made in another of his sonnets: Vanguard of Liberty, ye Men of Kent, Ye Children of a Soil that doth advance It’s haughty brow against the coast of France, Now is the time to prove your hardiment! To France be words of invitation sent! They from their Fields can see the countenance Of your fierce war, may ken the glittering lance, And hear you shouting forth your brave intent. Left single, in bold parley, Ye, of yore, Did from the Norman win a gallant wreath; Confirmed the charters that were yours before;— No parleying now! In Britain is one breath; We all are with you now from Shore to Shore:— Ye Men of Kent,’ tis Victory or Death!²⁶
Here, the success of the men of medieval Kent in winning concessions from their Norman overlords is presented not as part of an ongoing struggle for the restoration of ‘Gothic liberty’ within Britain itself, but as an example of their ancestral capacity to resist the power of France—a capacity which is described with the antiquated, medieval word ‘hardiment’, and which is apparently to be enforced with a distinctively medievalsounding ‘glittering lance’. Clearly somewhat anxious that the modern ‘men of Kent’, like those in Wat Tyler’s day, might wonder whether the contemporary equivalents of those Norman aristocrats might be their descendants in the House of Lords rather than the armies of France, Wordsworth moves to cut off any such speculation, insisting that the men of Kent should not even think about negotiating with the French—‘No parleying now!’—and that the whole nation, including them, is united against the French threat: ‘In Britain is one breath; / We all are with you now from shore to shore’. ²⁶ Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, .
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In these years the British government was concerned that, if the French did invade, they might not be able to rely upon the loyalty of the people of Britain: elsewhere in Europe, local factions sympathetic to the French revolutionaries had sometimes sided with the invading French armies against their own governments. (Fears such as these led to Blake’s arrest in , after he and his wife were accused of threatening to side with Napoleon when the invasion came.²⁷) In these poems, Wordsworth invokes Britain’s medieval heritage as part of an attempt to persuade his countrymen that Britain was, and always had been, a nation united by its devotion to the heroic defence of liberty. There was a great deal of this sort of patriotic literary medievalism around at the time, most obviously in the form of the many nationalistic historical epics that were then being written: in alone two epic poems on King Alfred and one on Richard I were published, along with Ogilvie’s epic Britannia, which dealt with Britain’s distant past, and Cowley’s Siege of Acre, which emphasized the continuity between medieval and modern British military heroism by celebrating Britain’s recent victory over the French on the same site where Richard I had triumphed over the Saracens over six hundred years before.²⁸ This new literature of patriotic medievalism largely displaced the fashion for German Gothic, which by was falling out of favour in Britain, attacked for its supposed extravagance by critics as diverse as Francis Jeffrey and William Wordsworth.²⁹ In the new patriotic poems, the knights and kings of medieval Britain are presented as exemplars of justice and heroism, whose victories demonstrate that there is no enemy that Britain cannot overcome so long as it stays true to its glorious heritage. Coleridge’s poetic fragment, ‘The Knight’s Tomb’ (), communicates a similar faith in the value of Britain’s ancient chivalry, describing the medieval knight ‘Sir Arthur O’Kellyn’ not as an agent of oppression, but as a ‘good man’, the wielder of a ‘good sword’, who deserves his place in heaven ‘with the saints’.³⁰ Faced with the threat of imminent invasion by a French army which they no longer trusted to deliver a better future for anyone except Napoleon, both Wordsworth and Coleridge seem to have decided that an ancient military aristocracy might not be such a bad thing for Britain after all. These heroic knights and kings proliferate in the later poetry of Wordsworth and Southey; and in this they, like many other writers of the period, were doubtless influenced by the colossal popularity of Walter Scott. As already mentioned, Scott began his literary career as a translator of German poetry and drama in the s, before going on to edit a collection of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (–), which aimed to preserve the folk-songs of Scotland—many of them of ²⁷ Bentley, Stranger, –. ²⁸ On the patriotic epic tradition, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ch. , and Joseph Crawford, ‘Milton’s Heirs’, Studies in Romanticism, / (): –. ²⁹ On the waning fortunes of German literature in Britain after , see Ashton, German Idea, –, –. ³⁰ S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Knight’s Tomb’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
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medieval origin—just as Percy and Herder had done for those of England and Germany. He first became truly famous for his poetic tales of Scottish chivalry, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (), Marmion (), and The Lady of the Lake (), all of which owed something to the Scottish folk-ballad tradition, and rather more to the medieval-themed poetry of the German Romantics. In the wake of Scott’s success, the English poetry of the s began to fill with heroic medieval knights and warriors, in a continuous patriotic celebration of the nation’s glorious medieval past: in Wordsworth’s later poetry, such chivalric heroes can be seen in his poems ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’ (–), ‘Effusion’ (), and ‘Composed at Cora Linn’ (), while in Southey’s works, they serve as the heroes in his epic poems Madoc () and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (). As I have stressed, it is no coincidence that all of these poems were written during the Napoleonic wars. As young radicals, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey had looked to the medieval epoch for clues regarding the origins of those social fault lines which they saw as disfiguring contemporary British society; but, faced with the looming Napoleonic threat, they turned instead to that same past for a vision of ancestral British heroism with which to comfort and unify a divided and embattled nation.
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.................................................................................................................................. By the time the Napoleonic wars finally ended, medievalism—in both its patriotic and ‘Gothic’ forms—had become an entrenched presence within British literature. While Wordsworth was growing up it had still been something of a minority interest; but by the popularity of Gothic fiction, poetry, and drama, along with the proliferation of medieval-themed epics and the works of Scott, had made such subject matter commonplace. A fascination with knights and ladies, abbeys and castles, no longer required apology or explanation; it had come to be taken for granted that any British author might reasonably take an interest in the famous deeds of his medieval ancestors. Byron, Keats, and Shelley all shared this contemporary fascination with medieval history and culture. The young Byron—the only one of the British Romantics who could credibly claim descent from ‘the invincible Knights of old’—wrote two poems on his ancestral home at Newstead, ‘On Leaving Newstead Abbey’ and ‘Elegy on Newstead Abbey’ (both published in ), which mythologized the glories of his aristocratic medieval forebears. Percy Shelley’s grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, had been so carried away by the medieval enthusiasms of the s that he had a neo-Gothic castle built in Sussex. The younger Shelley’s adolescent fascination with German Gothic literature culminated in a number of poems of medieval supernatural horror—most notably the rather excitably titled horror-poem ‘Ghasta, or, the Avenging Demon!!!’ (, which he described as having been inspired by ‘a few unconnected German Stanzas’, but also clearly owed a great deal to Lewis’s The Monk) as well as two extremely poor Germanstyle Gothic novels, Zastrozzi () and St Irvyne (), which mercifully sank
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without trace.³¹ Radcliffe’s Gothic romances contributed to Keats’s fascination with the culture of the Middle Ages; later, he would refer jokingly to the ‘fine Mother Radcliffe’ names he bestowed upon his own romantic medieval tales.³² With the opening up of Europe following the end of the Napoleonic wars, all three increasingly turned their attentions south, to Italy; and just as the s had witnessed a flood of literary interest in medieval Germany, so the s and s saw a revival of interest in medieval Italy, powerfully stimulated by Henry Cary’s translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia into English blank verse. Leigh Hunt led the way with his Story of Rimini (), and Shelley, Byron, and Keats all followed him in writing works with medieval and early modern Italian settings, including The Lament of Tasso (), The Cenci (), ‘The Prophecy of Dante’ (), ‘Francesca of Rimini’ (), ‘Isabella’ (), Marino Faliero (), and The Two Foscari (); Shelley also wrote translations and adaptations of Dante, and some fragments of a drama on Tasso. (Scott, once again, had got there long before; he had been reading Ariosto and Tasso since he was a teenager.³³) Even the elderly Blake participated in this enthusiasm, producing his magnificent sequence of illustrations to Dante in –, in the very last years of his life.³⁴ While medieval Germany had tended to be viewed by British writers as a land of open tyranny and violence—an impression powerfully reinforced by the many s British novels and poems set in medieval Germany, which often made heavy use of scenes of horror—medieval and early modern Italy was generally figured as a setting dominated by luxury, corruption, and intrigue.³⁵ This was, to some extent, a matter of each generation finding the version of medievalism which it required: just as the example of medieval Germany had been used by the first generation of British Romantics to critique the repressive Ancien Régime states of Europe, whose symbol in pro-revolutionary writing was always the ‘Gothic’ medieval fortress-prison of the Bastille, so the example of medieval Italy was now used to critique the new European order, which Shelley and Byron saw as being hopelessly corrupt. (It also allowed them to comment indirectly on the wretched state of Italy under Austrian rule; in his Preface to the ‘Prophecy of Dante’, Byron describes the literature of the Italians as ‘all that is left them as a nation’.³⁶) Although their emphasis changed, for the most part they continued to depict the ‘Gothic Ages’ as a period of injustice, however gorgeously adorned; ³¹ Percy Shelley, ‘Ghasta’, in Poetical Works, ed. Neville Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), i. . ³² Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Feb. ; John Keats, Letters, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ii. . ³³ C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, ), . ³⁴ On Dante’s significance to the British Romantics, see Antonella Braida, Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), passim; Brand, Italy, –; and Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, ), ch. . ³⁵ On the fascination of the British Romantics with medieval Italian history, often depicted in a highly Gothicised fashion, see Brand, Italy, , and Cavaliero, Italia Romantica, ch. . ³⁶ Lord Byron, ‘Preface’, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), iv. .
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and in this Byron, Keats, and Shelley, all of whom were sympathetic to contemporary radical politics, signalled their dissatisfaction with the idealized visions of patriotic medievalism which were then being offered up by the now firmly conservative Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott. In the longer run, it was Scott’s vision which won out; and compared to the titanic shadow cast by his works, the influence of the other British Romantics on the ways in which the nineteenth century made sense of its medieval past was relatively minimal. But they did help to assimilate into English literature a disparate range of influences— German, Italian, radical, conservative, Gothic—which made it possible for British authors to write about the Middle Ages in new ways; and, in particular, it was through their works that the German-style Gothic literature of the s was translated into a form which would prove acceptable to later generations of British poets. Critics in might have seen Coleridge and Lewis as largely interchangeable purveyors of debased Germanic supernaturalism, but over the next forty years the fortunes of what we now call Gothic and Romantic literature diverged sharply; the works of the Romantics, Blake excepted, became established parts of the national literary canon, while the Gothic poetry and fiction of their lesser-known contemporaries came to be dismissed as morally degenerate sub-literature. It was thus largely through the poetry of the Romantics that genres such as the medieval tale of the supernatural and the Gothic tale of terror were able to live on into the high literature of mid-nineteenth century. To the Victorian era, they bequeathed a new sense of both the beauty and horror of the medieval past, and a new awareness of the symbolic and imaginative possibilities of ‘Gothic’ supernaturalism; and their legacy can be plainly seen in the works of Tennyson, Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and all those other Victorian authors who partook so heavily, and so frequently, of the riches of the Romantic Gothic imagination.
S Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Braida, Antonella, Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). Cavaliero, Roderick, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, ). Crawford, Joseph, ‘Milton’s Heirs’, Studies in Romanticism, / (): –. Curran, Stuart, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Fay, Elizabeth, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Houndmills: Macmillan, ). Hall, Daniel, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, ). Hoeveler, Diane, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, – (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, ).
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Le Tellier, Robert, Kindred Spirits: Interrelations and Affinities between the Romantic Novels of England and Germany (–) (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, ). Mortensen, Peter, ‘Robbing The Robbers’, Literature and History, rd ser. / (): –. Watt, James, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Wittreich, Joseph (ed.), The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, ).
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The Lake Poets’ Architecture of the Past ......................................................................................................................
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.................................................................................................................................. S in valediction to his son, the old shepherd in William Wordsworth’s ‘Michael, A Pastoral Poem’ (), bids him retain as an ‘emblem of the life’ of his forefathers, and hence as an ‘anchor and . . . shield’, the plan of a Sheep-fold, the first stone of which the boy now lays.¹ The conspicuously absent and imaginary Sheep-fold (‘A work which is not here’) forms, in Michael’s mind, ‘a covenant / . . . between us’ (ll. –). His self-imposed duty to complete what his son has symbolically begun is the corollary of the duty imposed upon Luke to redeem for his father his own ‘patrimonial fields’ (l. ). But the putatively natural ‘covenant’ is rapidly denatured when transplanted with Luke into the ‘dissolute’ world of the city (l. ). Chosen by Michael as the solution to a financial crisis rather than the sale of any ‘portion’ (l. ) of his subsistence farm, the ‘covenant’ was in fact always as unnatural as what Tom Paine called Edmund Burke’s sacrifice of the substantial good of the present generation to a fetishized patrimony.² Michael sends Luke to one ‘Kinsman’ in order to ‘repair’ the ‘loss’ caused by the old shepherd having been ‘bound / In surety’ for another—his ‘industrious’, now-bankrupt, ‘Brother’s Son’ (ll. –, –). But once removed from anything more than an imaginary connection to his father’s hastily invented
¹ ‘Michael’, in William Wordsworth, The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis, vols (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, ), –; ll. –. ² Tom Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
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patrimonial tradition, Luke ‘slacken[s] in his duty’, gives himself over to ‘evil courses’, and ends in a ‘hiding-place beyond the seas’ (ll. –). And Michael, whose ability to endure this catastrophic loss of posterity depends upon evading the kind of social and historical consciousness that first motivated the sacrifice of his son, works compulsively at the non-building of the palliative emblem of ancestry that is not there (ll. –).³ Michael’s ‘unfinished Sheep-fold’ is a fitting emblem of Wordsworth’s sense of history. As a ruin recovered in verse, the Sheep-fold echoes the recuperative endeavours and acts of ‘commemorative piety’ of eighteenth-century antiquarianism—which took castles, churches, and ruined walls as ‘constituent parts of the nation’s past, which in turn was a formative part of the present’.⁴ But as a fragment forestalled in the act of construction, to which ‘appertains’ a ‘history / Homely and rude’ (ll. , –), the unwrought Sheep-fold also registers a crisis within the sense of history more widely. In Reinhart Koselleck’s account, the French Revolution completed the erosion since the Reformation of the ‘static time’ that could be ‘experienced as tradition’.⁵ The Revolution also marks the emergence of a new ‘unknown’ time, ‘within which and out of which’ the nation state ‘weaves’ itself, ‘trapped within’ an incipiently ruinous ‘temporal structure’ of ‘static mobility’.⁶ For the medieval historian, Sharon Turner, this heapingup of the historical horizon made all preceding histories ‘dwindle into insignificance’— requiring historians of the future to be ‘more picturesque’ in order to be ‘more comprehensive’, ‘exhibit[ing] great operations’ by bringing ‘events together more in their connected masses’.⁷ As Nicholas Halmi notes, ‘the temporalization of history and the aestheticization of ruins’ were at once ‘opposed in theory’ and ‘compatible in fact’.⁸ A sense of historical foreshortening and acceleration becomes visible in architectural images such as Joseph Gandy’s ‘Imagined view of the Bank of England in ruins’ () and Charles Cockerell’s architectonic capriccio, ‘The Professor’s Dream’ (; Figure .).⁹ ³ See also the reading of ‘Michael’ in Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. ⁴ Rosemary Sweet, ‘Gothic Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, ), –, . ⁵ Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Kenneth Tribe (Cambridge, MA: Columbia University Press, , tr. ), . ⁶ Koselleck, Futures Past, , . ⁷ Sharon Turner, The History of England During the Middle Ages. nd edition, vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, ), i, pp. xi–xii. ⁸ Nicholas Halmi, ‘Ruins without a Past’, Essays in Romanticism, (): –, . ⁹ Gandy’s ‘Imagined view’ is reproduced in Iain McCalman (ed.), Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. There is a neat summary of Cockerell’s ‘Dream’ in a report on the Royal Academy Exhibition in The Builder: ‘Mr. Cockerell, R.A., has a very remarkable drawing, called “The Professor’s Dream”, and which is a synopsis of the principal architectural monuments of ancient and modern times, drawn to the same scale, in forms and dimensions ascertained from the best authorities, and arranged on four terraces—Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, and Mediaeval and Modern; the last of these shows more particularly the comparative heights. The Egyptian temples and propylea [sic] form the foreground, including also the sphinx, the Memnon, &c. Then come the Athenian wonders; and the Roman Coliseum, Pantheon, and (once called) Jupiter Sator: the Pisan
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Figure .. C. R. Cockerell, RA, ‘The Professor’s Dream’, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Meanwhile, writers from Horace Walpole and Constantin-François de Volney to Anna Barbauld and Charles Lamb associated visions of ruin with the feeling of being or of ‘having been modern’.¹⁰ In his correspondence of late with the Sinologist Thomas Manning, Lamb (‘of the India-House, London’) spins a series of ‘improbable romantic fictions’, including the imaginary death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, leaving ‘behind him more than forty thousand’ unfinished ‘treatises’.¹¹ Lamb envisions London, England, and ‘the whole western world’ accelerating past its own futurity while Manning remains ‘stationary’ in the east: ‘St Paul’s Church is a heap of ruins; the Monument isn’t half so high as you knew it, divers parts being successively taken down
Tower, the Cathedrals of Cologne, Strasburg, Antwerp; the Brussels Town Hall, &c., represent the mediaeval skill. The Italian domes of the Revival, with St. Paul’s and other of Wren’s works, are crowned by St. Peter’s, and the whole are backed by the dim pyramids, which, as old Fuller says, have outlived their makers’ names. The buildings are brought into combination most artistically, and the result is an extraordinary work.’ The Builder, ( May ): . ¹⁰ The phrase is Bruno Latour’s, from his resonant remarks on hybridity, purification, modernity, and the ‘Great Divide’ in We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –; my emphasis. See also Halmi, ‘Ruins without a Past’, –. ¹¹ The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, vols (London: Methuen & Co., ), vi. –. As David Higgins notes, Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ was first published in Southey’s Annual Anthology under the title ‘THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON, / A POEM, / Addressed to CHARLES LAMB, of the India-House, London’. See David Higgins, Romantic Englishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, – (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .
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which the ravages of time had rendered dangerous . . . all this has taken place while you have been settling whether Ho-hing-tong should be spelt with a — or a –’.¹² The Sheep-fold in ‘Michael’ is one of a series of semi-ruinous structures in which Wordsworth seeks to retransmit tradition and ‘commemorative piety’ beyond the ‘transnatural’ time of the ‘Epoch of Revolutions’—to ‘enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration’, as he puts it in The Prelude.¹³ This architectural series stretches from ‘The towers’ ‘split with ruin deep’ of ‘A Gothic Tale’ (), to the ‘four naked walls / That star’d upon each other’ of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’ (–, ‘The Pedlar’, ll. –), the lost ‘mansion’ in the landscape of ‘Tintern Abbey’ (, l. ), and the half-fragmentary, half-ruined ‘gothic Church’ of The Recluse that was—as Wordsworth put it in the s, modifying the architectural image of The Excursion () with the geological language of ‘Malham Cove’ ()—a ‘wreck of is and was’, ‘sadder’ still ‘Than noblest objects utterly decayed’.¹⁴ As in Cockerell’s ‘Dream’—where a ‘wilderness of building’ (Excursion, II, ) proliferates within bounds set by immemorial antiquity—so in Wordsworth’s poetry, Gothic structures produce an effect of ‘static mobility’—of historical deepening in place. In his poem on the ‘internal spirit’ of ‘feudal times’, The White Doe of Rylstone (), Wordsworth evokes the Gothic remains of Bolton Priory—‘mouldering’ on into ‘Eliza’s golden time’, as ‘young and old’ continue to ‘repair’ to the ‘shattered fabric’s heart’ ‘for praise and prayer’.¹⁵ By thus contrasting desuetude and decay, and by choosing ‘common historic records’ over the ‘curious’ ‘particulars’ favoured by creative antiquarians such as Walter Scott, Wordsworth reasserts the claim of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads () that the Poet is a traditionalist, ‘an upholder and preserver’ rather than a man of historical science.¹⁶ In comments of that veer between ¹² Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vi. –. So far from being stationary, Manning was in fact travelling between Calcutta, Lhasa, and Canton. ¹³ See The Prelude (), XI, –, in The Prelude: The Four Texts, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin Books, ); and Koselleck, Futures Past, . The phrase ‘Epoch of Revolutions’ is Barthold Niebuhr’s. ¹⁴ For ‘A Gothic Tale’, see Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), –. For the other poems mentioned here, see The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth. For The Recluse and The Excursion, see Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye, assisted by David Garcia (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), ‘Preface’, –; and see also The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, ; Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, ), –. ¹⁵ Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone: or, The Fate of the Nortons, ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), ll. –. See also Fenwick Notes, –. ¹⁶ See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, nd edn, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, –), i. ; James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ), ; and The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; Tirril, Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, ), i. . On the withholding of Wordsworth’s White Doe until , following the ‘derision’ of Lamb and Hazlitt, and Coleridge’s reservations in , see The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas, –.
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anxiety and pride in a distinctive achievement, Wordsworth pronounces ‘a plague upon’ Scott’s ‘industrious Antiquarianism’ that has threatened to put ‘my fine story to confusion’.¹⁷ Mid-way between James Thomson condemning Gothic builders for their ‘labour’d heavy monuments of shame’, and John Ruskin celebrating the crude work that manifests freedom, Wordsworth offers his Gothic buildings as an imaginative architecture of the past.¹⁸ Wordsworth’s ‘plague upon . . . industrious Antiquarianism’ would also have implicated his Lake District neighbour and friend, Robert Southey. But while Southey was a very different sort of writer—periodical essayist, would-be historiographer royal, and (at least initially) an enthusiastic poet laureate—he was similarly engaged in efforts to transform antiquarianism into new forms of history.¹⁹ Southey affiliated his historical sense to Wordsworth’s in describing his own long-planned Book of the Church () as a ‘running commentary’ to Ecclesiastical Sketches (), and hoped that they would thus, ‘without any concerted purpose . . . go down to posterity in company’.²⁰ In his imaginative history cum dialogue with the dead, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on Society (), Southey made repeated references to ‘our great philosophic poet’, and there was, ‘perhaps, not a page’ of that book that he ‘did not read [Wordsworth] in MS’.²¹ ‘One of Southey’s purposes in the Colloquies was’, as Tim Fulford argues, ‘to advance the cause of Wordsworth’s past poetry as a discourse that could teach Britons how to live in the present’.²² When planning a second series of Colloquies against the Reform Bill in –, it was Wordsworth—and specifically not his earlier collaborator Coleridge—to whom Southey turned for advice.²³ And it was Wordsworth’s sense of the importance of the work and ‘anxi[ety] for . . . speedy publication’ that prompted
¹⁷ The Middle Years, i. . ¹⁸ See Thomson’s Liberty (–), ii. –, in The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); and John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume the Second, The Sea-Stories (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., ), –. ¹⁹ See W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), passim; and Mark Storey, ‘ “Bob Southey!—Poet Laureate”: Public and Private in Southey’s Poems of ’, in Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –. ²⁰ See Stuart Andrews, ‘Wordsworth, Southey, and the English Church’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Winter ): ; and Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, vols (London: Longmans, –), v. . Southey had been planning The Book of the Church since at least the start of : see Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, ), . ²¹ See Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, vols (London: John Murray, ), i. , ; ii. , , ; and Lionel Madden (ed.), Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, ), . ²² Tim Fulford, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ²³ Robert Southey to John Rickman, May , in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, vols (New York: Columbia University Press, ), ii. –. ‘I will . . . show the whole to Wordsworth, the only consultable person within reach here, at present. S.T.C. is not so: he would travel from Dan to Beersheba in the margin’.
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Southey to take the project to his publisher, John Murray.²⁴ Southey was, however, something more than Wordsworth’s social mouthpiece or historical interpreter. He claimed to be ‘a good poet—but a better historian, & the better for having been accustomed to feel & think as a poet’.²⁵ If Wordsworth’s Poet was a global historian of feelings, then Southey was at least an alternative answer to the description.²⁶ He described himself in as having ‘more in hand than Bonaparte or Marquis Wellesley. digesting Gothic law—gleaning moral history from monkish legends & conquering India, or rather Asia, with Alboquerque—filling up the chinks of the day by hunting in Jesuit-Chronicles, & compiling Collectanea Hispanica & Gothica’.²⁷ ‘Michael’ represents an intriguing intersection of Southey and Wordsworth as poets and historians. As Michael Wiley argues, ‘Michael’ was written in response to Southey having ‘appropriated’—if not plagiarized—the themes and images of Wordsworth’s unpublished ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (–), in a poem of the same title included in Southey’s English Eclogues ().²⁸ As in Southey’s eclogue, and as in early drafts of Wordsworth’s own dialogical ‘Ruined Cottage’, Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ presents a single ‘knowledgeable speaker explaining the historical circumstances of a pile of ruins’; and the later poem compensates the loss of dialogue with an ‘amplification’ of the ruin motif whereby ‘the sheepfold ruins’ are doubled by ‘Michael’s cottage now fully erased from the land’.²⁹ Southey recognized ‘Michael’ as one of Wordsworth’s foremost ‘pieces of . . . beauty’.³⁰ But in his own later appropriation of the dialogue form (following Wordsworth’s publication of his ‘Ruined Cottage’ as book I of The Excursion, ), Southey attempted in the Colloquies both to supplement and to surpass Wordsworth’s history in ruins. In conversation with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, Southey summons up the spirit of ‘Michael’. Sir Thomas quotes Henry VIII on the Reformation and ‘an old stone wall’: Henry had too much sagacity not to perceive the consequences which such a book [as Simon Fish’s The Supplication of Beggars ()] was likely to produce, and he said after perusing it, ‘If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and begin at the ²⁴ Robert Southey to John Rickman, June , Huntington Library MS RS. The second series of Colloquies was never published, owing to John Murray’s financial difficulties. ²⁵ The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and Ian Packer, Romantic Circles Electronic Editions, University of Maryland; letter . ²⁶ Wordsworth’s Poet ‘binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time’. Poetry is ‘the history or science of feelings’. See Preface to Lyrical Ballads in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, i. ; and the ‘Note to The Thorn’, in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ²⁷ Collected Letters of Robert Southey, letter . ²⁸ Michael Wiley, ‘Romantic Amplification: The Way of Plagiarism’, ELH / (Spring ): –, –. ²⁹ Wiley, ‘Romantic Amplification’, . On the evolution of Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’ from ‘stark story’ to complex dialogue, see James Butler (ed.), ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), p. xii. ³⁰ Robert Southey to Anna Seward, July , The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, letter .
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bottom, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his head’. But he saw also that it tended to serve his immediate purpose.³¹
For Southey’s Sir Thomas, this architectural image bespeaks the king’s consciousness of historical cause and effect—and testifies to the historical ingrowth consequent (as in ‘Michael’) on suppressing or evading such knowledge. Elsewhere in the Colloquies, Southey invokes ‘Michael’ still more directly. Another conversation with Sir Thomas turns on the historical origins of commercial society and the medieval ‘progress of inclosures’. This exchange comes with an assemblage of anecdotes that includes sheep devouring ‘men and fields and houses’ in Thomas More’s Utopia (), Hugh Latimer on ‘inclosers’ turning ‘householders and inhabitants’ into ‘a shepherd and his dog’, and an ‘odd’ early-Stuart text on ‘Churches’ making ‘shepherds cottages’.³² Having thus charged the pastoral figure of the shepherd with historical resonance, as the unwitting cipher of the ‘depopulating system’, Southey then draws a parallel with ‘the extinction of small farms’ ‘in these days’.³³ Southey’s history thus comprehends Wordsworth’s ‘pastoral poem’, articulating the pattern of dispossession and historical blindness that ‘Michael’ realizes only obliquely in the shape of the unfinished Sheep-fold. Southey historicizing Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ is a suggestive instance of HansGeorg Gadamer’s account of historicism taking hold, as ‘romanticism—the revival of the past . . . the cultivation of ancient customs’ motivates ‘the historical research that has slowly, step by step, transformed the intuitive revival into historical knowledge proper’.³⁴ But if Wordsworth’s traditionalism is just, as James Chandler notes, a ‘wrinkle in Gadamer’s story’, it is also clear from the exchange with Scott over The White Doe that Wordsworth was deliberately doing something different.³⁵ In August , Wordsworth told Scott that while his Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field () had gained its end, it was not ‘the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself . . . both as to matter and manner’.³⁶ That ‘end’ was not Scott’s ‘outward & social forms’ of past ‘life’ but ‘its internal spirit’.³⁷ Coleridge suggested something similar in his later
³¹ Southey, Sir Thomas More, i. –. Simon Fish’s Supplication of Beggars () attacked the doctrinal edifice of purgatory, focusing on its lack of scriptural authority and the clerical abuse that had turned it into a system of ‘pardons for money’. See Richard Rex, ‘More and the Heretics: Statesman or Fanatic?’, in George M. Logan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Thomas More’s response was the Supplication of Souls (), defending purgatory by what Stephen Greenblatt calls ‘strained’ exegesis of apocryphal texts, ‘oddly’ presented as the direct communication of the dead, speaking to the reader from within their purgatorial fires. See Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, ), –. The text of Fish’s Supplication, followed by ‘The Story of M. Symon Fish’—Southey’s source here—is included in the staple work of English Protestant identity, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, vols (London, ), ii. –. ³² Southey, Sir Thomas More, i. –. ³³ Southey, Sir Thomas More, i. –. ³⁴ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, ), . ³⁵ James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, . ³⁶ The Middle Years. i. . ³⁷ The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, .
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comment that the history reader who had not learned to honour the ‘self-evolving’, half-submerged ‘ideal’ character of the English Constitution had ‘missed [the] most valuable result’ of his studies, and ‘might . . . as profitably, and far more delightfully have devoted his [time] to Sir Walter Scott’s Novels’.³⁸ The Romantic historicism of the Lake Poets was, on this view, not an ox-bow lake cut off from ‘historical knowledge proper’, but itself the main stream, carrying a history held not in curiosities but in common. What the comparison with Scott and Southey reveals is that Wordsworth’s ‘Gothic’ poetics involves the gradual ‘cultivation’—as opposed to the ‘civilized’ transcendence—of the forms handed down from tradition.³⁹ In ‘Michael’, Wordsworth develops an oblique historical form, a ‘pastoral poem’ that registers without over-writing or allegorizing the socio-political ‘trouble’ (l. ) of the s. Various cues in the poem and in Wordsworth’s other writings extend the historical frame all the way back to the s, and the gradual (though occasionally violent) consolidation of the ‘statesmen’ system of ‘small estates’.⁴⁰ Wordsworth evokes without expressing the overlapping temporalities and perspectives in play by suspending the story in oral tradition: it is ‘the first, / The earliest of those Tales that spake to me / Of Shepherds’ (ll. –). He redoubles the effect by using a language of ‘plain humanities’, shorn of ‘poetic’ ‘hieroglyphics, and enigmas’, but subtly ‘garnished’ by a pervasive use of the ‘un-’ prefix (‘unhewn’, ‘ungarnish’d’, etc.).⁴¹ Pointing at once to the past and the future, carrying a double sense of reversal and of incomplete accomplishment, the ‘un-’ prefix is the textual ‘remnant’ of Michael’s historical experience of Koselleck’s ‘new unknown time’. As Jane Stabler notes (in a different context), the ‘un-’ prefix embodies Wordsworth’s processes of ‘slow creation’: it allows the poet to revisit a word even as it is ‘wrought in the opposite direction’, with the ‘remnant’ making ‘the process of transformation . . . legible’.⁴² Poised, in Georg Simmel’s phrase on the ruin, ‘[b]etween the not-yet and the no-longer’, the ‘un-’ prefix acts as a textual double for Michael’s Sheep-fold, providing a negative ‘affirmation’ of the peaks ascended by the ‘spirit’ by marking out the persistence of the ‘path’ ‘descend[ing] to its home’.⁴³ For Fiona Stafford, similarly, the ‘privative prefix’ in ‘Michael’ has a slow historicizing effect, gradually specifying ‘the ideal through knowledge of what it is not’.⁴⁴ Wordsworth thus draws out that which lies inchoate and inarticulate in the ³⁸ Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, ), –. ³⁹ Coleridge develops the distinction between civilization and cultivation in his Constitution of the Church and State, –. ⁴⁰ Terry McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, in Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁴¹ See Wordsworth, ‘Appendix to the Preface’, in Prose Works, i. ; and Fiona Stafford, ‘Plain Living and Ungarnish’d Stories: Wordsworth and the Survival of Pastoral’, Review of English Studies, / (): –, –. ⁴² Jane Stabler, ‘Byron and The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Spring ): –, . ⁴³ See Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in ‘Two Essays’, The Hudson Review, / (Autumn ): –, . ⁴⁴ Stafford, ‘Plain Living’, .
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‘history / Homely and rude’ (ll. –) of the ‘unfinished Sheep-fold’—making the unconscious conscious, the accidental intentional, and the ballad lyrical. The poem recreates the dynamics of the ‘covenant’ between Michael and Luke, as Wordsworth encloses the rustic ‘Tale’ in imagination, ‘for the sake / Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second Self when I am gone’ (ll. , –). But this virtual reproduction is already an act of imaginative reclamation and historical reading. In a pair of roughly contemporary draft passages for ‘Michael’ and The Prelude, Wordsworth engages in a vitally metaphorical reflection on how steady attention to old forms unlocks their latent historical content. ‘There is’, he writes in the ‘Michael’ passage, a shapeless heap of unhewn stones That lie together, some in heaps and some In lines that seem to keep themselves alive In the last dotage of a dying form At least so seems to a man that stands In such a lonely place.⁴⁵
In the Prelude fragment, Wordsworth writes of the ‘considerate and laborious work’ of ‘slow creation’ that doth impart to speach Outline and substance, even till it has given A function kindred to organic power— The vital spirit of a perfect form.⁴⁶
Wordsworth’s staging of Michael’s steadfast act of unremembrance lifts him out of occlusion in the natural landscape, but without subsuming the family tragedy in a higher-level economic analysis. Dorothy Wordsworth suggested a virtual identity between poet and shepherd in describing her brother working ‘at the sheepfold’, and often ‘in vain’.⁴⁷ The ‘dying form’ of the ‘unfinished’ Sheep-fold returns, half-historicized and half-humanized, in Wordsworth’s slow creation of his lyrical ballad’s ‘perfect form’.
A Gothic plan ‘Michael’ marks one stage in the longer development, across Wordsworth’s career, of a Gothic myth and a Gothic inner architecture; what Coleridge, speaking of ⁴⁵ Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems, –, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), . ⁴⁶ Wordsworth, The Prelude , , , ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, ), . ⁴⁷ See David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination (New York and London: Methuen, ), .
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Wordsworth’s ‘feudal’ White Doe, called the evanescent ‘Plan’—to be withheld from too gross a ‘materialization’—of ‘the history in the mind’.⁴⁸ So wide is the span, so high the pinnacle, of this overarching design, that it often recedes from view. It is glimpsed in a poem such as ‘Mutability’, a sonnet in Ecclesiastical Sketches (), in which Wordsworth evokes the persistence of ‘the tower sublime / Of yesterday’ by reclaiming and repurposing material on the ‘touch of time’ from ‘A Gothic Tale’—composed over twenty years before.⁴⁹ But much closer to the surface of Wordsworth’s early poetry is a radical feeling for nature as—in John Thelwall’s phrase—‘what is fit and true, and can endure the test of reason’, and the polar opposite of ‘the gaudy, cumbrous fustian’ of the ‘Gothic custumary’.⁵⁰ In such poems as ‘The Tables Turned’ in Lyrical Ballads (), the impulses of nature teach more ‘Than all the sages can’.⁵¹ But Wordsworth also reads in the landscape a ‘Gothic’ lesson—poised between Edmund Burke’s and John Ruskin’s senses of the term—about habit and human nature. ‘For I have learned’, Wordsworth says in ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘To look on nature . . . hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity’ (ll. –). ‘[L]ook[ing] . . . hearing’, the poet perceives in the ruin-rich landscape ‘Things which you cannot see’ (l. ), looking steadily—like ‘Armytage’, the pedlar of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ before him—into the human dimension of time.⁵² Wordsworth closes his poem ‘on the Wye’ by reimagining Armytage’s ‘strange discipline’ of memory as a plan of inner-architecture.⁵³ Through a continual sublation of ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts’ of unselfconscious being, Wordsworth tells his ‘wild-eyed’ sister, she may refashion her mind as a ‘mansion for all lovely forms’, and live on in his absence, haunted everywhere by hope (ll. , , –). The Prelude, composed between and , though not published until , reflects this gradual ‘materialization’ of Wordsworth’s Gothic ‘Plan’ throughout. The two-part poem of depicts the child-poet, placed in the ‘severe’ and sublime stream of nature’s ‘school’, both inhabiting and inhabited by a landscape of ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men’, from ‘naked crags’ and ‘stone walls’ making ‘bleak music’ with the wind, to ruins like Furness Abbey, with its ‘fractured arch’ and ‘nave . . . touched by faint / Internal breezes’ (: I, –, –, , ; II, –). Like Byron in Childe Harold, Wordsworth transforms the quest romance and the feeling of historical rupture in ruins into the present matter of his song, shifting ‘from previous ages to previous states of mind, from culture to individual and from
⁴⁸ Coleridge to Wordsworth, May , qtd. in The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas, . ⁴⁹ See Wordsworth, The Borderers, ; and The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth, iii. –. ⁵⁰ John Thelwall, The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), . ⁵¹ The Poems of William Wordsworth, Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth, i. –. ⁵² Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, ed. James A. Butler (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), . ⁵³ ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, – (RC MS. B v l. ).
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history to psychology’.⁵⁴ The poet is himself a human version of the Gothic ruins that populate the landscape, a ‘building’ with its ‘props . . . removed’, that stands ‘as if sustained / By its own spirit’ (: II, –). In this early version of Wordsworth’s ‘Poem on the Growth of [his] own Support’, as Coleridge called it, the Gothic imagery sublimates the Wordsworth family tragedy—the early loss of both parents and the dereliction of old John Wordsworth’s employer, Lord Lonsdale.⁵⁵ Lonsdale’s refusal to repay outstanding debts of almost £, to the Wordsworth children left them literally ‘destitute, and as we might / Trooping together’ (: II, –).⁵⁶ As Dorothy reflected in February , ‘We in the same moment lost a father, a mother, a home, we have been equally deprived of our patrimony by the cruel Hand of lordly Tyranny’.⁵⁷ But as Wordsworth reworked The Prelude into a five- and then a thirteen-book form, including explicit treatment of the French Revolution, he increasingly read the ruin as a historical palimpsest and a paradigm of ‘strong / Confusion’ (: VI, –). In book V, Wordsworth further internalizes the taste for buildings ‘formed in ruins’ in the culture of sensibility.⁵⁸ The boy of Winander, like the ‘fractured’, ‘shattered’ remains of Furness and Bolton, ‘Has carried far into his heart the voice’ of an inhuman nature (V, ). The boy is the limit-case for Wordsworth’s vision of the ‘real chil[d]’: ‘not too wise, / Too learnèd, or too good, but wanton, fresh’, with a little world woven from ‘books and nature’, and with only such ‘Knowledge’ as quickens from inborn ‘power’ (V, –). But better the boy’s toorapid ruin, Wordsworth suggests, than the ‘hollow . . . life of lies’ (V, ) provided for by Benthamite systems of education. A child raised to programmatic study is, indeed, ‘no child, / But a dwarf man’, who dwindles even as he ‘grow[s] wiser every day’, pounded ‘Within the pinfold of his own conceit’ (V, –, , –). The ‘real child’ is to the ‘dwarf man’ as Ruskin’s clumsy ‘old Venetian’ is to his ‘engine-turned’ modern-day English operative: rough, dull, incapable, failing, but hiding ‘transfiguration behind and within’.⁵⁹ The Wordsworthian child, keeping ‘the mind / Deep in its fountain’ (Byron, Childe Harold, III, ), is Coleridge’s ‘dormant’, ‘insular’, ‘self-evolving’ Constitution in miniature.⁶⁰ But in The Prelude, as in the ‘Intimations’ Ode, Wordsworth transforms
⁵⁴ Ralph Pite, ‘Introduction’, in Timothy Saunders, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie (eds), Romans and Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ⁵⁵ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, –), iv. –. ⁵⁶ See McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, –; and Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁵⁷ The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, –, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . ⁵⁸ See Inger Sigrun Brodey, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility (New York and London: Routledge, ), . ⁵⁹ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . ⁶⁰ Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –.
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the ‘immemorial’ view of English nationhood that Coleridge took on from the ‘Gothic historiography’ going back to Edward Coke in the s, as he locates the ‘soul’s immensity’ in a time before education, and claims for his story of true ‘nature yet remembered’ the status of a ‘history’ that, ‘in the words of reason deeply weighed— / Hath no beginning’ (: II, , –).⁶¹ Reflecting on the Revolution in France, Burke had boasted that his feeling for the ‘Gothic’ ‘ground-work’ of Britain in ‘monkish’ institutions like the universities was ‘so worked into my mind’ that he could not ‘distinguish’ the structures of his own thoughts from those of others who came before him.⁶² But Wordsworth had, as Coleridge put it, absorbed and redirected the shock of the Revolution, rebuilding lost ‘Hope’ at home into a ‘dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self ’, transforming history into prophecy.⁶³ In the language of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ and of his prose tract, The Convention of Cintra, Burke’s mental ‘buildings’ ‘bind too closely to something inward,—to the present and the past’, ‘[w]hereas the vigour of the human soul is from without and from futurity’, in the mental architecture of ‘worlds not realized’.⁶⁴ What Wordsworth proposes in The Prelude is therefore a far more ‘revolutionary architecture’ of the Gothic, which—to adapt John Ruskin’s terms—sets out from an admission of no ‘executive inferiority . . . at all’.⁶⁵ In The Prelude, Wordsworth presents his own story as little less than a national theodicy: Gothic England is redeemed from history in the growth of a poet’s mind. Coleridge articulated this ‘Gothic’ achievement in ‘To William Wordsworth’, his poetic response to Wordsworth reading the whole Prelude aloud in the dying days of . Coleridge’s Gothic ideal, as he later described it in relation to the British constitution and the English language, was a ‘structure . . . complete in each part’ that preserves ‘the rights and interests of the individual in conjunction with those of the
⁶¹ See R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest, Medieval Institutions in British Thought, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, ; Sean Silver, ‘The Politics of Gothic Historiography, –’, in Byron and Townshend, The Gothic World, –; and Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –. ⁶² Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. nd edn (London: J. Dodsley, ), . ⁶³ Coleridge, ‘To William Wordsworth’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, ll. –, –. ⁶⁴ See The Convention of Cintra in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, i. . Stephen Gill suggests a reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’ as a poem of political imagination. The poem was first published in as plain ‘Ode’, and it was only through a gradual process of reframing—with a footnote in The Excursion () and a retitling in Poems ()—that Wordsworth managed subsequently to ‘impose a transcendental interpretation’. Opening with the line, ‘There was a time when’, and linked via ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ to ‘Lines’ on the ‘Power’ and the ‘passing’ of Charles James Fox, the ‘Ode’ originally ‘beckoned to who knows what exercise of nostalgia’. See Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁶⁵ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . Ruskin divides architectural ornament into three ‘systems’: ‘. Servile ornament, in which the execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect of the higher;—. Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers;—and . Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all.’
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whole’.⁶⁶ Wordsworth was already the incarnation of this organic ideal: Coleridge had prophesied in January that a simple song of ‘Wordsworth . . . himself ’, a ‘Faithful transcript’ of his ‘habitual Feelings & Modes of seeing and hearing’, could not help but be the world’s ‘first & finest philosophical Poem’.⁶⁷ The Prelude confirmed the prediction. A ‘prophetic’ ‘lay / More than historic’, of ‘high and passionate thoughts / To their own music chanted’, the poem installs Wordsworth ‘in the choir / Of ever-enduring men’ (ll. –, –, –). More than a ‘Gothic instrument’ defining the ‘choir’ (in Coleridge’s later phrase for the church organ), Wordsworth’s poem resembles an entire Gothic cathedral, an ‘architecture’ of ‘self-annihilation’ that also embodies a selfevolving ‘plan’ in which ‘endless complexity and variety are united into one whole’.⁶⁸ Wordsworth’s ‘lay’ rushes Coleridge out of selfish mourning at the ‘grave’ of his own ‘genius’, and he emerges from the poem rising in profound obeisance, reborn in a ‘Gothic’ form between Burke’s ‘proud submission’ and Ruskin’s aspiring reverence: ‘my being blended in one thought / (Thought was it? Or aspiration? Or resolve?) / . . . And when I rose, I found myself in prayer’ (ll. –, –).⁶⁹ Wordsworth’s Gothic ‘Plan’ materialized still further in The Excursion (). The Preface introduces the poem as only ‘part’ of a larger ‘philosophical poem’, The Recluse. The associations of this overarching title, along with Wordsworth’s references to retirement, an inward ‘review’, and a solitude oriented towards ‘Society’, all suggest a modern-day monasticism. This suggestion becomes explicit as Wordsworth figures The Recluse as a fragmentary Gothic edifice, awaiting a reader able to decode the accretive ‘system’ of its architecture: [The Prelude and The Excursion] have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the Anti-chapel has to the body of a gothic Church. Continuing this allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor Pieces . . . have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to the little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses ordinarily included in those Edifices . . . It is not the Author’s intention formally to announce a system: it was more animating to him to proceed in a different course; and if he shall succeed in conveying to the mind clear thoughts, lively images, and strong feelings, the Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself.⁷⁰
The whole poem reinvents the Gothic historiographical pattern of Thomson’s Liberty, whereby Britain rises ‘from Celtic night / To present grandeur’ (IV, –). All four of the principal characters are historically transitive. The Solitary is a priest turned Jacobin, now living like an anchorite in a cell, who cultivates Coleridgean poses of ⁶⁶ Coleridge, Lectures –: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, vols (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, ), ii. . ⁶⁷ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ii. . ⁶⁸ Coleridge, Lectures: On Literature, ii. . ⁶⁹ See Burke, Reflections, ; Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . ⁷⁰ Wordsworth, The Excursion, –.
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historical ‘abstraction’, and extols the contemplative ‘life where hope and memory are as one’ (Excursion, II, –, V, –, III, ).⁷¹ The Pastor is less an evangelist than a local historian and functionary of Coleridge’s ‘national Church’. The Poet, instantly distinguished from Wordsworth the mountaineer by his ‘languid feet’ ‘toiling’ across a common (I, –), seems much less a Poet than a poet laureate as he hails ‘the State of England’ and the ‘Crown by Freedom shaped’ (VI, –). And the main character in the early books, the Wanderer (‘Armytage’ from ‘The Ruined Cottage’), is doubly obsolescent as a pedlar and an oral poet who lacks ‘the accomplishment of Verse’ (I, ). The ‘something . . . dramatic form’ of the poem also adumbrates medievalism. The focus of interest shifts from the ‘rounded’ character of the Wanderer (I, ) to the ‘pointed’ figure (‘changeable to infinity’) of the Solitary (VIII, ).⁷² Their ‘argument’ about what the Solitary calls our ‘sad dependance upon time’ (IV, ) moves through various types of historical sensibility towards a ‘medievalist’ structure of feeling. Private myth, ‘antiquarian humour’ (III, ), religious syncretism, and graveyard poetry are progressively superseded from books I to VI. Reflections on an Elizabethan knight left stranded by the long withdrawing roar of chivalry then lead on to a Pugin-esque contrast between a ‘many-windowed’ modern factory and a ‘Conventual Church’ ‘of old’ (VII, –, –; VIII, –, –). The poem concludes with a series of ‘Gothic’ vignettes, in which Britain ‘cast[s] off / Her swarms’; Parliament’s ‘venerable Halls’ realize Edward VI’s vision of the Reformation; and a faculty for imagining ‘The thing that hath been as the thing that is’ produces a vision of ancient British druidism and wicker-men, shockingly superimposed upon a cultivated English landscape (IX, –, –, –). But if The Excursion thus anticipates Ruskin on ‘medievalism’ as social life in ‘Gothic form’, much of its audience, including Coleridge and the younger Romantics, received the poem as a backward step, a work more untimely than ‘prophetic’.⁷³ William Hazlitt suggested that the poem was a ‘gothic Church’ only because it harked back to the wilful obscurantism of the Ancien Régime. It ‘affects a system without having any intelligible clue to one’, and resembles nothing so much as a poetical cathedral of Cologne: ‘like one of those stupendous but half-finished structures which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use
⁷¹ In The Friend, Coleridge represents himself as immersed in the ‘old Faith’ that is ‘modern Heresy’, ‘upholding some Principles both of Taste and Philosophy, adopted by the great Men of Europe from the Middle of the fifteenth till towards the Close of the seventeenth Century’. See The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, vols (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, ), ii. . ⁷² Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. . See also Richard Gravil, ‘Is The Excursion a “Metrical Novel?” ’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (): –; and my ‘The Dramatic End of The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Spring ): –. ⁷³ See Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Delivered at Edinburgh, in November (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., ), , ; and Linda H. Peterson, ‘Sage Writing’, in Herbert F. Tucker (ed.), A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, ), –.
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or beauty’.⁷⁴ The ‘characters’ in The Excursion were not so much psychologically plausible individuals as versions of Wordsworth, refractions of the ‘intense’ (‘selfannihilating’, ‘Gothic’) character that ‘swallows up every thing’: ‘the dialogues . . . are soliloquies of the same character . . . The recluse, the pastor, and the pedlar, are three persons in one poet’.⁷⁵ The potential of those parallel ‘soliloquies of the same character’ for a critical archaeology of the ‘Gothic’ subject had ended, for Hazlitt, in nothing more than a self-indulgent ‘intellectual egotism’. Coleridge similarly ‘censured’ The Excursion, ‘comparatively’ with the (thenunpublished) Prelude, as showing an ‘undue predilection for the dramatic form’.⁷⁶ In effect, The Excursion fulfilled Coleridge’s worst fears about a ‘materialization of the Plan’ subverting the true-Gothic ‘history in the mind’ that he still hoped—despite his estrangement from Wordsworth since —would constitute The Recluse. Wordsworth had reduced the ‘wholly imaginative’ ‘character’ of the pedlar from ‘The Ruined Cottage’ to the status of a mere ‘talker in the dialogue’, more ‘Methodist parson’ than Gothic bard.⁷⁷ In the language of Coleridge’s Constitution of the Church and State (), Wordsworth had thus lost sight of the ‘due proportion of the potential (latent, dormant) to the actual Power’. Exchanging the rough majesty of The Prelude for the ‘little urbanities’ of dialogue in The Excursion was equivalent, for Coleridge, to England sacrificing ‘the insular privilege of a self-evolving Constitution’, progressive in proportion as it ‘remain[ed] in the Idea, unevolved’, for a state as ‘improgressive’ as Venice or China, where ‘power’ was ossified in proportion as it was fully ‘awake and . . . operative’ in ‘rigid’ ‘forms’.⁷⁸ For Coleridge, Wordsworth’s poetry had departed from its ‘historic’ and ‘prophetic’ character at the point when it had ceased to be ‘insular’ and oblique. Writing in Tait’s Magazine in , De Quincey concurred: ‘Not . . . in The Excursion must we look for that reversionary influence which awaits
⁷⁴ See William Hazlitt, Selected Writings, ed. John Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; and The Examiner, Aug. , . ⁷⁵ The Examiner, Aug. , . ⁷⁶ See Seamus Perry, ‘Coleridge’s Disappointment in The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Spring ): –; and Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vols (London and Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), ii. . ⁷⁷ Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, vols (London and Princeton: Routledge, Princeton University Press, ), i. –. ⁷⁸ See Coleridge, Table Talk, i. ; Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –; and, for Coleridge comparing Wordsworth’s ‘mental bombast’ to ‘the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries’, see Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. . While this looks on the face of it like standard ‘orientalist’ denigration of China, Coleridge’s account of the constitution as a magnet, polarized between the forces of ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’, suggests a more specialized meaning for ‘improgressive’. The term may give a Romantic-historicist twist to Adam Smith’s account of the Qing empire as ‘stationary’—meaning, as Giovanni Arrighi claims, not ‘stagnant’ but ‘optimalized’, fit for its own purposes, already arrived at the end of history. See Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, –; Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, ); and Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
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Wordsworth with posterity’.⁷⁹ Wordsworth’s ‘whole college of philosophy’ was guilty of ‘childish impatience’, of failing to perceive the ‘long swells setting in from the French Revolution’, which ‘has not, even yet, come into full action’. By contrast, Wordsworth’s early poetry was one of ‘palingenesis’: ‘oblique forms’, ‘ruined lodges’, and ‘forgotten mansions’, giving glimpses of a far future ‘even now on the road’. But as Coleridge half-recognizes in his comment on the ‘imaginative’ decline of the Wanderer, The Excursion retains an ‘insular’ and ‘oblique’ ‘Gothic’ character in another sense—in the (distinctly Coleridgean) shape of the Solitary.⁸⁰ For much of the poem, the Solitary’s true-Gothic identity is obscured as the other characters attempt to ‘correct’ him by ‘heaping up . . . exempla in the medieval manner’.⁸¹ But the Solitary’s telling of his own life-story in book III concludes with a passage of poetry that—like Coleridge’s ‘To William Wordsworth’—takes up and transforms Wordsworth’s own articulations of his Gothic myth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude. In the parallel passage at Prelude, IV, –, Wordsworth figures memory as visual mastery. ‘Incumbent o’er the surface of past time’, he engages in a ‘sweet[ly]’ impeded struggle to ‘part / The shadow from the substance’, the surface from the ‘deeps’ of his memory. The Solitary rehumanizes and universalizes the figure: all of ‘human Life’ is a ‘mountain Brook / In some still passage of its course’ (III, , –). There is real imaginative risk in this image. In book V of The Prelude, still waters signified stagnation, as with the mis-taught ‘dwarf man’ and ‘the dimpling cistern of his heart’ (, V, , ). But in an exemplary act of ‘Gothic’ rereading, the Solitary understands the ‘still passage’ in terms of the ‘inland murmur’ and ‘still . . . music’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’. ‘[S]eeing and hearing’ in the ‘habitual . . . Mode’ that Coleridge identified with Wordsworth’s own true-Gothic identity, the Solitary at the ‘Brook’ hears ‘a roar or murmur’, and sees, Within the depths of its capacious breast, Inverted trees, and rocks, and azure sky; And, on its glassy surface, specks of foam, And conglobated bubbles undissolved, Numerous as stars; that, by their onward lapse, Betray to sight the motion of the stream, . . . and make known Through what perplexing labyrinths, abrupt Precipitations, and untoward straits, The earth-born wanderer has passed . . . (III, –)
⁷⁹ Thomas De Quincey, ‘On Wordsworth’s Poetry’, in David Bromwich (ed.), Romantic Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁸⁰ For the suggestion that Coleridge was Wordsworth’s model for the Solitary, see Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ⁸¹ Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, – (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), .
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The Solitary here models a more historical mode of memory, a sort of reading against the grain of time, in which superficial traces ‘betray’ unknowable internal complications, and impediments to pure knowledge prompt imaginative insight. Overreaching the poet of The Prelude who ‘would enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration’ (XI, –), Wordsworth’s Coleridgean character of the Solitary articulates the transumptive sense of the Gothic Revival that a better spirit lies in waiting, inchoate and immanent, in the external forms of a reinvented tradition. Wordsworth’s Excursion thus plants, in the winter snows of Romanticism, the snowdrops of the Victorian medievalist self. Wordsworth pioneers an inward Gothic architecture with the diffident suggestion that The Recluse ‘may . . . be found’ to resemble a ‘gothic Church’. But by the s, this ‘advance . . . made by the soul of the poet’ is secure.⁸² For John Ruskin, there is no doubt that ‘[t]here will be found something more than usually interesting in tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us’.⁸³ Nor is there—any longer—any doubt of the reader perceiving the inward ‘fellowship’ of this Gothic ‘image’ with ‘our Northern hearts’.
Insular history From a global perspective, of course, Ruskin’s account of the northern-hearted Gothic subject only begs the question. The ‘insular’ Gothic ideal, as I have traced it in Coleridge and De Quincey on Wordsworth, seems to be at odds with scholarship that finds the fountains of Romanticism and the Gothic in intercultural exchanges with the Continent, and with the still more ‘distant peoples’ (in Southey’s phrase) of Asia.⁸⁴ But in this final section, I’d like to focus on an episode, gathered from the scholarship of Romanticperiod ‘globalism’, that suggests how such ‘insular’ and global concepts of the Gothic may coexist or combine. Jerome McGann notes the enabling paradox of historical study that only a ‘completely . . . localized’ art accrues sufficient ‘difference’ to ‘speak to alien cultures’.⁸⁵ But if this in itself suggests the ‘global’ significance of an ‘insular’ Gothicism, I would suggest that the peculiarly historical character of Wordsworth’s poetry lies in the way its ‘oblique forms’ continually register origins and ends altogether elsewhere, and thus preserve it from any kind of easy historical ‘transcendence’. ⁸² See Wordsworth’s ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (), iii. . ⁸³ Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ii. –. ⁸⁴ See Robert Southey, Letters from England: by Don Manual Alvarez Espriella. nd edn, vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, ), ii. ; and for a concise introduction to the field of the ‘global’ Romantic and Gothic, see Evan Gottlieb’s ‘Recovering Romantic Globalism’, in his Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, – (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, ), –. David Higgins considers at length the sort of ‘local’ presence of the ‘global’ that I am sketching here in his Romantic Englishness (). ⁸⁵ Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. nd edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ), –.
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In representing Michael’s compulsive ‘work unfinished’ at the Sheep-fold, Wordsworth gestures towards a new, still almost unthinkable sense of simultaneity with ‘lost’ loved ones—not in the grave but ‘beyond the seas’ (ll. , ). Wordsworth leaves Luke’s overseas ‘hiding place’ unspecified. In the Romantic imagination, however, a foreign bourne from which it was scarcely possible to return generally meant East Asia, and particularly China. From Thomas Percy to Coleridge, China was an important ‘foil’ for the early Gothic Revival. Percy’s antiquarian studies of China were instrumental in defining the literary nationalism, the non-classical aesthetics, and the progressive evaluation of language change in his ‘Gothic’ Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ().⁸⁶ In notes prepared for the ‘Macartney’ embassy to the Qing court, Joseph Banks articulated the widespread view of China—fostered by Percy and by William ‘Orientalist’ Jones—as a quasi-medieval civilization that had failed to become modern, lacking a (medievalist) feeling for ruins and for ‘Gothic’ hybrids of all kinds.⁸⁷ For Banks, China was the ‘high Pitch[ed]’ ‘Ruin of a state of Civilization’, merely possessed in the present by the Qing, but appealing to the British as superior to anything hitherto achieved in Europe.⁸⁸ Differences over commerce and cultural hybridity fed notions of historical divergence. The idea of a world-historical clash between ‘dynamic and modern Britain’ and ‘stationary’ China found emblematic expression in the episode of the Qing court showing curiosity about British men-of-war, but neglecting such high-tech ‘works of art’ as the Weltsmachine, a German-made cosmological clock specially covered in chinoiserie.⁸⁹ Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (–) arguably refracts this context, with its ‘Gothic’ poet inwardly transforming into a ‘symphony’ with ‘flashing eyes’, a ‘dread’ type of the British zeitgeist-made-machine, transcending Chinese cultural categories to ‘build . . . in air’ with ‘music loud and long’.⁹⁰ There is a similar sense of divergence in ⁸⁶ See David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, –; Eun Kyung Min, ‘Thomas Percy’s Chinese Miscellanies and the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ()’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, / (): –; and Kitson, Forging Romantic China, –. On Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ as a Chinese poem, see also Peter J. Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. ⁸⁷ See George Steinmetz’s summary of this ‘European’ view of China in The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. ⁸⁸ See The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection, –, ed. Neil Chambers (London: Imperial College Press, ), –. ⁸⁹ See Kitson, Forging Romantic China, , –. For intriguingly different images of the Weltsmachine, see the Romantic Circles Gallery, ‘The Chronometer and Planetarium System’ (http://www.rc. umd.edu/gallery/chronometer-and-planetarium-system), and Philipp Matthäus Hahn, ‘Große astronomische Welt-Maschine—Cod.math.qt.’ (c.–) in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart (http://digital.wlb-stuttgart.de/purl/bszX). ⁹⁰ I draw here on Nick Groom’s persuasive reading of the ‘symphony’ in ‘Kubla Khan’ as a variant of the hurdy-gurdy, the droning ‘automatic harp’ of the ballad singer. Groom’s papers on the topic include: ‘Kubla Khan’s Automatic Harp: Ambient Noise in Late-th Century and Romantic Poetry’, University of Sheffield, Feb. , and ‘Strange Music from Beyond the Wall of Sleep: Aeolian Harps, Seashells, and the Pagan Lyre’, at the th Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere, Aug. .
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Charles Lamb’s letters to Thomas Manning at Canton. Lamb suggests that his ‘improbable romantic fictions’ of London in ruins follow inevitably from being in ‘correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth’.⁹¹ His joke about the ‘spelling’ of ‘Ho-hing-tong’ (discussed earlier) leads on to a vision of Manning returning ‘like a Struldbug [sic] into a world where . . . all your opinions will be out of date, your jokes obsolete . . . as wit of the last age’.⁹² The very title of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (), meanwhile, plays on the cognitive ‘shudder’ of connecting England and the (supposed) ‘modes of life’ in China.⁹³ In telling his dreams, De Quincey counterposes ‘Chinese’ visions of being ‘buried, for a thousand years . . . in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids’ with a dream-architecture inspired by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Piranesi’s fantasies of Rome, of ‘endless growth and self-reproduction’ in ‘vast Gothic halls’.⁹⁴ If De Quincey’s dream-architecture recalls the ‘wilderness of building’ in The Excursion (II, ), and if Lamb’s linkage of catachresis and historical consciousness recalls the ‘plain humanities’ replacing ‘hieroglyphics’ in ‘Michael’, there is a still closer correspondence between Wordsworth’s poetry and China in the shape of his brother, John Wordsworth, captain of the Canton trader, the Earl of Abergavenny. The Wordsworths invested heavily—both financially and emotionally—in John’s voyages. And as Peter Kitson has shown, this outbound investment returns with strange force, as China ‘erupts’ into ‘that most canonically Romantic poem about the formation of the Romantic self ’, The Prelude.⁹⁵ The Chinese ‘eruption’ happens twice. In one version of the poem, from /, Wordsworth introduces China into book V as a new context for the miseducated ‘dwarf man’. The child prodigy is now ‘Monstrous as China’s vegetable Dwarfs’, and resembles an English ‘Oak’ in ‘living miniature’, the product of a system ‘Of human care industriously perverse / Here to advance the work and there retard’.⁹⁶ Wordsworth also adds a trace to the text of book VIII, where the ‘Paradise’ of the English Lakes enters into comparison with ‘Gehol’s famous Gardens’, ‘Beyond that mighty Wall, not fabulous’ of China (VIII, –). Gehol’s interjoining ‘scenes’ of ‘shady dells’ and ‘eastern monasteries’ exemplify a landscape architecture of ‘ever growing change’ (VIII, –). But Wordsworth prefers the ‘Paradise / Where I was rear’d’, as a human landscape: not ‘composed’ by ‘patient’ ‘myriads’ for an imperial ‘dynasty’, but cultivated
⁹¹ See Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vi. . ⁹² See Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vi. . ⁹³ See Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, ), –: ‘De Quincey’s adoption of the adjective “English” was undoubtedly meant in part to preempt the implicit “Oriental” that would otherwise be attached to “Opium-Eater” ’. ⁹⁴ Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁹⁵ Kitson, Forging Romantic China, . ⁹⁶ See The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark Reed, vols (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), ii. ; book V, ll. –.
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with ‘Fellow’ feeling by ‘Man free, man working for himself ’ (VIII, –). Here beauty—like knowledge in book V (l. )—is ‘not purchased with the loss of power’. A ‘roam’ in Gehol’s gardens ‘Would leave behind a dance of images’ that might ‘break in upon . . . sleep for weeks’ (VIII, –). But even in that brief interspace, the ‘common haunts of the green earth’—existing beyond and beneath the artifice of landscape gardening—are ‘fastening on the heart / Insensibly’, ‘So that we love, not knowing that we love, / And feel, not knowing whence our feeling comes’ (VIII, –). Wordsworth’s source for both of these ‘Chinese’ passages appears to be John Barrow’s Travels in China (), a quasi-ethnographic account of the country based on first-hand experience during the ‘failed’ Macartney embassy of . Wordsworth likely read Barrow’s book (possibly in Southey’s review copy) around the time he composed the lines in book VIII, by October .⁹⁷ Extracts then went into the Wordsworths’ commonplace book (DC MS ) for future use.⁹⁸ Wordsworth’s late addition to book V is in keeping with Barrow’s account of a system of ‘dry study’ that replicates knowledge but with ‘no meaning’.⁹⁹ The evocation of Gehol in book VIII similarly comes straight out of the Travels, corresponding closely to the description given on pages – of Barrow’s book.¹⁰⁰ But the common origin of the two passages belies the contrast in their textual status. The passage on Gehol, from , is present with variations in all subsequent versions of The Prelude. The / addition to book V, on the other hand, is expunged from the final text. After the lines on ‘the dimpling cistern of his heart’, only a context-less stump survives: ‘For this unnatural growth the trainer blame, / Pity the tree’ (: V, –). Wordsworth’s reasons for adding and then subtracting China from book V are unknown. But The Prelude was a poem that ‘lived in manuscript’, continually revalidated between and through ‘compulsive rewriting’.¹⁰¹ The ‘vegetable’ and ‘industrious’ terms of the / addition suggest Wordsworth removing it in the spirit of Burke’s constant constitutional gardener, taking ‘care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant’.¹⁰² Wordsworth’s poetry of self-evolving
⁹⁷ See Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Kitson, Forging Romantic China, –; and John Barrow, Travels in China: Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey Through the Country from Pekin to Canton (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, ), –, –. ⁹⁸ Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, . ⁹⁹ Barrow, Travels in China, –. ¹⁰⁰ See Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, ; and The Thirteen-Book Prelude, i. . ¹⁰¹ See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., ), ; see also Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, . ¹⁰² See Burke, Reflections, . Wordsworth developed Burke’s metaphor in his pamphlet on The Convention of Cintra, warning the Spanish patriots not to be ‘indiscriminately afraid of new things . . . Young scions of polity must be engrafted on the time-worn trunk: a new fortress must be reared upon the ancient and living rock of justice’. See The Convention of Cintra in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, i. .
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‘internal spirit’ again reasserts itself against ‘industrious antiquarianism’.¹⁰³ But if this only sharpens the contrast with the hardier material on ‘Gehol’s . . . gardens’, Kitson intimates an explanation both global and ‘insular’ in the death, en route to China, of John Wordsworth, in February . Wordsworth conferred finished form on the poem ‘on . . . [his] own Support’ in May , just three months after John’s ship went down, taking to the sea floor some £, of goods and silver, and leaving the Wordsworths exposed to huge potential liabilities.¹⁰⁴ But the ‘feeling . . . loss’, as ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ calls it, runs deeper still. Bound up somewhere in the near-quarter-million loss, and John Wordsworth’s total investment of around £,, was a £, advance on the Lonsdale debt, which the family had invested in John’s unsuccessful voyage to Canton of –.¹⁰⁵ John Wordsworth seems to have understood his Chinese voyages, with their huge potential for profit (through private trading in opium), as a way of repairing the family ruin. As William put it in his correspondence, ventriloquizing his brother’s voice: ‘He [i.e. John] encouraged me to persist in the plan of life which I had adopted; I will work for you, and you shall attempt to do something for the world. Could I but see you with a green field of your own and a Cow and two or three other little comforts, I shall be happy’.¹⁰⁶ The Prelude passage comparing the English Lakes and Gehol’s gardens maps intriguingly onto the difference between John’s vision of a rural English idyll, invisibly sustained by (partially illicit) Chinese commerce, and the account Wordsworth found in Barrow’s Travels of the imperial spectacle at Gehol. Barrow inserts the account of the British ambassador, George, Lord Macartney, who describes finding ‘before me’, ‘at my feet’, ‘everything . . . as on an illuminated map; palaces, pagodas, towns, villages, farmhouses, plains, and vallies . . . and meadows covered with cattle’.¹⁰⁷ The distressing effect of this similarity in dissimilarity is uncannily exact. As Kitson suggests,
¹⁰³ This ‘insular’ turn in the revision of book V may, however, also have a ‘global’ register. Andrew Warren reads the ‘Arab Quixote’ dream at the start of book V in terms of an incipiently global perspective, with the ‘Oriental Manuscript’ no longer representing, as for the Augustans, merely ‘a fortuitous route to allegory’, but rather (quoting Andrew Piper) a ‘complex calculus of the local and the global’. See Warren, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Merging the global presence of China into the already ‘complex calculus’ of book V may have seemed to Wordsworth after to complicate beyond comprehension what he already feared in was a ‘scarcely’ ‘obvious’ ‘drift’ (, V, –). The background ‘argument’ of the book on ‘Books’ and education runs, as I read it, from an ‘Arab Quixote’ allegory recalling Southey’s Thalaba on ‘Oriental’ immemorialism, ‘waste’, and ‘ornament’, to a (modern, European) nightmare of machine-education, and on to an implicitly contrasting ‘Gothic’ vision of ‘There was a Boy’—where the Coleridgean Gothic ideal of a ‘structure complete in each part’ materializes briefly, only to perish as premature. Barrow’s account of Chinese ‘industry perverse’ might have seemed in / to make a neat link between the first and second parts of this ‘argument’ about education. But on subsequent reflection, the dwarf tree figure may have seemed to pre-empt or subvert any claim for the completeness-in-each-part of the Gothic child. ¹⁰⁴ Kitson, Forging Romantic China, –. ¹⁰⁵ See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, ; and Peter Kitson, ‘The Wordsworths, Opium, and China’, The Wordsworth Circle, / (Winter ): –, . ¹⁰⁶ The Early Years, . ¹⁰⁷ Barrow, Travels in China, –.
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Wordsworth reading Macartney in Barrow would almost certainly have noticed a further comparison between the scene at Gehol and the ‘noble’ and ‘diverse’ grounds of Lowther Hall in Westmorland—a place which, Macartney notes in passing, he ‘knew . . . many years ago’.¹⁰⁸ Macartney’s airy reference to past pleasures summons up the Wordsworth family tragedy. John Wordsworth senior had been law agent and land steward to James Lowther, Lord Lonsdale.¹⁰⁹ The British ambassador to China, meanwhile, ‘knew’ the Lowther estate because Lonsdale was his brother-in-law, and because he (Macartney) was returned as MP for Cockermouth in the general election—the beneficiary of bribes and other expenses advanced in the Lowther interest by none other than John Wordsworth senior, and never repaid.¹¹⁰ In , long after Lowther’s heir had made restitution to the adult Wordsworth children with an overpayment of £,, they were still ‘fighting against a sense of their dispossession’.¹¹¹ In a letter of August, Dorothy reflected with a feeling of loss never old on Lonsdale having restored ‘in a whim’ the ruin (‘buried’, ‘choked’, ‘intermingled’) of the ‘home’ by the Derwent that they had ‘lost’ when their father died, ‘one and twenty years ago’.¹¹² And therefore, perhaps, the far-fetched reference to ‘Gehol’s famous Gardens’ remains, unchanged in its substantial lineaments, within Wordsworth’s ‘insular’ English poem. Wordsworth importing Macartney’s vision of China into The Prelude was also making a repayment, with interest, of the lordly ambassador’s global export of the Lakeland stewardship of his father, John Wordsworth senior. The story of William and his brother John sealing their own ‘covenant’ by laying ‘the foundation stone of a little fishing hut’ may (or may not) be a ‘fantasy’ back-projected from Wordsworth’s ‘pastoral poem’.¹¹³ But Wordsworth could hardly have failed to notice, through all his years of toil at the complete but continually unfinished Prelude, that the loss of John Wordsworth junior to the China trade was in effect the tragedy of ‘Michael’—and with it the whole Romantic spirit of a traumatically reinvented tradition—reinscribed within the very fabric of his own family, and written in the ultimately unspellable hieroglyphics of global commerce.
S Brodey, Inger Sigrun, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility (New York and London: Routledge, ). Fulford, Tim, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Gill, Stephen, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
¹⁰⁸ Barrow, Travels in China, . ¹⁰⁹ McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, . ¹¹⁰ See Kitson, Forging Romantic China, ; and McCormick, ‘Wordsworth and Shepherds’, . ¹¹¹ Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority, –. ¹¹² The Early Years, . ¹¹³ Richard Matlak, Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, – (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, ), –, n.
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Higgins, David, Romantic Englishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, – (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Kitson, Peter, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Porter, David, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Warren, Andrew, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
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A discussion of this topic has to begin with Ivanhoe (), which has been aptly described by Clare A. Simmons as ‘the textbook of nineteenth-century British medievalism’.¹ Ivanhoe was such a richly ‘procreative’ text, as Ann Rigney has argued, because it at once ‘stuck in people’s memory’ and ‘invited . . . readers to re-write it’.² In this chapter I will focus primarily on Ivanhoe and the novels that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period in English history—from just before the Norman invasion of to just after the Third Crusade of –—in the terms that Scott so vividly established. Writers of medievalist fiction after Ivanhoe generally took for granted what Scott had to say about the eventual resolution of the post-Conquest antagonism between Norman and Saxon, and it is in part at least the adaptability (as well as attractiveness) of this story of national emergence that helped to make Ivanhoe, as Fiona Robertson has claimed, ‘probably the single most important cultural production of the nineteenth century’.³ While Ivanhoe did not encompass all of the possibilities that would be explored by subsequent works set in the Middle Ages (many of which dealt with earlier or later periods), it did in different ways help to shape the development of historical fiction more broadly, and, as I will suggest, the reception of the text and of its numerous reworkings had implications for the status of the historical novel as a genre. In the light of Richard Maxwell’s account of the mid- to latenineteenth-century ‘juvenilization’ of historical fiction, I will conclude by briefly considering Robert Louis Stevenson’s War of the Roses tale The Black Arrow ()
¹ Claire A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), . ² Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ³ Fiona Robertson, ‘Novels’, in Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, .
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as a retrospect on the subject of this chapter that borrows from Ivanhoe, but which also refuses the conjoining of individual and national development that is so characteristic of the medievalist novel in the wake of Scott.⁴ Before discussing reworkings of Ivanhoe it is important first of all to acknowledge that the novel itself is rhetorically less straightforward than some nineteenth-century responses to it appear to indicate. Ivanhoe’s opening chapter provides an outline of the ‘state of things’ in England at the end of the twelfth century, and it describes the effects of the Norman invasion, central among them, at least according to Scott’s enormously influential version of events, the continuing existence of ‘two hostile races’, victor and vanquished.⁵ The work also here introduces the reader to the no less resonant idea of ‘merry England’, by evoking ‘a pleasant district’ of South Yorkshire where ‘there extended in ancient times a large forest’, said to be home to ‘those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song’ (I, ). Scott thus created a composite setting—partaking of romance as much as history—that merged different, if related, mythologies which had already been subject to diversely politicized appropriation. Scott’s reference to ‘English song’, for example, alludes to the ballads about Robin Hood that had been collected by the republican antiquary Joseph Ritson, and Locksley and his men were key constituent elements of the ‘procreativity’ that Ivanhoe set in play. While Locksley is a yeoman—a commoner rather than a nobleman—who speaks for ‘the rights of Englishmen’ (I, ), he additionally regards himself as ‘monarch’ (I, ) of the forest and later kneels before King Richard. Just as Ivanhoe in this way nods to but then undercuts the idea of a ‘greenwood’ commonwealth, so too does it rehearse the popular notion of the ‘Norman yoke’ only thereafter to relativize the Conquest as one among other past invasions of England: the oaks of the forest described at the outset, it is said, may once have ‘witnessed . . . the stately march of the Roman soldiery’ (I, ). In its opening chapter alone, then, Ivanhoe contains multitudes, establishing much of the potentiality that would be explored by subsequent fictions of the Middle Ages. Ivanhoe also looks ahead to its own conclusion during these preliminaries, because after rehearsing the idea of the linguistic gulf dividing Norman and Saxon, it notes that the ‘necessary intercourse’ between the lords and the cultivators of the soil gradually led to the formation of a common dialect, from which arose ‘our present English language’ (I, ). Another index of the breadth of Scott’s canvas, however, is that the novel complicates this evolutionary narrative by telling the story of the ‘noble Saxon maiden’ Ulrica, who became ‘the prey and the scorn’ (I, ) of the elder Front-de-Boeuf and his men, her fate re-establishing the association of conquest and rape. Scott’s representation of the treatment of Isaac of York additionally offers the reader a critically detached perspective on the process of reconciliation that is ostensibly the novel’s subject, since it suggests how common abuse of an abjected other might help onetime enemies ⁴ Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ⁵ Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Hereafter I.
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eventually to overcome their differences: if ‘Norman, Saxon, Dane, and Briton [remained] adverse . . . to each other’, the reader is told, they ‘contended which should look with greatest detestation upon a people, whom it was accounted a point of religion to hate, to revile, to despise, to plunder, and to persecute’ (I, ). Aware that people of her faith are scapegoated as sources of infection, and refusing to be converted to Christianity, Isaac’s daughter Rebecca declares at the end of the novel, just after the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena, that she and her father will seek exile in Moorish Grenada. Even as it concludes its narrative of rapprochement with the joint festivities of Saxon and Norman, therefore, the novel acknowledges the limits of this inclusivity, presenting the self-definition of a ‘Christian’ society as a closing of ranks that entails losses as well as gains. That so many readers have wanted Ivanhoe to marry Rebecca rather than Rowena is perhaps indicative of a wider dissatisfaction with the nature of the novel’s resolution. Many of the best-known nineteenth-century responses to Ivanhoe attended not to any such perceived shortcomings in the text, however, but rather to Scott’s successful negotiation of the problem of ‘two hostile races’ announced at the work’s outset. Ivanhoe famously offered a lens on the present for Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil (), because it helped him to define a ‘one nation’ Toryism that recognized the necessary obligations of aristocratic rulers to the people that they governed. The novel similarly spoke to the present for Thomas Carlyle, who saw in Scott’s depiction of the relations between Cedric of Rotherwood and his ‘thrall’ (I, ), the swineherd Gurth, a moral economy that was more humane than the modern capitalist world of wage labour. Scott’s vivid representation of the pageantry of chivalry, notably in the chapters dealing with the Ashby tournament, provided further memorable episodes and tableaus that succeeded for their readers in, as Ann Rigney has put it, ‘bringing the past to life in colour’.⁶ The tournament itself is described by Scott in ironic as well as romantic terms (one of the four men who died there was ‘smothered by the heat of his armour’ (I, ), we are told), but it nonetheless inspired re-enactments not just in Britain, as at the Eglinton tournament of , but also in the United States, where Mark Twain famously lamented the impact of the ‘Sir Walter Scott disease’ on the self-perception of slave-owners in the antebellum South. Twain claimed that Ivanhoe undid the good work of Don Quixote by encouraging self-styled Southern gentlemen to revere the ‘sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless longvanished society’.⁷ For Scott’s contemporary William Hazlitt, by contrast, the ritualized violence of the Ashby tournament demonstrated an enduring truth, because it manifested the ‘determination and spirit’ and indifference to pain that were characteristic of English masculinity—whether evident in a modern boxing ring or on a field of armed combat in ‘merry England’.⁸ ⁶ Rigney, Afterlives, . ⁷ Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (), in John O. Hayden (ed.), Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), . ⁸ William Hazlitt, ‘Merry England’, The New Monthly Magazine, (Jan. ): –, .
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Such different responses to Scott’s evocation of the culture of chivalry serve to illustrate Rigney’s argument that the various ‘figures of memory’ generated by Scott—of the ‘two hostile races’, Locksley and the greenwood, Gurth’s thraldom, and Rebecca’s resistance, as well as the Ashby tournament—were both extremely compelling and liable to invite ‘correction, re-working, and puzzling through’.⁹ If it is fair to say that Ivanhoe played a very substantial role in inventing the Middle Ages for the nineteenth century, it is necessary to emphasize too, however, that Scott was not himself the originator of the medievalist novel. Thomas Leland’s Longsword () was probably the first work of fiction to employ a medieval setting, and the idea of ‘English’ or ‘Gothic’ historical romance, inaugurated by Longsword and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (), was well established by the end of the eighteenth century. In writing within yet also turning away from this genre, Ann Radcliffe, in Gaston de Blondeville (probably completed in ), anticipated the playful reflexivity of the Waverley novels, most obviously by including a long frame-tale in which two travellers in the present debate the meaning of the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, where the action of the work takes place. Set (like Longsword) during the reign of Henry III, Gaston incorporates a tournament scene of its own that is pivotal to the denouement of the novel, but which also exemplifies Radcliffe’s self-consciousness about the process of attempting to produce the distant past for her audience. When the work refers to ‘a loud blast of trumpets and a great huzza’ as it begins to evoke the ‘splendid field’ on which the title character later meets his end, the narrator records the reaction of a spectator struggling to find a vantage-point: ‘Why this is worse than seeing nothing at all, to be tantalized in this way’.¹⁰ Scott did not acknowledge Radcliffe’s Gaston (which was not published until , after Radcliffe’s death), but he did identify a forerunner of sorts in the figure of the antiquary Joseph Strutt. In the ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ to Ivanhoe, Scott cited Strutt’s medieval romance Queen-hoo Hall () as a negative example that defined the novelty of his own work, projecting onto Strutt an over-zealous obsession with ‘the repulsive dryness of mere antiquity’ while claiming for himself a much more extensive domain, the ‘manners and sentiments which are common to us and our ancestors’ (I, ). Scott at the same time indulged in the pleasures of ‘antiquarian irony’ here, for example by having his persona Laurence Templeton declare his reliance on ‘the singular Anglo-Norman MS’ (I, ) of Sir Arthur Wardour—actually a character in Scott’s earlier novel The Antiquary ().¹¹ The novel registers its debt to this imaginary manuscript on a number of occasions, and in other ways too it parades its own artifice, displaying what Jerome McGann has described as an almost ‘Brechtian
⁹ Rigney, Afterlives, . ¹⁰ Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, Or The Court of Henry III. Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance. St Alban’s Abbey, a Metrical Tale; With Some Poetical Pieces, vols (London: Henry Colburn, ), ii. . ¹¹ I take the phrase ‘antiquarian irony’ from Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
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transparency’.¹² One especially rich example of this self-consciousness occurs when the jester Wamba exchanges habits with his master Cedric and instructs him as to how best to effect his escape, in the disguise of a friar, from captivity in Torquilstone Castle: Pax vobiscum will answer all queries. If you go or come, eat or drink, bless or ban, Pax vobiscum carries you through it all. It is as useful to a friar as a broomstick to a witch, or a wand to a conqueror. Speak it but thus, in a deep grave tone,—Pax vobiscum!—it is irresistible—Watch and ward, knight and squire, foot and horse, it acts as a charm upon them all. (I, –)
Scott can be seen here to reflect on his own strategy for producing medievalist fiction, by suggesting that judiciously sparing use of authenticity-effects, such as a familiar Latin phrase, might be enough to create the requisite atmosphere, and to enchant an audience likely to be nonplussed by ‘mere’—in other words, undiluted—antiquity. For all that the influence of Ivanhoe was enormous, then, Scott’s status as an innovator needs to be understood as in part the product of his own self-representation, as he carefully cleared a space for himself and differentiated his work from that of his predecessors, in the process making possible his ‘colonization’ of—for Scott—new English territory.¹³ Situating Ivanhoe in the context of Scott’s own writing career provides another useful way of thinking about the impact of the novel, because as well as being Scott’s first ‘English’ fiction it contained the seeds of later works such as The Talisman () (one of his Tales of the Crusaders) that came to be influential in their own right. Set before Ivanhoe, with King Richard still in Palestine prior to his return to England, The Talisman was seen by many reviewers to immerse its audience in the world of the crusades, where previous historical fictions—for example, Longsword and Richard Warner’s Netley Abbey ()—had only included brief crusading interludes. If there was something thrilling for readers about thus being placed ‘in the very heart of the camp’, however, some also signalled their disappointment that the novel finished ‘without a battle’.¹⁴ As is the case with Ivanhoe, The Talisman is a work that often appears to be as interested in the effects of peaceful contact between erstwhile adversaries as it is in the history of conflict between them. One early demonstration of this occurs after the famous opening depiction of the ‘knight of the red cross’ Sir Kenneth and the Saracen Sheerkohf (Saladin in disguise) in single combat, when the novel presents the latter addressing Sir Kenneth in an established ‘lingua franca’, and then notes the way in which Saracens had ‘gradually caught’ chivalric manners from their Christian foes.¹⁵
¹² Jerome McGann, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, . ¹³ Ian Duncan, introduction to Ivanhoe, p. vii. ¹⁴ Review of Tales of the Crusaders, Monthly Magazine, (July ): –, . ¹⁵ Scott, The Talisman, ed. J. B. Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), and .
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Scott playfully drew attention to such confounding of readerly expectations, stating in his introduction that during this period ‘the Christian and English monarch’ Richard ‘showed all the cruelty and violence of an Eastern sultan’, while Saladin ‘displayed the deep policy and prudence of an European sovereign’.¹⁶ It has often been observed that Scott’s Saladin is a more chivalric figure than King Richard, and as David Simpson has pointed out, Saladin in the guise of Adonbec El Hakim is additionally credited with a healing agency analogous to that of Rebecca in Ivanhoe. The Talisman (in the words of Simpson) ‘stages a conflation of Jew and Arab in the debate among Richard’s courtiers about whether a heathen should be allowed to offer medical treatment to a Christian king’, but rather than present a European ‘Christendom’ that is unified by its identification of such interchangeable others, it continually emphasizes the depth of the enmity existing between nominal allies.¹⁷ Scott’s disruption of the Crusader/Saracen binary culminates in the scene at the novel’s conclusion, when Saladin summarily executes the Grand Master of the Templars, guilty of having finished off his partner in crime, Conrade of Montserrat. Simpson has emphasized the sophistication of Scott’s treatment of outsiders such as Rebecca and Saladin, who are both possessed of a—largely unrecognized—‘curative power’.¹⁸ The nature of Scott’s attention to the figure of the charismatic stranger demonstrates the idiosyncrasy of his crusading fictions, and their divergence from contemporary efforts to recover the idealism of the crusades: Kenelm Digby in The Broad Stone of Honour (), for example, described the crusades as an endeavour in which ‘all Europe was united in a band of brothers to worship the Saviour of mankind’.¹⁹ Just as nineteenth-century audiences were able to appreciate Ivanhoe as a work of romantic pageantry, however, so too did many readers praise in particular the picturesque grandeur of The Talisman, a novel which, for G. P. R. James, ‘fully, perfectly, and feelingly, displayed’ the ‘spirit’ of the Third Crusade.²⁰ Scott characterized himself in his Journal in as ‘something like Captain Bobadil who traind up a hundred gentlemen to fight very nearly if not altogether as well as myself ’, adding later that the method of his followers was akin to ‘dragging in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute descriptions of events which do not affect its purpose’.²¹ These remarks predate the publication of James’s first novel (Richelieu: a Tale of France of ), but, uncharitable as they are, they help
¹⁶ Scott, Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous, ed. J. H. Alexander (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), p. xx. ¹⁷ David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . ¹⁸ Simpson, Stranger, . ¹⁹ Kenelm Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour: or, Rules for the Gentlemen of England (London: C. and J. Rivington, ), . ²⁰ G. P. R. James, The History of Chivalry (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, ), . ²¹ The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), and –.
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us now to think about the ways in which some subsequent writers of historical fiction read—and perhaps misread—Scott. James’s fifth novel Philip Augustus, or The Brothers in Arms () is set in France in the late twelfth century, and it clearly takes from Ivanhoe its point of departure, the return home of knights from the crusades, as well as its larger interest in the dynamics of national unification. One obvious difference of James’s novel from Ivanhoe is also apparent at the outset, however, when it refers to the feudal system as a ‘brilliant institution’, which had risen at this time ‘to its highest pitch of splendour’.²² In Ivanhoe, ‘brilliant’ is a far more ambivalent designation than this, as is evident in Scott’s description of King Richard as a ‘brilliant, but useless’ figure: if ‘the lion-hearted king’ may be regarded as ‘a knight of romance’, the reader is told, his reign was ‘like the course of a . . . meteor’, which shed light but was then ‘instantly swallowed by universal darkness, his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause, and hold up as an example to posterity’ (I, –). James stated that the crusading enterprise popularly associated with King Richard was ‘in itself magnificent and heroic’ (PA, i. ), and he further evoked a ‘splendid’ past at the level of his work’s historical costume. The opening chapter of Philip Augustus offers an itemization of the armour worn by the Count d’Auvergne and his companion Guy de Coucy, the latter said to be ‘covered with a bright haubert, or shirt of steel rings, which, polished like glass, and lying flat upon each other, glittered and flashed in the sunshine as if they were formed of diamonds’, though the ‘puckered silk’ of his ‘gambeson’—a padded defensive jacket—‘rose above the edge of the shirt of mail, and prevented the rings from chafing upon his neck’ (PA, i. ). Scott’s claim that the authors he ‘trained up’ provided an overload of ‘minute descriptions’ indicates that he was well aware of the precarious status of historical fiction in the hierarchy of literary genres, as a kind of writing that was liable to be pulled down by the weight of the detail that it dragged in; in the journal entry cited above, he admitted that ‘Perhaps I have sin’d in this way myself ’.²³ As is well known, Scott was widely accused of anachronism and error in his own evocation of the past (for example, in Ivanhoe’s account of a conflict between Norman and Saxon that was still ongoing at the end of the twelfth century), and the German historian Ranke, committed to an idea of history ‘as it really was’, cited Scott as a negative influence, pledging to avoid ‘all imagination’ after reading Quentin Durward ().²⁴ Even as historical fiction increasingly came under scrutiny as the practice of history-writing was professionalized, however, the historical novel became the genre of choice for prolific authors writing for the mass market, not least because—as the titles of the diverse works of
²² G. P. R. James, Philip Augustus; or, The Brothers in Arms, vols (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley), i. . Hereafter PA. ²³ Scott, Journal, . ²⁴ Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
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James or Edward Bulwer-Lytton demonstrate—its potential seemed to be all but inexhaustible. Ivanhoe helped to generate not only other crusading novels but also other fictions of the Norman Conquest, the best-known and most influential of them probably Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (). Bulwer-Lytton wrote in a review of Scott’s Tales of My Landlord () that historical fiction afforded ‘[o]pportunity to instruct as well as to amuse’, and in Harold he both sought to set a new scholarly standard and to construct a grand narrative free from the self-reflexive irony of Scott: ‘I have devoted to this work’, he declared, ‘a degree of research which, if unusual to romance, I cannot consider superfluous when illustrating an age so remote, and events unparalleled in their influence over the destinies of England’.²⁵ Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold refers in a footnote to Duke William of Normandy’s ‘bandit argument’ (H, ) proposing the division of conquered English lands (and thereby alludes to Tom Paine’s memorable portrait of the ‘French bastard’ in Common Sense ()), but it is nonetheless sceptical about any notion that ‘Saxon’ liberties were curtailed by the Norman invasion.²⁶ While King Harold is clearly heroic and his men are impressively brave, Saxon warriors in the novel are defined against a generally ‘inert’ population, and the ‘Witana-gemot’ is described less as a proto-democratic popular assembly (as it was in the writing of some eighteenth-century radicals) than a body ‘representing . . . the things the people most prized’, including ‘wealth’ as well as ‘valour’ (H, ). Depicting ‘the old Saxon manhood’ as having been subdued by ‘that timorous spirit of calculation, which the over-regard for wealth had fostered’ (H, ), Bulwer-Lytton is thus able here to portray the Norman Conquest as in the long run an act of renewal, by which the nation was strengthened rather than subdued: significantly, both the legendary King Alfred and Duke William are at different times credited with a far-sighted vision of ‘the Civilisation that was to come’ (H, ). Clare A. Simmons has observed that Harold presents the reader with the paradox of a ‘Whig tragedy’.²⁷ The titular hero is nominally ‘the last’ of his line and meets his death during a conflict that is rendered in epic proportions, but in the novel’s terms the idea of a Saxon ‘spirit’—more martial than democratic—nonetheless lives on into the present, as ‘the tombless shade of the kingly freeman still guards the coasts, and rests upon the seas’. The novel’s final paragraph declares that ‘Eight centuries have rolled away’, and then asks ‘where is the Norman now? or where is not the Saxon?’, ultimately rejecting the argument that the Norman invasion was a decisive rupture in the history of the nation, and celebrating the emergence of a greater Englishness, aligned with qualities of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Justice’ (H, ).
²⁵ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Fraser’s Magazine (), in Hayden, Scott: The Critical Heritage, ; Bulwer-Lytton, Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, rd edn (London: George Routledge, ), p. xvii. Hereafter H. ²⁶ The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), . ²⁷ Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), .
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The language of national destiny invoked by Bulwer-Lytton here helps to substantiate Billie Melman’s claim about the mid-century shift in understandings of the post-invasion period, now seen in terms not of ‘darkness’ but ‘apotheosis’.²⁸ A comparable rhetoric is evident in Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, ‘Last of the English’ (), published (as Melman points out) on the th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and, like Harold, focused on a figure popularly associated with resistance to the Norman invasion. The ‘last of ’ formulation clearly echoes that of Bulwer-Lytton, and Kingsley’s novel, again following the example of Harold, situates its hero in the context of a much longer and broader narrative that, partly by virtue of its scope, manages to transform defeat into victory. Hereward begins by declaring that while ‘heroic deeds of highlanders . . . have been told in verse and prose’, ‘we must remember . . . there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and the fen’.²⁹ Kingsley thus distances himself from Scott (identified as a ‘Scottish’ writer rather than as the author of Ivanhoe), and at the same time introduces the reader to a practical heroism integral to the making of modern Britain, specifically referring to the acts of ‘clearing, delving, dyking, [and] building’ (HW, i. ) by which the Fens of East Anglia were drained. The novel presents such improvement of ‘nature’ as supporting a civilization, antithetical to romance, that is liable to degenerate into ‘slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed’ (HW, i. ), but the figure of the ‘lowlander’ nonetheless retains his manly virtue, Kingsley suggests, in part because he is possessed of a ‘mongrel’ (HW, i. ) strength, the product of a history of amalgamation between Germanic peoples predating the Norman invasion. This idea of intermixture as a progressive force is again appealed to in relation to the sturdily independent ‘Zeelanders’ who would go on to constitute the Dutch Republic, and Kingsley’s attention to the determining effects of race is similarly evident in his reference to the apparently unchanging history of ‘Celtic Ireland’, ‘one dull and aimless catalogue of murder and devastation, followed by famine and disease’ (HW, i. ). Hereward at one point aligns the savage Irish of the eleventh century with the Maoris of contemporary New Zealand, and Kingsley’s earlier novel Westward Ho! () offers a more overtly imperial frame of reference than this in its concluding account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada: it describes this conflict in world-historical terms as the decisive triumph of ‘Protestantism and freedom’ over ‘Popery and despotism’, and ‘the prophetic birth-paean’ of enlightened colonization across the globe.³⁰ If the language of race provided a way of explaining the course of history in fictions from Harold onwards, however, novels with broadly medieval settings were generally not as direct as Kingsley’s Elizabethan tale in looking ahead to the future ‘expansion of
²⁸ Billie Melman, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History, (): –, . ²⁹ Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, ‘Last of the English’, vols (London: Macmillan & Co., ), i. . Hereafter HW. ³⁰ Kingsley, Westward Ho! Or, the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight (London: Macmillan & Co., ), and .
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England’.³¹ In the case of a work such as Charlotte Yonge’s The Little Duke, or Richard the Fearless (), for example, this can partly be explained by the fact that its action takes place across the Channel, and in the distant past (‘as long ago as the year ’).³² The lack of overt reflection on manifest destiny here can also be attributed to the way in which, in a text written for child readers, Yonge maps historical development onto her protagonist’s coming of age. Yonge’s hero Richard is introduced as the ward of ‘Northmen’ in Bayeux (his father Duke William having fallen victim to Flemish treachery), and he undergoes a kind of captivity at the hands of the French King Louis (who also poses as his guardian), before escaping to rejoin his own people, among whom he implements the lessons he has learned: above all he comes to understand what his father knew, that the passions have to be governed and that the only proper use of force is in defence of right. Richard Maxwell has referred to Yonge’s work as ‘the story of a child who must grow up before his time’, a parable about the ‘half-hidden moral abysses’ of childhood, where play is never entirely divorced from the responsibilities of adult life.³³ The historical scaffolding of this tale is itself significant, though, not least because—scrambling the binary logic of the ‘Norman yoke’—Yonge presents her Normans as if they were Saxons, as a ‘free-born’ (LP, ) people resisting an overbearing and expansionist neighbour. More clearly than in Harold and Hereward, the bearers of virtue in the novel are rooted in the vigour of their ethnic heritage (‘let not our Danish cousins say we learn Frank graces instead of Northern blows’ (LP, ), one character exclaims), but are progressive at the same time, because they have rejected Norse codes of vengeance for Christian ideals of forgiveness. Yonge’s work therefore pays tribute to the endurance of the racial myth that Ivanhoe did so much to circulate, and by demonstrating the ‘flexibility’ of that myth, as Simmons has argued, further depoliticizes it.³⁴ Rather than appealing to the distant past as the locus of hereditary democratic rights, the High Church Yonge instead associated her Normans with familiar forms of faith and manners, thereby negotiating Kingsley’s opposition between English Protestantism and continental Popery. G. A. Henty’s Winning His Spurs (), another tale for children, set at the time of the Third Crusade, distinguishes at the outset between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Normans, as its hero Cuthbert, son of Sir William de Lance, enlists the ‘foresters’ of Worcestershire (inhabitants of an Ivanhoe-style ‘greenwood’) to help him rescue the Earl of Evesham’s daughter, who had been abducted by the tyrannical Sir John of Wortham (significantly labelled as a ‘baron’). In the style of Yonge, Winning His Spurs brings together historical fiction and coming of age narrative, its title making plain that the protagonist is an irrepressibly active figure, in contrast to Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who, as when he ³¹ J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan & Co., ). ³² Charlotte Yonge, The Little Duke, or, Richard the Fearless (London: John W, Parker, ), . Hereafter LP. ³³ Maxwell, Historical Novel, . ³⁴ Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, .
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follows the siege of Torquilstone Castle from his sick-bed inside, is sometimes presented at a remove from the heroic activity taking place elsewhere. Taken together, Henty’s—over one hundred—adventure tales are at once wide-ranging in their subject matter and repetitively formulaic in their structure. They both draw on and revise the example of Scott, because while they invariably introduce, as Maxwell has argued, ‘a fictional boy protagonist, just on the edge of manhood, [who] becomes attached to a world-historical figure’, they present heroes who, more clearly than Scott’s prototype Edward Waverley, learn ‘honourable, effective conduct’ when they become caught up in conflict.³⁵ In Winning His Spurs, Henty’s hero joins the Third Crusade as a follower of the Earl of Evesham, and he goes on to receive a knighthood after helping to extricate King Richard from the throng of Saracens who surrounded him at the height of one of the numerous battles and skirmishes that the tale describes. In a work by a writer who has so often been seen as a recruitment agent for British imperial service, it is striking that, while a captive in Palestine, Cuthbert should encounter a veiled woman who asks what ‘stirs up the heart of the Christian world that they should launch their armies against us, who wish but to be left alone, and who have no grudge against them?’³⁶ The novel addresses this disarming question not so much by seeking to justify the crusades in themselves (it acknowledges King Richard’s massacre of the defenders of Acre, for example), as by portraying the crusading enterprise as a kind of service to the nation. In by now familiar terms, Henty here accepts Scott’s account of the ‘two hostile races’ in late twelfth-century England, and presents the crusades as creating a new English identity out of the ethnic divisions of the past. Even as it bears the imprint of Ivanhoe, however, Winning His Spurs offers a manifestly reductive rewriting of Scott’s novel. In addition to downplaying Scott’s scepticism about popular investment in the crusades (and imagining an undivided Christendom), Henty’s tale marries its hero to the woman he initially helped to rescue (without any Scott-style introduction of a rival heroine), and it describes the return of King Richard from captivity in Europe as restorative for the nation as a whole. Leslie Stephen in famously declared that Ivanhoe marked the beginning of Scott’s ‘descent from the library to the school-room’, and it seems fair to say that works by Yonge, Henty, and others that were derivative of Ivanhoe helped to accelerate this decline in Scott’s status, by reshaping perceptions of the text with which they directly and indirectly engaged.³⁷ As a variety of historical fiction, then, the medievalist novel after Scott, at least in Britain, came to be regarded as a form of writing that, if it could provide a ‘healthy’ reading experience for boys, had little claim to literary value. With this reputational shift in mind, I will conclude by looking at another—and rather different—reworking of Ivanhoe, Robert Louis Stevenson’s fifteenth-century tale The Black Arrow. Stevenson’s work was initially published (in ) in a magazine titled Young Folks, but it ³⁵ Maxwell, Historical Novel, . ³⁶ G. A. Henty, Winning His Spurs: A Tale of the Crusades (London: W. Foulsham & Co., n.d.), . ³⁷ Leslie Stephen, Cornhill Magazine (), in Hayden, Scott: The Critical Heritage, .
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can nonetheless be seen to disrupt the ‘juvenilization’ of medievalist fiction that in many respects—for example, its elaborate stylistic pastiche—it helped to perpetuate. Although Stevenson’s protagonist Dick Shelton ‘starts the novel as a page and ends it a knight’ (in the words of John Sutherland), the story of his coming of age significantly departs from the Yonge and Henty tradition of adventure-fiction, by detaching adolescence from any idea of an analogous national emergence and presenting it instead as a state of psychological confusion.³⁸ This confusion is above all the product of Dick’s complex relationships with others, most notably his surrogate father, Sir Daniel Brackley (who murdered his actual father), and his fellow ward, John Matcham/Joanna Sedley, whom he first encounters as another ‘lad’ but who is in fact a ‘maid’ in disguise, with whom he falls in love. The Black Arrow borrows from Scott as well as from the tradition of Yonge and Henty, but while it alludes to the ‘greenwood’ locale of Ivanhoe in its description of the home of the outlaw fellowship referred to in the title, it makes no concession to any idealizing mythology of ‘merry England’. Where Scott offered to his successors a schematic understanding of ‘two hostile races’, there are no such clear dividing lines in the world of The Black Arrow, and there is consequently no comparable basis for a forward-looking story of reconciliation. Although the absence of any narrative of national ‘apotheosis’ here is partly a function of Stevenson’s Wars of the Roses setting, The Black Arrow also draws attention to the shifting allegiances of calculating figures such as Sir Daniel Brackley, and its denouement introduces a renowned historical villain in the form of ‘Richard Crookback’, the future King Richard III. If The Black Arrow can thus be seen to define itself against Ivanhoe (Stevenson struggled with his powerful Scottish precursor, as is well known), in other respects it might be regarded as truer to Ivanhoe than some of the earlier Scott-inspired fictions previously discussed in this chapter. Towards the close Dick Shelton is yoked to one that he recognizes as ‘a great personage’ () (in line with the Henty formula that itself derived from Waverley), yet this figure, ‘the bold, black-hearted, and ambitious hunchback’, is associated only with a ‘brief kingdom and . . . lasting infamy’ (), and Dick’s brief entanglement with his namesake leaves him wanting to escape from the ‘dust and blood of that unruly epoch’ (), and to return to the greenwood with his new wife. As I have tried to show in this chapter, one important manifestation of the ‘procreativity’ of Ivanhoe is the work of writers from Bulwer-Lytton onwards who claimed that historically remote events such as the Norman invasion were enduringly formative for modern imperial Britain. From these readers of Ivanhoe, The Black Arrow might be seen to recover something of the playfully reflexive scepticism of a novel that—after it reconciles Norman and Saxon—concludes by recording the exile of its most attractive character, Rebecca, and by following its reference to the death of the ‘rash and romantic’ (I, ) King Richard with a (mis-) quotation from ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’.
³⁶ Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, ed. John Sutherland (Harmondsworth, ), p. viii.
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SUGGESTED
READING
Bann, Stephen, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in NineteenthCentury Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Hayden, John O. (ed.), Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). Leask, Nigel, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Maxwell, Richard, The Historical Novel in Europe, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). McGann, Jerome, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Melman, Billie, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History, (): –. Rigney, Ann, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Robertson, Fiona, ‘Novels’, in Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Simmons, Clare A., Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). Simmons, Clare A., Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). Simpson, David, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
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I a lecture delivered at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin on February , shortly before his unexpected and untimely death, John Mitchell Kemble stated that ‘No man values higher than myself that noble spirit which makes us look with love upon the records of our ancestors, and of our own hand; nor can any man feel prouder than myself in the conviction of the high state of culture to which the earliest denizens of this island had attained’.¹ This passionate appeal to the past is not straightforward nostalgia for a glorious past but an active desire to praise and acknowledge earlier cultural accomplishments. This sense of national pride—even extreme pride—at the cultural accomplishments of one’s ancestors: this is the hallmark of Victorian approaches to Anglo-Saxon poetry. And John Mitchell Kemble, brother of the famous actress Fanny Kemble, son of the two Irish players who established a theatrical dynasty in the centre of London, and first English editor of the vernacular epic Beowulf, clearly did believe what he said. The discovery of ‘the records of our ancestors’ had taken place in earlier generations, indeed in earlier centuries, but the first serious academic study of those records was the work of the Victorians. They produced the first critical editions of the poetry in English, and for some texts the first editions in any language. With assistance in the previous generation from John Josias Conybeare, John Mitchell Kemble and
¹ John Mitchell Kemble, The Utility of Antiquarian Collections, as throwing Light on the Pre-historic Annals of the European Nations. An Address delivered to the President and Members of the Royal Irish Academy at their meeting February , (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, & Co., ), .
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Benjamin Thorpe in particular led the way with respect to Anglo-Saxon poetry. Their work was codified and organized in the next generation under the aegis of Frederick J. Furnivall, surrounded by a growing professional or more than semi-professional cadre of scholars and thinkers.² These three men (Thorpe, Kemble, Furnivall) established the field in the British Isles; more importantly, both Furnivall and Kemble were indefatigable proselytizers on behalf of all things early medieval. In Furnivall’s case his enthusiasm led him to found societies for the study of Chaucer, Wyclif, Shakespeare, and to become the leading light of the Early English Text Society, despite a tendency to quarrel with those from whom he needed support and effort. Kemble also never achieved the academic post which must have been his dearest desire, largely owing to a protracted quarrel early in his career. Thorpe, on the other hand, lived a quieter life altogether, organizing and publishing edition after edition of Old English poetry and of the laws, and other texts too. Other scholars engaged in editing and studying Old English poetry, and in proselytizing on its behalf, but Thorpe, Kemble, and Furnivall represent the core of the endeavour in this period. Moreover, the Victorian period, until recently little acknowledged for its role in the historiography of the study of Old English language and literature, reminds us of just how closely scholars and students of the early medieval period could be connected with the poets and prince-pleasers, the movers and shakers, of the time. The societies they founded attracted politicians, thinkers, writers, socialites, landed gentry: the elite of Victorian society and a good portion of the middle class as well. Work on Anglo-Saxon poetry was very much in the public eye, and contributed to a conception of the nation in very profound ways.
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.................................................................................................................................. Anglo-Saxon poetry might best be described as a proximate source of Victorian medievalism. All five of the major manuscripts containing vernacular poetry written down before in England were discovered, studied, and edited before or during the nineteenth century for the first time. Poems found in other manuscripts were published in more sporadic ways; John Josias Conybeare located and published some, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems were published as part of the chronicle materials by various editors, and some of these scattered poetic texts were not edited until the ² The best study of these individuals is Julie Ellen Towell, ‘The “Rise and Progress” of AngloSaxonism and English National Identity: Old English Literature in the Nineteenth Century’ (Wayne State University, doctoral dissertation, ).
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mid-twentieth century. But the major five manuscripts were all addressed very thoroughly in the Victorian period, including the least of these. Benjamin Thorpe, the first English editor, trained in Denmark with Rasmus Rask; his second publication, in , addressed what to modern scholars might be the least of the Old English poetic texts, but the metrical translation of the translation of the psalms known as the Paris Psalter is also the longest surviving Old English poem at over , lines. Thorpe honed his trade as an editor with this text, printing the poetry with a facing Latin version of the psalms. Thorpe next edited the Exeter Book in , an edition followed later in the century by Israel Gollancz for the Early English Text Society in . The Exeter Book remains in some ways the most famous of the Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts, since it includes most of the elegies and all of the extant riddles, along with a rich collection of other religious and secular poems. The third manuscript of Old English poetry is perhaps the one of least interest to the Victorians, and also the one already available in a considerably earlier period: named for Caedmon or Junius, the manuscript in the Bodleian Library in the Victorian period was first edited by Franciscus Junius in ; its impact on nineteenth-century medievalism is somewhat indirect, although it does have to be mentioned that one of its texts, Genesis B, might have informed John Milton’s construction of Satan in Paradise Lost. This was Thorpe’s first edition, in (probably very early in ), the first production of the Society of Antiquaries as a publishing entity and also including a prospectus of the Society’s publishing plans for what it called Anglo-Saxon and Early English literature. Kemble produced the editio princeps of the Vercelli Book in for the Ælfric Society; the manuscript contains a mix of homilies and religious poems, including the famous Dream of the Rood. Its existence was only discovered in the early nineteenth century, so it was very much a ‘new’ Old English collection that the Victorians could really engage with. Most significantly, the last of the five principal manuscripts of Old English poetry is that containing Beowulf, and the editing history of this poem of , lines in the nineteenth century is by far the most complex of these stories. GrímurJónsson Thorkelin published the first edition in Denmark in ; the first English edition was that by John Mitchell Kemble in , with a second and more accurate edition in –, and the second major edition was that of Benjamin Thorpe in . For the next fifty years, scholarship on Beowulf was dominated by Danish and German textual editors, including C. W. M. Grein’s conservative edition in , N. F. S. Grundtvig’s conservative edition in , and many more. The text of the poem appears to have become extremely well-known in nineteenth-century Britain, with excerpts and translations and stories adapted for both adults and children published by a broad range of individuals (most famously, William Morris). Its representation of an ideal nobility, its theme of selfless sacrifice, its generous and manly hero: these were stirring elements for the nostalgic medievalism of the nineteenth century. Where scholarly focus became continental and conservative, it could be argued that the earliest editions of Anglo-Saxon poetry in England gave rise to strongly patriotic and nationalistic responses. These early editions were all preceded, however, by perhaps the most
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influential of the early poetic engagements with these materials, the work of John Josias Conybeare.
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.................................................................................................................................. The first collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry to arrive in the salons of Victorian England was an extremely popular and much-reprinted volume titled Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.³ The volume contains a number of pieces read by Conybeare (–) to the Society of Antiquaries and published in Archaeologia, pieces which may have introduced the British literati to Anglo-Saxon literature and its ideas. The Society of Antiquaries was already a venerable institution, very broadly based across upper-class English society, having been founded in the early eighteenth century. Illustrations, completed after the death of John Josias in by his widow Mary and his brother, the geologist William Daniel Conybeare,⁴ seems to have effected a turn from deep interest in the history and antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon period to concern with its texts, especially the poetic ones. Conybeare had been an early holder of the Rawlinson professorship of Anglo-Saxon, from (when nominated in he was ) until when he resigned to become professor of Poetry. He was the first to edit and translate some of the knottier Old English poems, and also perhaps the first to attempt to offer a detailed survey of the field, with descriptions of each manuscript, elucidation of its contents, comparisons of the poems and other texts with other Germanic materials, and analyses of what each text offers to the present-day reader. Language interested Conybeare deeply, so in the Illustrations he prepared examples of what we would today call Old High German and Old Norse texts, translated or transliterated them into Anglo-Saxon, and then offered what he called an English version. The book begins with detailed discussion of Anglo-Saxon metre, focusing for example on the Riming Poem, and draws comparisons both to Celtic poetry and to later medieval alliterative poetry before offering a catalogue of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry, and editions and translations (into Latin and English) of several poems including Battle of Maldon, Widsith, The Wanderer, sections from Christ and Satan, and very extensive materials from Beowulf. The texts appear under other titles, so that what today we call ³ John Josias Conybeare, as edited by William Daniel Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Harding & Lepard, ). ⁴ Conybeare has received less scholarly attention, and probably less credit, than he merits, but now see Robin Bray, ‘ “A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Christian”: John Josias Conybeare (–) and his “Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” ()’ (Glasgow University, doctoral dissertation, ). Bray uses an array of previously unpublished materials, including family documents and correspondence, to get a much clearer picture of Conybeare’s contribution to the field. She also identifies the involvement of his widow in the preparation for publication of the Illustrations.
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The Wanderer is for Conybeare The Exile’s Complaint, and The Battle of Maldon is well titled The Death of Byrhtnoth. Conybeare even includes the twelfth-century alliterative poem now called The Grave, under the title ‘Norman-Saxon Fragment on Death’, and he includes a passage from what he calls ‘King Alfred’s Boethius’, picking up from William of Malmesbury and publicizing for his nineteenth-century audience the involvement of Alfred in translation practices in the ninth century. To some extent, Conybeare was following up the work of Sharon Turner, whose widely known History of the Anglo-Saxons had included substantial discussion of Anglo-Saxon poetry and literature.⁵ In the seventh edition, in , Turner introduces Beowulf and offers a romanticized account of the text. (The eighth edition of the History, produced by Turner’s son, came out in ; that the text ran to eight editions, each involving corrections and additions, suggests considerable interest in the period.) Underlying Conybeare’s more focused and scholarly approach (if in many details mistaken, as is often pointed out), then, is Turner’s nationalistic and passionate narrative. Conybeare’s work, however, established poetry as a subject of study, a discipline, in the nineteenth century and also as a valued enterprise in the AngloSaxon period.⁶ To trace but one small example of his influence, within a few years of publication of the Illustrations, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was recommending Beowulf in print, and privately translating the ‘Norman-Saxon Fragment on Death’, giving the poem its generally accepted title of ‘The Grave’.⁷ Conybeare’s work on Beowulf offers another window into a broader world of thinking about these texts, since in the last years of his life he worked with his new friend Frederic Madden (later, in , to be named as the long-time Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum) on a collation of the Thorkelin edition of Beowulf with the manuscript. Although the history of this work is complex, Conybeare’s plans for improving on Thorkelin’s work are clear.⁸ Had he lived longer, and not been obliged by his clerical duties to move away from Oxford, and not undergone such a sustained attack on his scholarship and
⁵ Sharon Turner, The History of the Manners, Landed Property, Government, Laws, Poetry, Literature, Religion and Language, of the Anglo-Saxons, vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, ). ⁶ See Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon & London, ), –; Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; and Richard C. Payne, ‘The Rediscovery of Old English Poetry in the English Literary Tradition’, in Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (eds), Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), –. ⁷ See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . For Longfellow’s version, see The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Horace Elisha Scudder (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., ); Longfellow also translated ‘Beowulf ’s Expedition to Heort’ and ‘The Soul”s Address to the Body’, both also from Conybeare’s Illustrations. His translations were the principal influence on the translation programme a century later of Jorge Luis Borges, who rendered ‘The Grave’, in particular, into Castilian Spanish. ⁸ See Kevin S. Kiernan, ‘The Conybeare-Madden Collation of Thorkelin’s Beowulf ’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine M. Treharne (eds), Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), –.
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abilities by Kemble, Conybeare might well be more fully acknowledged today for the extent to which he made Old English poetry readily available. One of the first reviews of the volume regarded it as perhaps ‘too recherchée for the general reader’ but also a ‘rich treat’ with many intriguing texts, ‘gems’ of ‘intrinsic merit and beauty’: in short, ‘the work is one of great and lively interest’.⁹
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.................................................................................................................................. First among the early English editors of Anglo-Saxon poetry is Benjamin Thorpe (c.–), partly because he edited Beowulf, the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Paris Psalter, four of the five major codices. He also edited the law-codes of Anglo-Saxon England, the homilies of Ælfric, the romance Apollonius of Tyre, several historical texts and chronicles, and the other poem in the Beowulf manuscript, Judith. More importantly, however, he seems to have accomplished his work without drawing a lot of attention to himself. In his obituary in the Otago Witness he is ‘the well-known Anglo-Saxon scholar and archaeologist’ and ‘one of the best Teutonic scholars of the age’, a quiet encomium and an accurate one. In addition to his work editing texts and attracting students and colleagues to the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, he was also a constant contributor to Archaeologia, and a highly engaged member of the Society of Antiquaries for much of his working life as an Anglo-Saxonist.¹⁰ Thorpe and Kemble together mark a shift in the English approach to Anglo-Saxon poetry, having both been trained on the Continent. Thorpe took the lead in their initial relationship, writing to Kemble in as a senior and already-published figure encouraging his younger colleague in the edition of Beowulf that Kemble was just finishing, and asking his advice on an issue with respect to his own edition of the Junius manuscript poems. Their correspondence continued for about a decade, reflecting also the extent to which the antiquarian world of Victorian England was a small one.¹¹ Together, they brought a new rigour, a new interest in comparative philology, to thinking about Anglo-Saxon studies. Thorpe had been a student with Rasmus Rask in Copenhagen, and he began his career as an Anglo-Saxonist by translating Rask’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar into English in (and again in ); in the postscript that he appends to the extended preface, Thorpe explains his desire to give ‘an English garb
⁹ The review appeared in La Belle Assemblée, or Court and Fashionable Magazine (Sept. ); it is quoted here from Bray, ‘A Scholar, A Gentleman’, as appendix :, pp. –. ¹⁰ Anonymous obituary, ‘Benjamin Thorpe’, Otago Witness, Oct. . The paper was a fortnightly publication in Dunedin, capital of Otago, in New Zealand; Thorpe clearly merited mention far from home. ¹¹ See Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
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to a work so excellent in itself, and so important to English Scholars’.¹² His first volume for the Society of Antiquaries was Caedmon’s Metrical Paraphrase, the term used in the Victorian period for the poems in the Junius manuscript, which appeared in early ; his edition of the Paris Psalter manuscript, including both the poetry and the prose and a facing version of the Latin psalter came out in ; and his work on the Vercelli Book was published in a meagre and unhappy form in , the full version available in sheets circulated amongst scholars. He edited many prose works, mostly of Old English, for the next two decades, and returned to poetry with his edition of Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburh, with very literal translation, in . Thorpe was a careful editor, providing accurate transcriptions of the manuscripts, and as much information as he deemed necessary for comprehension. In the early s he pushed hard for an English plan to edit and publish these materials, as against a plan developed in Denmark by Grundtvig; partly he seems to have wanted to do the work himself for a group of subscribers, and partly he seems to have wanted the work done in England. Before the s, when he appears in Copenhagen as a student in his mid-forties, and meets his future wife, there is little information about Thorpe. He seems to have been paid, at least by some of the commissioners of his work, and to have needed the payment, as late in life he was granted a small civil pension, and his widow received a similar stipend for his services to editing Anglo-Saxon. The ODNB even describes his works as ‘self-effacing’, listing nearly two dozen major editions including the first anthology of Old English texts (Analecta Anglo-Saxonica in , which remained in print until Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader first appeared in ).¹³ Thorpe also produced, for a general audience, several works popularizing the mythology of the North, and offering tales and traditions of Scandinavia and Germany, and a translation of the Edda from Old Norse. In other words, Thorpe wanted both to prepare scholarly editions and to popularize the material he knew, to make available a whole range of Germanic legends and stories for an English audience. Over the years, Thorpe has been much maligned for his errors of comprehension and presentation, but he worked for a wage, quietly and with little or no access to the grand circles of Victorian England. He was treated as the journeyman editor of this material so that others could build their free-wheeling and spectacular castles upon his base. Getting the text available and comprehensible for the historians and the literary figures of the time seems to have been the main goal of the Society of Antiquaries, the Master of the Rolls, and the others who employed Thorpe in these endeavours. He seems to have done as instructed, and to have proceeded with the labours requested of him with as little fuss as he could manage. Hudson Gurney once remarked in his ¹² Erasmus Rask, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, with a Praxis, tr. from the Danish by B. Thorpe (Copenhagen: S. L. Møller, ), p. lx. I am grateful to David Carlton for lending me his copy of this work. ¹³ See ODNB. Except for Towell, ‘Rise and Progress’, Thorpe gets little attention, less of it positive; see Phillip Pulsiano, ‘Benjamin Thorpe (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York: Garland Publishing, ), –.
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journals (Gurney was the long-time vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries, –, and part of his remit, as he interpreted it, was underwriting and organizing the publication of many early antiquities including the literary ones) that Thorpe had come to him in some distress. He had submitted an edition and had been ordered to curtail it, to eliminate much of the scholarly matter and keep it more entertaining. Gurney advised careful attention to the letter of the changed remit, but with an eye to preserving as much scholarship as possible. Thorpe did not have the level of control of his scholarly work that he might have wanted, and it seems likely that some of the opprobrium heaped on his head is undeserved.¹⁴
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.................................................................................................................................. Kemble, (–) sometimes called the Anglo-Saxon Meteor, is the figure most discussed and researched from this period.¹⁵ Tennyson in a sonnet admires him as ‘spurred at heart with fieriest energy’ and lauds him in – for a plan to enter the priesthood (later abandoned).¹⁶ Kemble was one of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’, an elite society of twelve gregarious, creative, and liberal thinkers who are also undergraduates at Cambridge; the group also included his friends Arthur Henry Hallam, William Thackeray, Richard Chenevix Trench, and Alfred Tennyson. Kemble as a young man was at the heart of this society, engaged and enthusiastic, though not about the law despite his entrance into the Inner Temple in , or about mathematics, the subject of his degree. He cast about as a young man, thinking of holy orders, joining an ill-fated uprising in Spain, and after a study trip to Germany during the long vacation in , studying the work of Jakob Grimm. Here he settled. His correspondence with Grimm began with a fan letter in and the last surviving letter is ; Kemble also spent time in Germany with Grimm. Theirs is a highly scholarly correspondence, but also a warm one; Kemble’s salutations start with ‘Honored Sir’ and shift gradually to ‘My dear friend’ and finish with ‘My dear Jakob’, while Grimm has ‘Dear Friend’ and ‘Dear, good ¹⁴ Hudson Gurney’s notebooks are a fascinating study worth further consideration. This reference comes from Norfolk Record Office, Norfolk, catalogue ref RQG , volume N in the alphabetical series of Gurney’s notebooks, the volume dated August th –August th . On the other hand, see Levine, Amateur and Professional, , for a complaint about Thorpe, who protested that he had suffered ‘an inflammation of the eyes and head’. ¹⁵ The best starting point is the website curated by Simon Keynes at http://www.kemble.asnc.cam.ac.uk/. In addition to comprehensive work on Anglo-Saxon charters, the site includes a great deal of information and material concerning Kemble. See also the very full study by Raymond A. Wiley, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kemble. The Life and Works of John Mitchell Kemble –, Philologist, Historian, Archaeologist’, in Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, David Brown, and James Campbell, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History I (): –. Wiley also collected, edited, and translated John Mitchell Kemble and Jakob Grimm: A Correspondence – (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ). ¹⁶ Alfred Tennyson, The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate (New York: Harper & Brothers, ), ; originally published in Poems (), Tennyson’s first collection of poetry.
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Kemble’, and the like. Kemble’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon grammar was very strong, and like his soon-to-be friend Thorpe he was very good at transcription, but his first edition of Beowulf, produced in haste in when he was , rushed to publication. J. R. Hall refers kindly to his ‘pioneering intelligence’ which brought the editing of Old English texts into the modern era,¹⁷ but Kemble’s construction of the poem was full of ‘gloomy ideas’ and shifted from an Anglo-Saxon approach to a German Saxon one.¹⁸ The edition presented the poem in half-lines (hudibrastically), and had few notes, a very cursory glossary, and no translation. It argued strongly that the poem was a copy of something that had come over to England with the Germanic ancestors prior to , and offered therefore a highly Germanicized account of the mythology and history mentioned in the poem. At the same time, this was the first scholarly edition of the poem in English, and a tremendous advance on Thorkelin’s. Kemble revised and republished his edition in –, with a second volume, a corrected text, and a full and surprisingly modern translation. Kemble had given up his desire to date the poem and its events, and offered here a professional and authoritative text and commentary. He did continue to work on the poem, declaring in a letter to Grimm in that he wanted to ‘publish a new edition of Beówulf’, continuing with the statement that ‘Beówulf, Beówulf himself, both God & Hero, I cannot give him up!’¹⁹ Kemble’s translation stands alone as the first complete translation of the poem, and his belief in its purpose and meaning for English history and English nationalism points to the mythic import of the poem. Kemble published his edition of the poems in the Vercelli Book in two volumes, in and again in . Perhaps one detail will indicate his brilliance as a scholar and creative thinker; it was Kemble who connected the Dream of the Rood, a poem he called ‘Poem of the Dream of the Holy Rood’ as being a version of the text in the runes inscribed on the Ruthwell Cross. He published a long article on Anglo-Saxon runes, a precursor to his shift towards the study of archaeology in his forties (he died just before turning fifty). A synthetic thinker, Kemble was always searching for connections in Germanic philology, in place names and idioms, in artefacts and historical references. Although he did inherit his father’s job of Examiner of Plays in , Kemble’s financial situation was never entirely secure. Sadly, he never obtained the university post at Oxford or Cambridge that he dearly wanted, or the position of chief librarian at the British Museum, or any of the other posts for which he was eminently qualified and for which he applied. The reason seems likely to be his combative and polemic attitude, ¹⁷ See J. R. Hall, ‘The First Two Editions of Beowulf: Thorkelin’s () and Kemble’s ()’, in D.G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the Manchester Conference (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –, at . ¹⁸ Thomas Wright makes these complaints in ‘Anglo-Saxon Scholars and Literature’, Gentleman’s Magazine, , (Sept. ): , as quoted in Gretchen P. Ackerman, ‘J. M. Kemble and Sir Frederic Madden: “Conceit and Too Much Germanism”?’, in Berkhout and Gatch, Anglo-Saxon Scholarship, –, at . Ackerman’s is the most entertaining account of the controversy in the magazines that Kemble caused, and Madden became thoroughly embroiled in. ¹⁹ Wiley, Kemble and Grimm: A Correspondence, letter July , p. .
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most notably exemplified when he started a public argument about Anglo-Saxon scholarship, with a review of Thorpe’s Analecta Anglo-Saxonica in the Gentleman’s Magazine for April . Kemble argued that, were it not for German and Danish scholars, there would be little useful work done on early English materials, and especially not at Oxford. The responses came thick and fast, and Kemble kept his side of the controversy alive for some time all by himself. The putative occasion for the whole kerfuffle, Thorpe’s anthology and grammar, disappeared under the wave and counterwave. Perhaps the most outspoken writer in response to Kemble was the anonymous author of a pamphlet written as a sequence of letters between R. and I. J. (Kemble thought it was Joseph Bosworth), and titled The Anglo-Saxon Meteor; or, Letters in Defence of Oxford treating of the wonderful Gothic attainments of John M. Kemble, of Trinity College, Cambridge.²⁰ The pamphlet does not seem to have circulated widely, however, so the larger part of the controversy was in the London periodicals. Kemble fought his corner well; the university post he so wanted never came his way.
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.................................................................................................................................. Furnivall (–) trained as a lawyer and practised in a desultory way, joining the Philological Society in and using that as a springboard with which to found a whole set of societies and start a multiplicity of projects. He was secretary of the Philological Society from until the end of his life. All of his societies were founded fundamentally in support of Furnivall’s greatest dream or plan, which was the notion of a new dictionary of the English language, based on historical principles, later called the New English Dictionary at Oxford. From until he served as editor for that dictionary, and until his death he was a massive and engaged contributor. In order to continue that work, he knew that the documents and texts available in the language needed to be available in good editions that were wholly trustworthy. Furnivall as a result founded the Early English Text Society in (still functioning today to provide new and better editions), and a whole sequence of other societies including Browning, Shelley, Wyclif, Chaucer, Ballad, and even one for Shakespeare. Like Kemble, however, Furnivall was quick to judgement and to make loud and untrammelled complaints, so that all of his ventures were marked by acrimony and division. At the same time, in many respects also like Kemble, Furnivall was a surprisingly scholarly editor, hardworking and accurate, anxious to improve his own work but also perfectly willing to publish carelessly prepared materials. That is, he was a contradictory soul, genial and
²⁰ The pamphlet is dated March . See the detailed bibliographic and historical analysis at Simon Keynes’s website: http://www.kemble.asnc.cam.ac.uk/node/.
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pugnacious, occasionally quite foolish and quarrelsome, but passionate and engaged. He was an enthusiast, and brought consideration of the English language and English texts into every literate place in England, with a constant flow of articles and notices in all the papers and journals, with events and his tea-time literary salons on New Oxford Street, with stories and bombast. Furnivall made the connection from medieval texts to lexicography; by the time of his death, as Derek Pearsall points out, over volumes had been published in the Early English Text Society.²¹ Like Thorpe and Kemble, he venerated the Germanic comparative philological approach, but unlike them he was a highly engaged and public figure. Both with the societies he founded, and with his public connections including altercations with figures such as Algernon Swinburne and friendships with John Ruskin, Richard Chenevix Trench (philologist and Archbishop of Dublin), and Robert Browning, Furnivall was in the Victorian public eye. He completed, metaphorically and in some ways physically, the link between medieval texts and the study of language. Thus, when universities began tentatively to engage in the study of English language and literature, it was Furnivall’s Early English Text Society which offered them the riches needed for effective advanced teaching and learning. However, the trajectory here has been one of increasing professionalization, and a turn to the scholarly engagement with Old English poetry. And while that is a genuine development, and perhaps the most important one for scholarship in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, it may not well reflect the background which gave rise to thinking about Old English as a populist issue in Victorian England. That is, the early study of Old English poetry and especially the process by which it came to be edited in England and then made more broadly available as a public endeavour indeed offers us one source of material for the matter of Victorian medievalism. J. J. Conybeare, John Mitchell Kemble, Benjamin Thorpe, and in the next generation Frederick J. Furnivall: these four are perhaps the most significant, though by no means the only, serious scholars of Old English poetry in England in the Victorian period. Among them they produced the texts that Victorian poets and early Anglo-Saxon scholars read and reworked, believed and relived; in some cases, they taught or read these texts to those poets, filled with enthusiasm and excitement at their rediscovery of the Old English past. Kemble remains perhaps the most famous of these, as the most well-connected, though his connections did not garner him the permanent appointment he dearly wanted. Thorpe perhaps did the hardest job of work, for the least amount of current acknowledgement and posthumous praise. Conybeare’s work was well-recognized and well-received, and his was scholarship for the sheer joy of doing the work; he did not depend on this work for making a living, as Thorpe certainly did and Kemble probably did without wanting to admit it. Conybeare also deserves credit as the first to think about the poetic metre of Old English, and its Germanic and Celtic ²¹ See Derek Pearsall, ‘Frederick James Furnivall (–)’, in Helen Damico Medieval Scholarship, ii. – at p. . See also the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Furnivall by William S. Peterson at ODNB; and William Benzie, Dr F.J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, ).
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parallels. And Furnivall represents the next generation of the businesslike Victorian scholar with no apology offered; the work needed to get done if it were paid for and not otherwise. That said, it may well be that the work that they and others did that may well prove to be the most important feature of Victorian medievalism was their articles for Victorian periodicals. For example, volume of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, published in , includes in its July issue a long article ‘On Anglo-Saxon Poetry’.²² Kemble published frequently in Fraser’s Magazine, but this piece is anonymous: it opens with a statement that it is worth having a paper on the ‘poetry of our Saxon forefathers, and the more so, as it is a subject which is at present attracting much attention’, reviews the scholarly field and publications in process, quotes extensively from Beowulf with a facing translation, refers to many other poems, and finishes with the statement that ‘[i]n studying it [the Anglo-Saxon tongue], we study also the groundwork of the latter [our language]; and, in a greater degree than we are accustomed to suppose, the ground-work of its literature’ (p. and p. ). These articles, read by the poets and novelists who were publishing their work in these magazines, and by the general public, offer a sense of what the ordinary Victorian individual came to think of as the Anglo-Saxon past, and its poetry.
S Benzie, William, Dr. F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, ). Bray, Robin, ‘ “A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Christian”: John Josias Conybeare (–) and his “Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” ()’, Glasgow University, doctoral dissertation, . Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Momma, Haruko, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Pulsiano, Phillip, and Elaine M. Treharne (eds), Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). Sweet, Rosemary, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon, ). Turner, James, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
²² Anonymous, ‘On Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, Fraser’s Magazine, (July ): –. The piece follows a short story and precedes a very chatty analysis of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and a selection of Hugo’s poetry, after which comes an analysis of the stock exchange and its vicissitudes. Fraser’s Magazine was but one of the popular periodicals of the Victorian era, sometimes called the age of the periodical; see also The Athenaeum and the Gentleman’s Magazine.
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I , the year in which Queen Victoria passed away, Rudyard Kipling published Kim, the culmination of his interest in Geoffrey Chaucer, whom he cherished as his favourite poet of all times. Kipling procrastinated over the completion of his novel for eight years because he desired to accomplish for his own contemporaries what he and many in the Victorian era believed Chaucer had accomplished for fourteenth-century England: a national epic that would help his contemporaries to unify, to develop a common patriotic identity. Kipling recognized the excellent possibilities the medieval frame tale offers to a writer who intends to depict and praise the diversity of real-life people in any given society. Through the frame tale, he felt in a position to inform his isolated island audience about the lives of people in the most populous part of the British Empire. He felt akin to Chaucer’s choice of characters, which excluded the highest ranks of authority and zoomed in on those who, in Kipling’s own opinion, kept the Empire going strong: the duty-bound experts in administration, army, secret service, and the common people. Moreover, he shared, and sometimes consciously imitated, his medieval predecessor’s love for detailed description and tongue-in-cheek perspective on human behaviour. To reread Chaucer’s Christian frame of the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Beckett in fourteenth-century Canterbury, Kipling substitutes a multi-ethnic and multi-religious pilgrimage on India’s trains and the Grand Trunk Road and celebrates Kim’s educational progress from the ‘little friend of all the world’ childishly playing ‘The Great Game’ to a conscious defender of the idea of the Empire in the British Secret Service. Where many of Chaucer’s stories (for example, ‘The Knight’s Tale’) abound with references to Christianity and Boethius’s early-medieval Wheel of Fortune, Kipling introduces an alternative in the Lama’s Buddhist avoidance of the Wheel of Life. Correspondences culminate in the one figure that fascinates Kipling the most among the character studies of the Canterbury Tales: the talkative and overbearing Sahiba in Kim is Kipling’s own misogynist misprision of the Wife of Bath. In his late
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short story, ‘The Wish House’ (), Kipling would recreate her character once again, this time into the lively portrait of Mrs Ashcroft, a retired cook who, like Chaucer’s Cook in the ‘Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’, has an ulcer on her shin and, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, negotiates issues of consuming possessive desire for and ‘maistrie’ over her lover. In ‘The Wish House’, Kim, ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ (; a story featuring a forged Chaucer fragment), and several poems (‘The Consolations of Memory’, ‘The Justice’s Tale’), Kipling scavenges Chaucer’s texts for ideas, plots, and characters to create a broad claim for an unbroken continuity between medieval England and contemporary Britain. At a time of increased political, social, and racial tensions within the far-flung boundaries of the British Empire, he uses Chaucer and medieval literature and history in general as powerful educational tools to forge a strong sense of national identity for his target audience of adolescent boys. He is convinced that they will carry the torch of the Empire’s civilizatory mission forward into and through the twentieth century. As numerous other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century examples demonstrate, Kipling’s preference for Chaucer as an inspiration for his own literary production was hardly exceptional. In fact, the engagement with Chaucer also shown by the likes of G. K. Chesterton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Masefield, William Morris, Henry David Thoreau, and Virginia Woolf was the direct outcome of more than seventy years of gradually growing fascination with a poet whose medieval persona and works Victorians as well as their contemporaries in other Englishspeaking countries imagined as a predecessor to their own preferred aesthetics, ideologies, and mentalities.¹
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.................................................................................................................................. In , the most distinguished English poet of his day, John Dryden, made a selffashioning effort to link his own poetry with the works of a number of famous predecessors in his Fables Ancient and Modern. While his translations contributed to disseminating the tales of the Knight, Nun’s Priest, and Wife of Bath from the Canterbury Tales, few of Dryden’s contemporaries would have thought of Chaucer as a canonical poet. By , Chaucer’s late medieval English had become increasingly difficult to understand, and most of the select few with access to his texts were unimpressed by his inclusion of lower class characters and bawdy scenarios. It is only at the end of the eighteenth century that Chaucer’s texts were being rediscovered due to a growing interest in historicizing the national past on the one hand and the romantic idealization of everything premodern and pre-industrial on the other. ¹ On such connections, see the chapter, ‘Writers’ Chaucer’ (pp. –) in Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, ).
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Thomas Warton’s highly influential History of English Poetry (–) confirmed Dryden’s earlier judgement by situating Chaucer historically as the father of England’s national poetic tradition; Thomas Tyrwhitt, through his five-volume (–) edition of the Canterbury Tales, not only made Chaucer more widely available, but also reduced his texts’ forbidding alterity by distinguishing between the grammatical and scribal origins of Chaucer’s perplexing final –e and providing a first fully fledged glossary; William Godwin wrote a sensationally successful Life of Geoffrey Chaucer in which, while partly confabulated, created great public interest in Chaucer, the author and the person; and the Romantic poets enthusiastically read the medieval poet as a pre-Shakespearean ally against Enlightenment rationalism and neoclassicist poetic forms and ideals.² This moderate revival of interest in Chaucer increased exponentially during Queen Victoria’s reign.
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.................................................................................................................................. During the first half of nineteenth century, the Middle Ages began to be identified as a distinguishable historical period, and the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘medievalism’ first entered the English vocabulary.³ Until the s, those interested in the medieval period, variously referred to as amateurs, antiquarians, bibliomaniacs, enthusiasts, glossographists, and dilettantes, were devoted and self-taught middle and upper middle class individuals who enjoyed reading and discussing historical documents. Dedicated students and lovers of these documents, they did much to preserve medieval manuscripts and assisted later generations in locating, cataloging, and editing them. However, access to their print editions of medieval texts was limited to themselves, their immediate circles of friends, and the members of the exclusive literary and printing clubs to which they belonged.⁴ These early readers and editors are fascinated as much by the similarity/modernity as by the otherness/alterity of their medieval sources. On ² Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, vols (London, –); Thomas Tyrwhitt, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, vols (London, –); William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet, vols (London: Printed by T. Davison for Richard Phillips, ); on Warton and Tyrwhitt’s publications, see Derek Brewer (ed.), Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). On the popular success of Godwin’s biography, see Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –; on the popularity of medieval poetry (and Chaucer) among the Romantic poets, see Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). ³ David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –, establishes the first uses of ‘medieval’ and ‘medievalism’ in English texts for and , respectively. ⁴ On the work of these individuals see Monica Santini, The Impetus of Amateur Scholarship: Discussing and Editing Medieval Romances in Late-Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bern: Lang, ), esp. –.
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the one hand, Chaucer’s long and structurally and linguistic complex poem, Troilus and Criseyde, with its close focus on the emotions and thoughts of its protagonists, invited modern readers to transcend the centuries which separated them from fourteenth-century England and to imagine Chaucer as a congenial soul akin to their own aesthetic preferences and those of the canonical authors of their own present. On the other hand, Chaucer’s fabliaux (The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale), which tell an extended (usually bawdy) joke or trick, were deemed entertaining precisely because of their premodern ‘primitive’ features. They enabled readers either to succumb to nostalgia about an allegedly less restrictive ‘old’ and ‘merry’ England or feel good about their temporal distance and perceived superiority to a more barbarous past. Two Victorian gentleman scholars, who found Chaucer’s works fascinating in their historical otherness as well as in their relevance to the present, played a central role in the poet’s rise to modern national and international fame: Frederick James Furnivall and Walter W. Skeat. Frederick James Furnivall (–), although lacking formal training in linguistics and textual editing, advanced the study of early English literature and language more than any other nineteenth-century scholar. If his educational background was in mathematics and the law, his real passion was more in social reform than in his daytime job as a conveyancer. He joined the Christian Socialist movement, participated actively in labour agitation as speaker and strike organizer, and even sold his book collection to support striking workers.⁵ Furnivall helped found and strongly supported London’s Working Men’s College (), teaching English grammar and literature five nights a week over a period of ten years. Impressed by the application of new scientific methods to the humanities, he joined the Philological Society in , became its Secretary in , and remained in this position until the end of his life. In , he persuaded the members of the Philological Society to create and publish a ‘New English Dictionary’ based on historical principles, an effort that would usher in the great tradition of English lexicography and its crown jewel, the Oxford English Dictionary.⁶ To take comprehensive stock of an entire nation’s linguistic heritage the dictionary needed reliable entries from historical sources, a challenge Furnivall overcame by founding the Early English Text Society (), the Ballad Society and the Chaucer Society (both ), the New Shakspere Society (), the Wyclif Society (), and the Shelley Society (). For his encyclopedic editorial plans, he enlisted the help not only of an impressive number of English and international scholars, but edited himself thirty-nine of the first Early English Text Society’s volumes, with the assistance of numerous students from the Working Men’s College and other volunteers. Twentiethcentury users of the Oxford English Dictionary had no idea that the unimpeachable authority of their reference book was based on the foundational work of collating and ⁵ For a biography, see William Benzie, Dr F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, ). ⁶ On Furnivall’s founding role for the OED, see Charlotte Brewer, Treasure-House of Language: The Living OED (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).
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comparing textual variants done by ordinary people like ‘Lizzy’ (Eleanor Nickel) Dalziel, a ‘lady’s maid’ and later Furnivall’s wife, W. A. Dalziel, Lizzy’s brother and a student teacher at the Working Men’s College, or other young women such as Teena Rochfort-Smith and Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx). Furthermore, it is questionable that Caroline Spurgeon (–) and Edith Rickert (–) would have become internationally known Chaucerians in an almost completely maledominated field had it not been for Furnivall’s steadfast support and encouragement.⁷ These examples reveal that Furnivall’s political activism cannot be separated from his scholarly enthusiasm about providing scientifically reliable texts. Because English universities lagged behind in the study of medieval English texts, he provided access to Old and Middle English manuscripts to numerous German scholars who, already organized in state-funded departments of English, travelled to Britain to transcribe, edit, and analyse texts they considered part of a common Germanic heritage. These German scholars had developed ‘philology’ as a methodology that would emulate the successes of their counterparts in the sciences, medicine, and technology. As exemplified by the work of Jacob Grimm (–), philology was originally broadly defined as an inclusive and even potentially emancipatory study of culture based on history, theology, jurisprudence, linguistics, and literature. After its institutionalization at the modern university, however, it quickly developed into a mostly decontextualized study of manuscripts, linguistic and prosodic aspects of texts, and the writing of literary history, often amounting to little more than the sedulous collecting of minute details to build an imposing tower of socially irrelevant knowledge. Furnivall, who held that the reading of original medieval texts could be a powerful tool to bring about social and political change by proposing alternative ways of living and thinking, despised the ‘doctored editions’ and most of the science-like paratextual features (footnotes, textual notes, indexes, glossaries, commentary) produced by his German academic collaborators. However, he needed their authority as university professors and their access to a host of well-trained Ph.D. students to speed up the publication of medieval texts. What German and British Chaucerians needed at this specific point in time to produce authoritative versions of Chaucer’s poetry was access to the extant manuscript tradition. Using his vast network of personal and professional connections, Furnivall managed to gain access to the most important known manuscript versions of the Canterbury Tales. Embracing the same nineteenth-century epistemological paradigms that led physician Peter Mark Roget to classify the vast English lexicon into orderly lists ⁷ Beatrice White (‘Frederick James Furnivall’, Essays and Studies, (), –) calls Furnivall a ‘feminist’ who rightly criticized Cambridge University as ‘preposterously antiquated in withholding degrees’ from women ‘when they could beat men at their own game’ (). Spurgeon wrote a -vol. history of Chaucer reception, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Rickert (together with John M. Manly) compiled the bulk of materials on Chaucer’s biography and historical contexts published in (Oxford: Clarendon Press) as the Chaucer Life Records. Rickert and Manly also published the first authoritative text of the Canterbury Tales based on all available manuscripts, the -vol. The Text of the Canterbury Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
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of related words in his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Furnivall ordered and systematized the unwieldy variance of Canterbury manuscripts by collating and printing them in neat parallel columns in the eight-volume Six-Text Print of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which he published through the Chaucer Society between and . With this feat, he enabled dozens of scholars and editors to produce the widely disseminated printed editions of the Canterbury Tales he hoped all other British readers, especially students, would enjoy as much as he did: ‘Anyone who reads the Canterbury Tales, and gets to know the man Chaucer, must delight in and love him, and must feel sorry that so little has been done for the works of the genial bright soul, whose humour and wit, whose grace and tenderness, whose power and beauty, are the chief glory of our Early Literature.’⁸ If Frederick Furnivall’s role was that of the tireless Victorian gentleman agitator, promoter, manager, and publisher, who transformed the landscape of medieval studies in Britain with his abounding energy for social change, Walter William Skeat’s engagement with Chaucer and medieval literature represents the increasing sublimation of enthusiastic interest in the Middle Ages into a fully fledged subject of academic study. Like Furnivall, Skeat did not set out to become a medievalist, but read mathematics and theology at Cambridge. After his church career was cut short because of illness and he had tired of teaching mathematics at Cambridge, he began to pursue a career in English studies, a path that would lead him to be elected the first holder of the Elrington and Bosworth professorship at Cambridge University in . He was involved in several of Furnivall’s projects and organizations, especially the Philological Society, became himself the founder and president of the English Dialect Society, produced (following Furnivall’s encouragement) several ground-breaking critical editions of Old and Middle English texts (Lancelot of the Laik, ; Piers Plowman, –; John Barbour’s The Bruce, –; and Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, –) for the Early English Text Society, and authored the widely received Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (–; revised and enlarged, ).⁹ In addition to hundreds of articles and notes on medieval literature and language, Skeat made lasting contributions to Chaucer studies. Following the modern obsession with clarifying questions of authorship and authority regarding the numerous anonymous medieval texts, he set out to distinguish between authentic Chaucerian creations and ⁸ The quotation is from Furnivall’s introductory section (which he downplays as ‘May be skipt as gossip’) to vol. i () of the Six-Text Edition, and . H. L. Spencer, ‘F.J. Furnivall’s Six of the Best: The Six-Text Canterbury Tales and the Chaucer Society’, Review of English Studies, / (): –, calls the Six-Text Edition ‘a radically important publication’ with ‘far-reaching consequences for the later editing of Chaucer’ that ‘are still with us’ (). For a recent assessment of Furnivall’s role for the study of Chaucer, see Ruth Evans, ‘The Chaucer Society, Victorian Medievalism, and the Nation State: Englishness and Empire’, The New Chaucer Society Blog, Mar. (http://newchaucersociety. org/blog/entry/the-chaucer-society-victorian-medievalism-and-the-nation-state-englishness), accessed Dec. . ⁹ For a full bibliographic assessment, see Charlotte Brewer, ‘Walter William Skeat (-)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York: Routledge, ), –.
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spurious works attributed to the poet since the fifteenth century. Like Furnivall, Skeat established a science-like methodology to extricate Chaucer scholarship from the druidical mist of more impressionistic pre-academic judgements. Diagnosing typical patterns in rhyme, grammar, and etymology from texts securely attributable to Chaucer, he applied formal tests about these internal features to texts of doubtful attribution. As a consequence, he rejected a number of texts that had been considered Chaucer’s and had contributed to the poet’s reputation as a prodigious nature-poet between the s and the s (for example, The Court of Love, Flower and the Leaf, Complaint of the Black Knight, The Testament of Love, and The Cuckoo and the Nightingale).¹⁰ Almost all of Skeat’s adjudications on what constitutes the Chaucer canon have remained unchallenged even more than years after he produced them.¹¹ Skeat made an even bigger contribution to providing reliable Chaucerian texts to scholars and the general public alike. He edited The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (–), the first comprehensive seven-volume critical edition of the poet’s works, with extensive notes and a full glossary, and the firm foundation for all future scholarly editions and numerous translations; in his Student’s Chaucer () he condensed introductory matters and textual notes to a minimum and provided secondary school and college teachers all over the Anglophone world with the first affordable one-volume edition of the poet’s works; and he published several editions of individual Canterbury tales, translated some tales into rhyming verse, and even composed his own ‘The Dyers Prologue’ and the ‘Dyers Tale’ in Middle English for The Universal Review ().¹²
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.................................................................................................................................. Frederick J. Furnivall’s and William W. Skeat’s efforts reveal a strong tendency among Victorian Chaucer experts to disseminate the poet’s texts as widely as possible. Various didactic goals are also at work in some of the translations and other modernizing renderings of Chaucerian narratives for the general public in the nineteenth century. The writer and illustrator Mary Eliza Haweis (–), for example, chose to translate and adapt several of Chaucer’s Canterbury stories and shorter poems for children as well as adult non-scholarly readers, a conflation of audiences that speaks to how many among the educated social classes viewed the intellectual abilities of working-class citizens. Haweis, who also wrote a suffragistic novel and several successful manuals on ¹⁰ The Chaucer Canon: With a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon, ). ¹¹ See Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, ), esp. ch. , ‘Disattribution and Authenticity’ (pp. –). ¹² For these creative contributions, see James D. Johnson, ‘Walter W. Skeat’s Canterbury Tale’, Chaucer Review, / (): –.
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domestic décor and home management, was convinced that Chaucer’s Middle English, if only accompanied by an ‘occasional reference to a glossary’, could be understood and enjoyed by ‘anybody with moderate intelligence and an ear for musical rhythm’. Bringing together numerous commonly held views about Chaucer and his age, she stated that the ‘stiff ’, ‘obscure’, ‘simple’, and ‘crude’ features of early English were easily accessible to those still developing their language skills, that Chaucer ‘wrote for the people’, and that he was ‘a thoroughly religious poet’. Defending him against common accusations of bawdiness and poor taste, she maintained that even ‘his merriest stories’ had ‘a fair moral’ and ‘those that are too coarse for modern taste are rather naïve than injurious’.¹³ Despite her protestations, however, she heavily bowdlerized any potentially offensive stories, passages, and words and illustrated her anthologies (Chaucer for Children, ; Chaucer for Schools, ; Tales from Chaucer, ) with mostly idyllic and picturesque scenes. Haweis was well educated—her father was Thomas Musgrave Joy (–), the genre and portrait painter who was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint the prince of Wales—and made ample use of the scholarship published by Frederick Furnivall and others. She may well be among the first editors and translators of Chaucer’s texts to whom the poet’s increasing fame as the father of English poetry provided a much-needed source of income. Her publication of Chaucer’s Beads: A Birthday Book, Diary and Concordance of Chaucer’s Proverbs or Soothsaws, which contained a large number of Chaucerian aphoristic and proverbial sayings in Middle English with contemporary translations, was ‘a pleasing combination of the functional and the decorative, would suit childish hands, but might also appeal to older purchasers who had both the leisure to read and sufficient social obligations to require the organisational properties of a diary’.¹⁴ The publication was clearly marketed toward middle or upper-middle class women, wives and mothers with access to a certain level of disposable income. The expurgation of potentially objectionable tales, sections, and individual words and the free adaptation of Chaucer’s original texts were also prominent features of earlier translations and adaptations. Charles Cowden Clarke’s two-volume The Riches of Chaucer is a radical example of such tendencies. His anthology, which dominated the popular market of modernized Chaucerian texts through the end of the century, omits the problematic fabliaux from his version of the Canterbury Tales, offering instead selections from the relatively ‘safe’ Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and Troilus and Criseyde. In addition, as the subtitle explains, the medieval poet’s ‘impurities’ were ‘expunged’, ‘his spelling modernized; his rhythm accentuated; and his obsolete terms explained’. Cowden Clarke’s focus on modernizing spelling, reducing syntactical alterity, indicating word stress, and adding a glossary at the
¹³ Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key (London: Chatto & Windus, ), pp. ix–x. ¹⁴ Margaret Connolly, ‘ “Dr Furnival and Mother Like the Same Old Books”: Mary Haweis and the Experience of Reading Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century’, Philologie im Netz, Supplement / (http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/beiheft/bt.htm), accessed Nov. .
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bottom of each page may well have been influenced by his experience of lecturing on Chaucer and Shakespeare at the Mechanics’ Institute of Royston, one of the numerous nineteenth-century educational establishments meant to create a better educated adult workforce. Just like Mary Haweis, Cowden Clarke, too, was convinced that stories featuring chivalry (‘Knight’s Tale’), female patience and obedience (‘Clerk’s Tale’), magic and wonderment (‘Squire’s Tale’), beast fable (‘Nun’s Priest’), and saintly children (‘Prioress’s Tale’) would help instil the behavioural virtues prized by Victorian educators in children as well as (allegedly childlike) working-class adults. Two years before The Riches of Chaucer, he compiled Tales from Chaucer in Prose: Designed Chiefly for the Use of Young Persons, a volume based on similar principles and modelled after Charles and Mary Lamb’s widely disseminated prose retellings of Shakespeare plays for children (Tales from Shakespear, ).¹⁵ John Saunders’s two-volume Canterbury Tales, from Chaucer, while perhaps not as influential as Haweis’s and Cowan Clarke’s publications, offers another variation among the Victorian attempts to bring Chaucer’s poetry to large segments of the British public. In his introduction, Saunders considers three ‘modes adopted by lovers of Chaucer to popularize his works’, and concludes that all three of these modes have only been partly successful. He has been ‘re-written, as poetry’, but since even another great poet, John Dryden, had already failed at modernizing the medieval poet appropriately, others should not even try; secondly, ‘the poetical has been transformed into a prose narration’, which has eliminated the ‘hindrances caused by antiquated words or pronunciations’, but also destroyed the subtlety of the poetic original and blocked readers from ‘the perusal of the original text’; and finally, ‘Chaucer’s poetry has been presented in its own proper form, with a modernized spelling, and an accented pronunciation’, but versions based on this method ‘attract neither the student nor the general reader: too lax for the one they still remain . . . too irksome for the other’.¹⁶ Saunders decides on a hybrid approach that combines the latter two ‘modes’, making ‘the whole course of the story clear by resolving inconvenient or difficult passages in the poetry into prose’, and allowing ‘the reader to be constantly refreshing himself from “the well of English undefiled,” by leaving all the remainder, including the finest portions of the poetry, in its own nervous and beautiful language’. He sees his specific method of presenting Chaucer’s poetry by a mélange of prose rendering, original verse, critical commentary, and aesthetic criticism as a transitional one until scholarly editions will provide medieval texts in fully appropriate form, until ‘Chaucer shall be, through all his works, his own sole interpreter.’¹⁷ The same new printing technologies (faster perfecting cylinders and rotary presses) and increases in general literacy that accelerated and improved the reception of the
¹⁵ See Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ), –. ¹⁶ ‘Introduction’, Canterbury Tales, from Chaucer (London: Charles Knight, ), i. –. ¹⁷ Canterbury Tales, from Chaucer, –. On Saunders’s method and goals, see Charlotte C. Morse, ‘Popularizing Chaucer in the Nineteenth-Century’, Chaucer Review, / (): –.
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Chaucerian modernizations by Haweis, Cowen Clarke, and Saunders also facilitated the distribution of some Chaucerian texts in one of the widely sold ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ or ‘Bloods’, serials which published sensationalized crime and horror fiction printed on cheap wood pulp paper and geared towards working-class (male) audiences. While the cheap paper quality and scant preservation of these serials render a reliable history of their reception impossible, it is clear that William Thomas Stead (–), a radical idealist, pacifist, and journalist and the leading publisher of paperbacks during the Victorian era, made versions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales accessible to more readers than ever before. Stead’s Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, which appeared in his Masterpiece Library, ‘Penny Poets’, Series , Vol. IV, no. (August ) and probably circulated in hundreds of thousands of copies, was meant to provide to its readers ‘a literature not of to-day, but of all the yesterdays, so as to render available for the poorest English-speaking man the best thoughts which the greatest thinkers expressed in the purest style since our language first was fashioned’.¹⁸ He decided to achieve his goals by retaining the poetic form, modernizing the spelling, and altering the verse where necessary to make it scan. Stead, too, would later extend his attention from adult working-class men and women to their children. In , he started another ‘Penny’ series, Books for the Bairns, which was meant to ‘fill the imagination of the English-speaking child with visions of beauty and romance’ and quickly attracted monthly sales of , via an attractive mélange of simplified narrative (mostly fairy tales) and outline pen-and-ink sketches.¹⁹ As an enthusiastic Christian, he excised all potentially offensive content, including in his issue on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.²⁰ For example, he changed the knight’s offence in the Wife of Bath’s Tale from a rape to a stolen kiss, and his version of the Franklin’s Tale made the Victorian implication that divorce is preferable to adultery.²¹
T ’
.................................................................................................................................. Whatever the specific genre or target audience Victorian critics, writers, translators, and illustrators chose to imagine Geoffrey Chaucer and his texts, they all shared in the ¹⁸ William Thomas Stead, ‘After Seven Years’, Review of Reviews, (): –, here . Christina von Nolcken, ‘ “Penny Poet” Chaucer, or Chaucer and the “Penny Dreadfuls” ’, Chaucer Review, / (): –, was able to identify only eight remaining copies world-wide of the issue containing the Canterbury Tales. ¹⁹ William Thomas Stead, ‘How to Get the Millions to Read: Books for the Bairns’, Review of Reviews, (): –, here . ²⁰ Stories from Chaucer, Being The Canterbury Tales. In Simple Language for Children. Illustrated by Edith Ewen (London: Office of ‘Books for the Bairns’, Mowbray House, Norfolk Street, Strand, W.C. [, reissued multiple times]). ²¹ Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature, –, offers an analysis of Stead’s Chaucerian ‘Penny’ publications.
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desire of a nineteenth-century nation that tried to articulate and bolster its specific and undeniable national character. In , two years after the Great Exhibition of had made a powerful display of Great Britain’s global superiority in technological and scientific progress, Henry Hart Milman, in his learned History of Latin Christianity, was ready to embrace the medieval poet as ‘resolutely, determinately, almost boastfully English’ and claim that his ‘deliberate goal’ had been the creation of a ‘native poetry’.²² Matthew Browne, in his study of Chaucer’s England, declared jubilantly that Chaucer was connected with persons and events ‘prominent in one of the most splendid eras of English history’ and that the Canterbury Tales contained ‘more Englishness than any other poem in the language’.²³ And in John Richard Greene, in his widely distributed Short History of the English People, glorified Chaucer’s ‘genius’ as ‘neither French nor Italian’, but ‘English to the core’.²⁴ British Chaucer scholars joined this general national effort, often similarly minimizing the importance of Italian and French poetry to the poet’s allegedly original ‘English’ creations. They were even more scandalized by German scholars’ similarly nationalistic attempts to subsume all of English literature and language study, including Chaucer, as rightfully belonging to the realm of German(ic) studies.²⁵ Thus, English philologist and phonetician Henry Sweet (–) keenly recognized that the historical study of English was being rapidly annexed by the Germans, and the English editors would have to abandon all hopes of working up their materials themselves, and resign themselves to the humble role of purveyors to the swarms of young program mongers turned out every year by the German universities, so thoroughly trained in all the mechanical details of what might be called ‘parasite philology’ that no English dilettante can hope to compete with them—except by Germanizing himself and losing all hope of his nationality.²⁶
Similarly, Walter W. Skeat voiced a bitter nativist complaint that ‘the inevitable German’ kept colonizing and monopolizing academic work on Chaucer that should really be done by English scholars like himself, ‘[t]hough I am perhaps to some extent disqualified, as being merely a native of London, in which city Chaucer himself was born’.²⁷ As common educational standards, newspapers, railways, and the telegraph assisted in building a sense of national unity and belonging for the modern British nation state, Chaucer, as the first and only medieval English poet comparable to Shakespeare and
²² Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity: Including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicholas V (; New York: Sheldon & Co., ), viii. . ²³ Matthew Browne, Chaucer’s England (London: Hurst & Blackett, ), i. –. ²⁴ John Richard Greene, Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, ), . ²⁵ On the German(ic) ‘annexation’ of medieval English subject matter, see Richard Utz, Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology. A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, – (Turnhout: Brepols, ), esp. –. ²⁶ Henry Sweet, The Oldest English Texts (London: Early English Text Society, ), pp. v–vi. ²⁷ Walter W. Skeat, ed. Chaucer: The Minor Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. vii.
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modern English poets laureate, was even elevated to the role of founding father not only of English poetry, but of the entire nation: He made a national language; he came very near to making a nation. At least without him it would probably never have been either so fine a language or so great a nation. Shakespeare and Milton were the greatest sons of their country; but Chaucer was the Father of his Country, rather in the style of George Washington. And apart from that, he made something that has altered all Europe more than the Newspaper: the Novel. He was a novelist when there were no novels. I mean by the novel the narrative that is not primarily an anecdote or an allegory, but is valued because of the almost accidental variety of actual human characters. The Prologue of The Canterbury Tales is the Prologue of Modern Fiction. . . . The astonishing thing is not so much that an Englishman did this as that Englishmen hardly ever brag about it.²⁸
G. K. Chesterton’s post-First World War summary of nationalist sentiment reveals the degree to which Victorian and early twentieth-century readers had projected their deep desire for their own linguistic and cultural origins onto the Middle Ages and, specifically, Geoffrey Chaucer. As ‘Father of his Country’, Chesterton makes him the equal not only of George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and first President of the United States, but of all ‘Father of the Nation’ figures in history. It is as such a powerful Pater Patriae figure that Ford Madox Brown (–), like his friends and colleagues of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists an avid devotee of medieval art, depicted the poet in his oil-oncanvas painting Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (begun ; finished ). There, Chaucer stands as a towering figure, on equal footing (representing equal national historical importance) with King Edward III, the Black Prince, and Chaucer’s patron, John of Gaunt, declaiming lines from ‘The Legend of Custance’ (‘The Man of Law’s Tale’). The painting also shows, in Brown’s own words, ‘a troubadour from the South of France, half jealous, half in heart-struck admiration’ of the father of English poetry, and in the spandrels of a large arch, ‘the overthrow, through Chaucer, of the Saxon Bard and the Norman Troubadour’.²⁹ Brown, who agreed with his contemporaries that Chaucer’s poetry, apart from ‘spelling’ and ‘a few minor proprieties’, ‘comes home to us as naturally as the last volume we hail with delight from the press’, saw him not only as ‘a perfect English poet’, but even ‘a modern English poet’.³⁰ It is in this role, as an almost timeless representative of Englishness and the unique continuity between the
²⁸ G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (; New York: Sheed & Ward, ), . ²⁹ Brown’s commentary was published in the Catalogue for the Piccadilly Exhibition of his work (The Exhibition of Work, and Other Paintings, by Ford Madox Brown), cited here according to Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, ), –. ³⁰ Brown, The Exhibition of Work, cited according to Bendiner, .
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medieval and the modern nation, that Rudyard Kipling would encounter Chaucer and extend his significance to the modern British Empire.
S Benzie, William, Dr F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, ). Brewer, Derek (ed.), Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). Brewer, Charlotte, ‘Walter William Skeat (–)’, in Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ii. Literature and Philology (New York: Routledge, ), –. Bury, Laurent, ‘Which Medievalism? The Case of Ford Madox Brown’, Cahiers victoriens et éduardiens, (): –. Connolly, Margaret, ‘ “Dr Furnival and Mother Like the Same Old Books”: Mary Haweis and the Experience of Reading Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century’, Philologie im Netz, Supplement / (http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/beiheft/bt.htm), accessed Nov. . Ellis, Steve, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, ). Fay, Elizabeth, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Johnson, James D., ‘Walter W. Skeat’s Canterbury Tale’, Chaucer Review, / (): –. Matthews, David, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ). Morse, Charlotte C., ‘Popularizing Chaucer in the Nineteenth-Century’, Chaucer Review, / (): –. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ). Santini, Monica, The Impetus of Amateur Scholarship: Discussing and Editing Medieval Romances in Late-Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bern: Lang, ). Spencer, H. L., ‘F. J. Furnivall’s Six of the Best: The Six-Text Canterbury Tales and the Chaucer Society’, Review of English Studies, / (): –. Spurgeon, Caroline, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, –, vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Utz, Richard, Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology. A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, – (Turnhout: Brepols, ). Von Nolcken, Christina, ‘ “Penny Poet” Chaucer, or Chaucer and the “Penny Dreadfuls” ’, Chaucer Review, / (): –. White, Beatrice, ‘Frederick James Furnivall’, Essays and Studies, (): –.
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- George Forrest Browne, Proctor, Professor, Bishop, and Anglo-Saxonist ......................................................................................................................
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.................................................................................................................................. I is generally accepted that the modern study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture begins at the turn of the twentieth century with work of William Gersham Collingwood following the death of John Ruskin in , for whom he had effectively acted as secretary from when he moved to Cumbria. In Collingwood had completed and brought to publication a volume on the Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures of the Diocese of Carlisle which had been left unfinished by the Revd W. S. Calverley when he died in , and with Ruskin’s death Collingwood began to publish systematically on the early medieval stone sculptures of Yorkshire (his first such publication appearing in ), and then the North of England, a volume published in . This, however, presents a far from complete impression of the origins of the modern ‘academic’ study of the material, which arguably has firmer roots in the later nineteenth century—in the lectures, illustrations, and publications of George Forrest Browne that seem to have commenced some thirty years earlier, in , following his publication on The Venerable Bede in . His indefatigable activities devoted to the promotion of the material, in both academic and public spheres, ensured not only continued interest in the subject, but may arguably have laid the foundations of the study and understanding of the need to
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conserve the sculptures in the twentieth century, leading to the county-by-county multi-volume British Academy publication of the corpus of Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture.
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.................................................................................................................................. Born in York in George Forrest Browne went up to Cambridge in the mid-nineteenth century, in , where he read mathematics and classics, and graduated in as ‘thirtieth wrangler’ (with first-class honours in maths); a year later he obtained a second in the theological examination (at the time not yet a tripos), and in was ordained at Cuddesdon (Oxfordshire), by the Bishop of Oxford. Following his graduation from Cambridge he was employed as master of mathematics and classics at Trinity College, Glenalmond (known as ‘The Scottish Eton’), which had been founded in by Gladstone to train clergy and educate the children of the gentry. He remained here, becoming Bell Lecturer and Theological Tutor, until when he took up a Fellowship at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and proceeded to MA. His marriage in forced him to relinquish the Fellowship but in he was appointed Chaplain of St Catherine’s and Junior Proctor of the University (serving subsequently as Senior Proctor between and ). Two years later, in , he was elected to the benefice of Ashley-cum-Silverley (in eastern Cambridgeshire). Following his appointment as first editor of the Cambridge University Reporter (), and first Secretary of the Local Examinations Syndicate (, becoming Secretary to the Local Lectures Syndicate in ), and his election as a member of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in , Browne began exhibiting objects and presenting papers at the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in , becoming a Council member with Henry Bradshaw in . It was an activity that he continued on a regular basis till and, from his papers focused almost exclusively on the sculptural remains of Anglo-Saxon England and those of early medieval Ireland and Scotland. His first presentation ( November ), apparently inspired by the fact that a number of sculptures had been recovered in that year, was delivered with the aim of bringing home ‘to the minds of Cambridge antiquaries more than had been done hitherto, the considerable number and very great importance of this group of sculptured stones’.¹ Browne’s use here of understatement, a rhetorical device common in his correspondence and publications, is clear: from the minutes of the meetings of the Society it seems no attempt had ever been made to ‘bring home to the minds of the Cambridge antiquaries’ anything on the subject of Anglo-Saxon sculpture. From this point on he was giving at least two lectures a year on the subject in Cambridge, and others elsewhere (in Newcastle, for instance, in ), while ¹ ‘Sculptured Stones and Crosses of the Saxon Period in the North of England’ ( Nov. ), Report Presented to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, at its Forty-Third Annual General Meeting, May , (Cambridge, ), p. lxxiii.
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publishing as many as four pieces a year in various antiquarian and archaeological journals and volumes of collected essays. His research into the subject is also apparent in his many publications on history of the early Church in England: on Bede (); on Monkwearmouth church (); on early English Church history (), Christianity in England before the arrival of Augustine in Kent () and Augustine himself (); on the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy (); and on Theodore and Wilfrid (), Aldhelm (), Alcuin (), and Boniface of Crediton (). Most notably, having been elected fourth Disney Chair in Art and Archaeology at Cambridge in , he devoted his Disney Lecture series to the subject of the sculptured stones of pre-Norman type in the British Isles. This marked a complete break with the (till then) accepted remit of the Chair: that the annual lecture series would be on classical art and archaeology, the interest of John Disney (–) who had endowed the Chair in and donated most of his extensive collection of Greek and Roman antiquities to the Fitzwilliam Museum in . The requirement was however, for the Chair to deliver lectures on ‘the subject of classical, medieval and other antiquities, the Fine Art and all matters and things connected therewith’;² it was under the broadest frame of reference of this remit that Browne chose his subject— particularly as the appointment seems to have followed his researches in Italy (Florence, Ravenna, and Rome) into the cross-cultural influences of early Christian art on that of the early medieval sculptures of Britain and Ireland in . On stepping down as President of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society at the AGM in May that year, Browne had presented a relatively excoriating address on the ‘position of Archaeology in the University’, deploring the absence of a ‘Special Board’ that ‘has charge of the whole subject, medieval, classical, ancient, prehistoric; whose business it is to combine and compare’ (emphasis added).³ Being as much a classicist as a medievalist by this time it can perhaps be assumed that his Disney Lectures were intended to foreground the non-classical elements of archaeology at the University; only classical archaeology were ‘in charge of the Special Board for Classics’, an arrangement Browne deemed ‘natural and proper’.⁴ Leaving such academic concerns, he was appointed Canon of St Paul’s in London in , elected Bishop Suffragan of Stepney in , and Bishop of Bristol in —a post from which he retired in . During his time in London and Bristol he continued promoting the early history of the Church in England and its arts, with lecture series on the subject, held for both Chapter and the wider congregation. In keeping with the remit of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) these were generally published by the Society and frequently reprinted.
² J. R. Tanner, The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge, Being a Supplement to the Calendar with a Record of University Offices and Distinctions to the Year (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ³ Cambridge Antiquarian Society List of Members – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, –), . ⁴ Cambridge Antiquarian Society List of Members, p. .
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In addition, his contributions to the Conference of Bishops tended also to be on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon Church and its arts, such as his address at Glastonbury in August which was held to mark the arrival of Augustine and the baptism of Ethelbert in Kent in by celebrating the presence of an active Christian Church in England long before the arrival of the Gregorian mission; some , people attended this event, over , of them members of the clergy. His lectures and their subsequent publication built his reputation as an expert in the field of Anglo-Saxon sculpture; as early as he had been consulted on the discovery of an early medieval inscribed stone at Brough (now in Cumbria), the preservation of which he campaigned for, acquiring the stone and presenting it to the Fitzwilliam Museum on May that year to ensure its safe-keeping and, ideally, public display. From this it is clear that Browne’s interest in Anglo-Saxon sculpture emerged from his understanding (indeed fervent belief), that the Church in England, historically, did not depend on the papacy. In one of his more strident publications, On What are Modern Papal Claims Founded (), following criticism in The Tablet ( May) of a lecture inspired by the doctrine of papal infallibility on May, Browne delivered a lengthy excursus on the debt owed by the English Church ‘to the see whose occupant Gregory sent Augustine, years ago, to call into being the Church of the English, Ecclesia Anglorum, as Gregory called it’.⁵ This is followed by an extended (thirty-page) criticism of the papacy, based on what Browne termed ‘historical evidence’, before he summarizes how modern papal claims rest: on a forced interpretation of Scripture not known to the great early commentators [such as Agatho]; . . . on a doubtful statement of a much controverted point of history [whether Peter was Bishop of Rome]; . . . on deductions dawn from some of the most barefaced forgeries of which history has to tell [such as the Donation of Constantine]; . . . on an asserted safety of sacraments which is shattered by the straightforward application of their own principles [the denial by various Popes of previous ordinations]; . . . and on the misplaced presumption that the English people have forgotten the centuries of scandals that led to the Reformation.⁶
It is clear that his publications on Anglo-Saxon Church history were, to a considerable extent, inspired by research into the historical relationship of the Church in England with that of Rome, but his correspondence reveals that antipathy towards papal claims did not hinder his campaigns locally, even after he had stopped serving as Proctor, to seek full censorship of University students who interrupted and otherwise hindered the celebration of Mass in the Roman Catholic churches of Cambridge. However, it was not just research into the historical relationship of the Church of England with the papacy that provided Browne with the opportunity to study and promote Anglo-Saxon sculpture. As an apparent devotee of the SPCK, and Secretary to
⁵ G. F. Browne, On What are Modern Papal Claims Founded (London, SPCK: ), . ⁶ Browne, Papal Claims, –.
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the London Diocesan Home Mission (from ), he was also fully aware of the relationship between Britain’s current imperial activities and the missionary role of the Church of England. The opening to his book on Bede notes that ‘in these present times of active missionary enterprise it is difficult to imagine anything more encouraging, and more full of hopeful prophecy, than the final conversion of Northumbria, with its speedy outcome’.⁷ His later publication on the history of the early English Church (), reflects the same theme with a lengthy examination of the nature of being Anglo-Saxon—which in his view enabled Britain to be an imperial power. In keeping with a long-standing view of the Anglo-Saxons vis-à-vis the Romans, Browne concluded that the ‘Roman Britons’ were ‘a very poor creature, a very bad blend’,⁸ and that: we are Anglo-Saxons, that first and that last, whatever else we may be: grateful to the Celt, the Dane, the Norman, for their attentions to our forefathers and our foremothers; grateful for the dash, the solidity, the firmness of grasp we may by these blendings have had strengthened in us; but Anglo-Saxons, after all complements are paid.⁹
This ‘nation race’ was, according to Browne ‘a stirring, independent, intelligent race; sprung up into dominance among the ruins of an earlier civilisation, ruins that they themselves made; absorbing what was attractive and worthy of imitation in the old world; striking out for themselves fresh lines in the new’, and it was among these people that the Gregorian mission shed ‘a flood of light’.¹⁰ The remainder of the book is spent detailing the characteristics of the early Church in England: its ‘liberal’ attitude to women and their education (an attitude reflected in his support of the foundation of the ladies’ colleges at Cambridge); the paintings displayed at Jarrow and Wearmouth; the scholarship flourishing in the early monasteries; the literature and manuscripts produced in the early scriptoria of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria; the nature of the art used to decorate the manuscripts; the architecture of the early stone churches at Jarrow, Wearmouth, Ripon, and Hexham; and the sculptures produced, such as the grave-slabs at Kirkdale in Yorkshire, and the stone crosses at Bewcastle (Cumbria), Ruthwell (Dumfriesshire), and Ilam in Staffordshire. After pages devoted to outlining such ‘fresh lines’ drawn by the Anglo-Saxons, Browne concluded that ‘those who guide the fortunes of the English Church will do well to bear in mind that we have a history such as no other nation has, and that such as we were in early times such we are in the whole now’.¹¹ Clearly the relationship between Church and State was as important to Browne as that between the Church in England and the papacy, and it was through engaging with these wider issues, historically, that Browne came to research and present the sculpture of early medieval England (claiming that these studies taught him also to
⁷ G. F. Browne, The Venerable Bede (London: SPCK, ), . ⁸ G. F. Browne, Lessons from Early English Church History: Three Lectures Delivered in the Cathedral Church of St Paul’s London (London: SPCK, ), . ⁹ Browne, Lessons, . ¹⁰ Browne, Lessons, –. ¹¹ Browne, Lessons, .
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review his understanding of that Church), and in doing so he can perhaps be considered to have provided the earliest systematic study of the material on which future scholarship has been based, albeit unacknowledged.
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.................................................................................................................................. When Browne presented his first paper on Anglo-Saxon sculpture in he had clearly been researching the subject for some time. The lecture included discussion of carvings at Ruthwell (Dumfriesshire), Bewcastle and Gosforth (Cumbria), Hexham and Alnmouth (Northumberland), Chester-le-Street (Co. Durham), Ilkley, Otley, Collingham, Burnsall, Thornhill near Dewsbury, Lastingham, Kirkdale, Sinnington, Leeds, and Healaugh near Tadcaster (all in Yorkshire), and Whalley in Lancashire. In what was to become a characteristic feature of his lectures this was illustrated by ‘a number of drawings and tracings’; in fact, it seems each monument was illustrated by some form of ‘facsimile’.¹² These generally took the form of a full-sized rubbing ‘outlined with pencil or ink, the latter giving the clearer effect’.¹³ In some cases the rubbings were exceedingly large, that of the panel of the Leeds cross displayed to the Society being a full feet long. In such circumstances, as with his later rubbings of the crosses at Sandbach in Cheshire now held at Bristol University Library, it seems that Browne produced the more extensive rubbings on a number of consecutive sheets of paper that were subsequently joined together by a cloth strip on the back, the outlines of the carvings being picked out first in pencil and then ink, and errors deleted by the application of white paint. It was a lengthy process, and Browne was not above involving others in it. When conducting his research in Rome with John Middleton, then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, he records how ‘the ladies [of the party] outlined my rubbings as an evening occupation’.¹⁴ It was a method of publicly illustrating his lectures that he chose deliberately, considering that even ‘the most careful draughtsman must in some cases interpret what he sees, and thus the result of his skill is a picture of what he thinks he sees. The accuracy of the proportion in my method is another advantage’, although he does note with considerable disingenuousness that as ‘I cannot draw at all, and can put in these outlines, it is a question between this method and none’.¹⁵ When preparing the illustrations for publication the rubbings were photographed and reproduced to scale on printers blocks through photolithography, a process Browne often had to finance at considerable expense; his ¹² Report Presented to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society at its Forty-Third Annual General Meeting, May , , with Appendix (Cambridge, ), p. xxiii. ¹³ G. F. Browne, ‘On the Pre-Norman Sculptured Stones of Derbyshire’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, (): . ¹⁴ G. F Browne, The Recollections of a Bishop (London: Smith, Elder & Co., ), . ¹⁵ Browne, ‘Derbyshire’, .
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Disney Lectures were accompanied by over such illustrations, costing him his entire professorial allowance. Whether through necessity or a concern for accurate reproduction Browne’s method of illustration was markedly different from that selected by Collingwood, or indeed Margaret Stokes, his contemporary, whose preparatory drawings for her book on the early Christian art of Ireland () are held in Dublin at the Royal Academy of Ireland (with Collingwood’s being held at the Sackler Library in Oxford). Like Collingwood she was a trained artist, and initial work in the field was recorded by measurements, notes, and sketches. These were subsequently worked up into neat versions, which were then sent away, with instructions, to be etched and published. Later, Browne’s lectures were ‘illustrated’ with full-scale casts being brought to the lecture hall—both squeeze paper casts and those moulded with plaster-of-Paris. These were presented by Browne to Bristol University but as with so many nineteenth-century cast collections they have failed to survive. While his lectures (and subsequent publications) were so generously illustrated, the carved ornament, figural subject, and inscriptions carved on the monuments under consideration were also systematically described, their measurements given, and were then discussed in terms of their relationship with other examples of what Browne deemed to be similar work, before being considered in terms of their potential meanings. As he put it in his first lecture: ‘from a comparative study of the subject there was no group of stones that were so decidedly living stones . . . , none which spoke in the way in which . . . these English stones speak’.¹⁶ In terms of modern art historical approaches Browne was employing two distinct methodologies: one that has been identified as involving a formalist ‘stylistic’ analysis, and the other, iconographic or iconological—that considers the symbolic frames of reference of the carvings. The first was familiar in archaeological circles since the pioneering work of Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (in ), the first director of the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, which was popularized in England, first by Thomsen’s successor, Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae, in his work on Scandinavian archaeology (in and ), and subsequently by John Evans in his numismatic studies of the s. Today, this methodology is strongly associated with post-Darwinian constructs of imperial synthesis through works such John Lubbock’s enormously influential Pre-Historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, published in . It was clearly the approaches popularized in publications such as these that Browne was applying, although similar approaches had been popularized in emerging art historical circles by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (often described as the father of both art history and archaeology), whose Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works (published in German in ) was translated into English by Henry Fuseli in , a second edition appearing in . It was a publication that would have been familiar in the archaeological circles in Cambridge, with its collection of classical art inherited from John Disney and catalogued by him in
¹⁶ Report, p. lxxiii.
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three volumes in keeping with such eighteenth-century publications. It was, however, only with Giovanni Morelli’s work on Italian painters in (translated into English in ) that the approach is deemed to have become firmly established in art historical circles, and it is the approach to the study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture that has most often been identified with that established by Collingwood. The other approach, identified in art historical circles following Erwin Panofsky’s discussion of it as ‘iconological’ in the s, has its roots in nineteenth-century perceptions of art having a moral imperative as (in Hegelian terms) it was understood to reflect the spiritual advancement of a people. For Margaret Stokes and Romilly Allen writing on the art of early medieval Ireland and Scotland (respectively) it was the means by which the spirit of the early Celtic peoples could be expressed. Following the ‘symbolical’ methodology that had been established by André Didron through his Iconographie chrétienne (of ) and his translation of the twelfth-century Byzantine treatise on Christian art that set out the formulae by which the symbolism of Christian events was to be depicted (adopted by Anna Jameson in her Sacred and Legendary Art of and translated into English by Margaret Stokes in ), Allen demonstrated how carvings in Scotland and Ireland corresponded to, but progressed from, early Byzantine images, on the understanding that ‘each period of history of Christian art has its special set of subjects’ so that ‘the varying conditions of ecclesiastical life . . . produced corresponding changes in the monuments and object upon which the symbolism manifests itself ’.¹⁷ For Stokes the approach was vital and required ‘something more than archaeology’: as she saw it, a mind of ‘wider grasp’ is required ‘to perceive the qualities which form the essential elements of the individuality of Irish Art [the] true merit [of which] lies in its use and in that indefinable quality which, for want of a better word, we term feeling’.¹⁸ Such perceptions informing this approach to early medieval Christian art clearly indicate why Browne might have incorporated it in his account of the sculpture of the Christian art of the Anglo-Saxons and the propensity of the ‘English stones to speak’. It was certainly a sentiment he agreed with; railing against what he termed the ‘dull school’ of archaeology at Cambridge, he identified its members as those who not only lacked imagination but ‘regarded the use of imagination by those who happened to have it as an offence against archaeology’.¹⁹ To find meanings in patterns and devices, references to real persons of the period in surface sculpture of the Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian style and times, was to their mind foolish. Not being either scholars or historians, or not being able to give life and actuality to scholarship or history, they had no sympathy with . . . those who were more adequately equipped.²⁰
¹⁷ J. R. Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland Before the Thirteenth Century: the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology for (London: Whiting & Co., ), . ¹⁸ M. Stokes, The Early Christian Art of Ireland (London: George Bell, ), , . ¹⁹ Browne, Recollections, . ²⁰ Browne, Recollections, .
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The combined approach employed by Browne enabled him to reassess the impressions of other commentators in the interests of establishing the nature of the carvings through accurate observation. The results could be remarkably beneficial in their insight: as at Wilne in Derbyshire where he demonstrated that the font had been cut down from a larger carved column, and turned upside-down to serve a baptismal function. Perhaps led to investigate the sculpture by the earlier claim of Charles Cox, the historian of the early Church in Derbyshire, that it displayed an inscription combining runic and Palmyrene scripts, Browne was able to demonstrate, through turning his rubbing upside-down, that the register in question depicted the lower portions of six human figures. He was also concerned to cast the net for comparanda beyond both the sculptural and the arts generally of Britain and Ireland. His close friendship with Henry Bradshaw who had identified the early medieval, Insular, nature of the tenth-century Book of Deer (Cambridge: University Library, MS. Ii..) and who had acted as Browne’s best man (apparently spending the wedding service under the church organ examining church brasses), no doubt facilitated his investigations into the art of early manuscripts; investigations that involved him travelling to Florence in to examine the Codex Amiatinus (Florence: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatinus ), identified in by De Rossi as a product of the Jarrow-Wearmouth scriptorium. This discovery was brought to the attention of an English readership in a letter to The Guardian (Church of England newspaper) by Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury in February , noting that De Rossi had identified the manuscript as that brought to Italy by Ceolfrith ‘Britonum’. Apparently unaware that Berger had suggested ‘Anglorum’ would be a more appropriate reading in , Browne responded to the news with his own letter identifying Ceolfrith as ‘Anglorum’ and with Hort’s support and receiving a letter from De Rossi agreeing he could decipher the ‘l’ of Anglorum in the preface to the manuscript, Browne travelled to Florence to view the manuscript for himself. After being refused entry to the Laurentian Library for days on end, he obtained an order from the government in Rome that gave him two days to examine the manuscript in person. His confusion concerning the requisite presence of the under-librarian and a workman was resolved when he saw that the weight of the manuscript required it to be brought up to him on a stretcher carried by two men. His examination convinced him that (regardless of palaeographic and codicological considerations) the decoration of the manuscript—almost completely limited to the first quartonium which he noted had been pasted into the manuscript after it had been originally bound—was not English in character. Nevertheless, the presence of a portrait of Ezra (fol. r) and an illustration of the Temple (fols v–r), taken together with Bede’s account of the Ceolfrith pandects, convinced Browne that the illustrations came from one of the (early sixth-century) Cassiodoran manuscripts recorded by Bede as having been at Jarrow-Wearmouth. Here, Browne’s concern with identifying the English nature of the early Church in the region was clearly primary in his deliberations. But in order to establish the presumed early Christian nature of the illustrations, he travelled on immediately to Ravenna to view the reputed bookcase featured in the mosaic programme of the fifth-century
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mosaics in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, and demonstrated its similarity with that in the Ezra miniature while also arguing that the figure of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels (London: British Library, Cotton MS Nero D .IV, fol. v) could be related to that of Ezra in the Codex Amiatinus. He seems to have been the first to note these connections which have been debated ever since. Soon afterwards Browne travelled to Rome, meeting up with Middleton, an acknowledged expert in the antiquities of Rome that he had published in ; there he made rubbings of the relief carvings he found in the Forum and in early churches that featured geometric designs and plant scrolls in their ‘surface decoration’, against which he was able to assess the British and Irish examples and demonstrate, like Allen and Stokes, the local nature of the Anglo-Saxon carvings and their place in the progress of the Christian spirit in the region. Here, it was the nature of interlace patterns, perhaps the most prolific pattern type featured on the Anglo-Saxon sculptures, that was of greatest concern. In fact, it was the difference between the interlinking circles of the Codex Amiatinus decorated pages (fol. VIIv) and the types of related patterns in AngloSaxon sculpture and manuscripts that led him to conclude that the painted miniatures could not have been produced in England. In Italy he found only one continuous interlace pattern (on a piece of sculpture in Brescia) that in his opinion came anywhere close to those produced in Anglo-Saxon art, while the closest parallels for the plant scrolls on the earliest Anglo-Saxon sculptures could only be found in Ravenna. His wide-ranging research had indicated no real comparisons with sculpture in either Rome or the French and German areas of the sub-Roman world, and this led him in turn to conclude that the early workers in stone who were, according to Bede, brought to England from ‘Gaul’ in the seventh century, must have come from Gaul south of the Alps—from what might today be termed ‘Lombardy’. His life-long concern with promoting and presenting Anglo-Saxon sculpture also involved Browne in the production of contemporary art projects based on AngloSaxon art. Middleton, like Browne born in York (in ), was also a long-standing friend of William Morris with whom he had travelled to Iceland in the and, following his appointment as Slade Professor Art in Cambridge, became Director of the Fitzwilliam in , and then Art Director of the South Kensington Museum in . As part of this circle Browne had early been brought into contact with the later PreRaphaelites, the sisters of John Millais being visitors to the family home in Cambridge in the s. Although apparently unable to draw, Browne designed the stained-glass windows of St Ignatius Martyr in Sunderland (in ) for another long-standing friend, Bishop Lightfoot of Durham, who had commissioned and funded the entire church. On his move to St Paul’s he was instrumental (in ) in designing part of the mosaic programme for the Cathedral—indeed in his autobiography of it is suggested that he sketched the overall design. And, a decade before Collingwood began designing grave-markers in the form of Anglo-Saxon crosses (for Calverley in and Ruskin in ), Browne had consulted over the design of the grave cover for Bishop Lightfoot’s tomb in the chapel at Bishop Auckland in , suggesting one of the grave slabs uncovered at Kirkdale in Yorkshire in . At the time of their
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recovery they were examined by Haigh and one was identified as bearing an inscription; they were then built into the outer wall of the church but erosion through damp destroyed most of the carved decoration and the inscription, so that when Browne visited the church to make a rubbing, prior to his lecture, he could only make out two letters of the inscription; during restoration work in – the slabs were moved back inside the church. Haigh’s account of the cross-decorated/inscribed grave slab, however, led to conversations between Lightfoot and Browne, and it was on this basis that the stone was used as the source of inspiration for the design of the Bishop’s gravestone. He also designed a copy of the pectoral cross of St Cuthbert (from a mould cut in boxwood as the original was too delicate), for Lightfoot’s successor, Bishop Westcott, which was worn at his consecration. Cast in iron at one of the laboratories in Cambridge, this copy was subsequently cast in gold for Browne’s successor as Bishop of Bristol, Dr Nickson, who had been a Canon of Durham; Browne himself commissioned one in silver for his own use. In he was also subsequently involved in designing large-scale crosses for ‘our age’ inspired by those at Ruthwell and Bewcastle:²¹ namely, the so-called Cædmon Cross at Whitby (inaugurated by Alfred Austin the poet laureate, in ), and the Bede memorial cross at Roker Point in Sunderland in (inaugurated by the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Durham). Under the initiative of Hardwicke Rawnsley, Canon of Carlisle (–), who would no doubt have been aware of the replica of the Gosforth Cross in Cumbria that was part-carved by Calverley and set up in Aspatria near his grave (something Browne does not mention), these monuments were, according to him, set up in imitation of the carved stone cross erected to commemorate the arrival of Augustine which had been commissioned in by Earl Granville (d. ), then Warden of the Cinque Ports. Inspired by the ninth-century south cross in the market place of Sandbach in Cheshire, the Latin inscription accompanying St Augustine’s Cross was composed by his tutor, Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford (–), the father of Alice Liddell who was apparently commemorated by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (). As an intimate of this group Browne had stayed in Oxford with Dodgson (who had spent much of his childhood at Richmond near York) when being ordained in . While Collingwood’s contribution to the early academic study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture cannot be denied, it is clear that a systematic study was made by George Forrest Browne during his time at Cambridge and afterwards; a study that was moreover, more wide-ranging both in its consideration of the various sculptures discussed and in terms of the comparanda invoked: Collingwood focused on the sculpture of the North of England in an attempt to identify those produced under Anglo-Scandinavian influence, while Calverley before him focused entirely on those preserved in Cumbria. Furthermore, Browne’s was what would today be termed an ‘inter-disciplinary’ study that situated the material within the disciplines of history,
²¹ Browne, Recollections, .
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theology, archaeology, and art history as they existed in the academy in the later nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He thus considered their relief carvings in considerable detail, recording measurements, taking rubbings, and making casts (today deemed to be invasive processes), which have nevertheless provided subsequent scholars with an invaluable record of the condition of the stones at that time. His engagement with the sculptures within the nexus of the emerging disciplines of archaeology and art history clearly situated his responses in terms that would today be considered neither fully archaeological nor art historical, but they nevertheless drew much that was rewarding from both avenues of enquiry, and perhaps led to his involvement with the promotion of large and small-scale art objects inspired by Anglo-Saxon art. He also considered their ‘meanings’ in terms of their Christian frames of reference, as well as their historical context. His opinions on these latter subjects were strongly held in terms of contemporary relations between Church and State, between England and Rome, and have no doubt contributed to his work being neglected by later generations. Yet, it remains the case that his motives led him to record, study, and present many monuments that had not yet been considered in the antiquarian or archaeological literature, and his deeply felt belief that the earliest vernacular sculptures of England needed to be saved from neglect, intellectually, artistically, and physically, has had a lasting impact on our understanding of this unique body of material, and for this he can perhaps be credited with rescuing the monuments from the comparative oblivion into which they had sunk since the sixteenth century.
A The research into this subject was funded initially by a British Academy Research Development Award to initiate an extended study by the author into the historiography of Anglo-Saxon sculpture between the mid-sixteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Without this grant, much would not have been possible.
S In addition to the publications referred to in this chapter relating to George Forrest Browne’s interest in Anglo-Saxon sculpture, see his contributions to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and their subsequent publication in the Reports Presented to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society at their Annual General Meetings (, , , ). For the British Academy Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (CASSS), see vols – which list complete bibliographies for Anglo-Saxon sculptures, including publications by Browne, Calverley, and Collingwood.
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Hawkes, Jane, ‘W. G. Collingwood and Anglo-Saxon Sculpture: Art History or Archaeology’, in Rachel Moss (ed.), Making and Meaning in Insular Art (Dublin: Four Courts Press, ), –. Hawkes, Jane, ‘Studying Early Christian Sculpture in England and Ireland: The Object of Art History or Archaeology’, in James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan (eds), AngloSaxon/Irish Relations Before the Vikings (London: British Academy, ), –. Hawkes, Jane, ‘W. G. Collingwood: Artist, Art Historian, Critic, Archaeologist, and AngloSaxonist’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, / (Summer ): http://www.thcartworldwide.org/accessed July . Hawkes, Jane, ‘An Early Encounter with the Codex Amiatinus: George Forrest Browne and the Art of the Manuscript’, in Jane Hawkes and Meg Boulton (eds), All Roads Lead to Rome: The Creation, Context and Transmission of the Codex Amiatinus (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –. Moreland, John, ‘The World(s) of the Cross’, World Archaeology, / (): –. Moreland, John, ‘George Forrest Browne, Early Medieval Sculpture and Nineteenth-Century Reformation Historiography’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, (): –. Townend, Matthew, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and his Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ).
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M Ireland and Wales broadly resembled each other in two important respects: the production of extensive and varied literatures in Celtic vernaculars, and the experience of English conquest that had major long-term consequences. These similarities help to explain why the reception of medieval Irish and Welsh culture and history in the Victorian period shared some common characteristics. However, there were also significant contrasts, resulting partly from differences in the Middle Ages, but owing more to the different directions taken by Ireland and Wales in the post-medieval centuries. An assessment of the recovery and revival of medieval Irish and Welsh culture and history in the Victorian period thus needs to be attentive to the particular contexts in which those efforts occurred. Such an assessment also faces the challenge that, by and large, approaches to the Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in Victorian Ireland and Wales have not been viewed from the perspective of medievalism. It has been justly noted that ‘Welsh medievalism is a relatively underexplored field’, and the same is true of its Irish counterpart.¹ Admittedly, some scholars have made (usually brief) attempts to situate the reception of medieval Irish and Welsh culture and history in a wider context of medievalism.² ¹ Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘ “Impertinent Structures”: A Breton’s Adventures in Neo-Gothic Wales’, Studies in Travel Writing, (): n. . For a survey of Welsh developments, see Pryce, ‘Culture, Identity, and the Medieval Revival in Victorian Wales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, / (): –; and, for history writing, see Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, (): –. ² Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival – (London: Thames & Hudson, ), ; Peter Denman, Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, ), –; T. J. Edelstein, Richard A. Born, and Sue Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in T. J. Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival – (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art,
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Nevertheless, this engagement with the Middle Ages has mainly been viewed through the lens of national or Celtic revival or the history of Celtic scholarship rather than approached as a subject in its own right.³ For example, Jeanne Sheehy wrote of a twostage Celtic revival in Ireland, beginning in the second quarter of the nineteenth century with the antiquarian study of medieval manuscripts, buildings, and other material evidence, followed by a reimagining of this medieval heritage in what is generally known as the Irish (Literary) Revival (c.–c.) associated with Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats.⁴ Two main phases of cultural endeavour have also been identified in Wales, both of which included a significant engagement with the Middle Ages. The early Victorian period witnessed the continuation by patriotic Anglicans of efforts, begun in the second decade of the nineteenth century, to revive Welsh culture through Cambrian societies and provincial eisteddfodau as well as the formation of the Welsh Manuscript Society () and Cambrian Archaeological Association ().⁵ However, in the second half of the century, as part of a wider shift in Welsh society, Nonconformists became more prominent in the eisteddfod movement and other cultural spheres; moreover, a self-conscious sense of national revival, focused above all on education, became increasingly palpable from the s and further stimulated interest in the nation’s early and medieval origins.⁶ This is not to say that nineteenthcentury movements of cultural revival designed to foster national identity in Ireland and Wales were essentially or even predominantly medievalist in their inspiration: particularly in Ireland, pride in aspects of the medieval past vied with primitivist idealizations both of a pre-Christian golden age and of a living peasantry seen as embodying authentic culture and traditions.⁷ University of Chicago, ), pp. xiii–xiv; Michael Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon: The Rediscovery, Reproduction, and Re-Invention of Early Irish Metalwork’, in Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past, ; Damien Murray, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies, – (Maynooth: National University of Ireland, ), –, , , , ; E. G. Millward, ‘ “Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion”: Y Rhamant Hanesyddol yn Oes Victoria’, in Millward, Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion: Agweddau ar Lenyddiaeth Oes Victoria (Llandysul: Gomer, ), –. ³ The same is true, with respect to the Victorian period, of Veronica Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, ), ch. (‘The Celtic Bandwagon’), which focuses mainly on late twentieth-century developments such as druidism, after outlining aspects of Celticism in Ireland and Wales down to the nineteenth century. ⁴ Sheehy, Rediscovery, . Cf. Michael McAteer, Standish O’Grady, Æ and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, ), –. See also Vera Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, ). ⁵ R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and of the Gwyneddigion and Cymreigyddion Societies (–) (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, ), –; Prys Morgan, ‘Lady Llanover (–), “Gwenynen Gwent” ’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion , (): –. ⁶ Huw Pryce, J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), , –. ⁷ Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, ), –, –; Murray, Romanticism, –, , –, –.
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A full consideration of the subject would need to encompass Irish and Welsh interactions with medievalism in other parts of Europe, especially England, as exemplified, say, by the influence of the Gothic Revival on Irish or Welsh Victorian architecture, or, conversely, by Tennyson’s use of Welsh Arthurian material, notably Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion, in Idylls of the King.⁸ However, such wide-ranging comparison and contextualization lie beyond the scope of the present chapter. Instead, through selective comparisons between the two countries, the following discussion assesses the significance of the reception of the Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in Victorian Ireland and Wales.
C
.................................................................................................................................. The contexts in which those efforts took place differed widely between the two countries.⁹ In Ireland, the Great Famine of – led to a significant fall in population that continued apace for the rest of the century.¹⁰ By the census of , the first to include questions about language, ‘English had become the everyday language of the vast majority of the people of Ireland’, with the number of Irish-speakers estimated at just over . million (. per cent of the population); by the number had fallen to just over , (. per cent of the population).¹¹ The period also witnessed increasing calls for political self-determination, some of whose advocates turned to violence with the Young Ireland revolt of and the Fenian rising of .¹² (The Fenians, a revolutionary republican movement, evoked medieval Irish legend in being named after the fianna, the ancient warrior band that followed Fionn Mac Cumhaill whose feats also inspired literary endeavours, as we shall see.¹³) Developments in Wales were both less catastrophic and less politically challenging. Rapid industrialization sustained substantial demographic growth, especially in the south-east, with the ⁸ Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail, , ; Jeanne Sheehy, ‘Irish Church-Building: Popery, Puginism and the Protestant Ascendancy’, in Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint (eds), The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –; The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ii. –, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; Tom Peete Cross, ‘Tennyson as a Celticist’, Modern Philology, / (): –; K. Tillotson, ‘Tennyson’s Serial Poem’, in Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, Mid-Victorian Studies (London: Athlone Press, ), , . ⁹ Cf. Paul O’Leary, ‘Accommodation and Resistance: A Comparison of Cultural Identities in Ireland and Wales, c.–’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since : Integration and Diversity (Dublin: Four Courts, ), –. ¹⁰ L. P. Curtis, Jr, ‘Ireland in ’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, vi. Ireland under the Union, . – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ¹¹ Brian Ó Cuiv, ‘Irish Language and Literature, –’, in W. E. Vaughan, New History of Ireland, vi/. –, . ¹² D. George Boyce, Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for Stability. Rev. edn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ), chs –. ¹³ F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), –.
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population of Wales doubling to two million during Victoria’s reign. This was accompanied by a constant increase in the numbers of Welsh-speakers to a total of about , by (about per cent of the population), who, in a further contrast to their Irish counterparts, were mostly literate, being served by an extensive print culture in Welsh.¹⁴ True, as in Ireland, the late s marked a turning point, but in Wales this took the form of a ‘crisis of identity’ rather than starvation, eviction, and emigration.¹⁵ Damning verdicts on the Welsh language and Nonconformist religion in reports on education in Wales, popularly known as the ‘Blue Books’ (), helped to mobilize a politically committed Nonconformity, aimed at ending Anglican dominance through the disestablishment in Wales of the Church of England: moves for greater political self-determination were limited to calls towards the end of the century for Welsh home rule by the ultimately abortive Cymru Fydd or Young Wales movement within the Liberal Party.¹⁶ It is striking that, despite the great changes just outlined, attempts to deploy their medieval past as a critique—whether radical or conservative—of the perceived failings of the present appear to have been few in Victorian Ireland and Wales. True, Thomas Davis (–), prolific advocate of the nationalism of Young Ireland, turned to early Irish land law—interpreted in the light of medieval Norwegian landholding (udalism)—as a remedy for landlordism, which he and later writers in both Ireland and Wales condemned as the toxic legacy of feudalism.¹⁷ In addition, half a century later, the notion of decline from the civilization of early Christian Ireland was central to the argument of Douglas Hyde’s famous lecture On the Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland ().¹⁸ On the whole, though, the Middle Ages were not used as a stick to beat Irish or Welsh Victorian society in the manner of, say, Pugin’s Contrasts or Ruskin’s idealization of the medieval craftworker. For example, while the young Yeats knew William Morris and admired his rejection of ‘the mass-produced values of Victorian capitalism’, he placed his hopes for artistic renewal in Irish patriotism rather than the socialism for which Morris found medieval inspiration.¹⁹
¹⁴ John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, vols (Cardiff: HMSO, ), i. . ¹⁵ Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales and its Crisis of Identity’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.–c. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. ¹⁶ Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, ‘ and : “Brad y Llyfrau Gleision” and Welsh Politics’, in Jones, Mid-Victorian Wales: The Observers and the Observed (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), ch. ; Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, – (paperback edn, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), chs –. ¹⁷ Thomas Duddy, A History of Irish Thought (London: Routledge, ), –; Pryce, J. E. Lloyd, n. . ¹⁸ Douglas Hyde, ‘On the Necessity of De-anglicising Ireland’, in Charles Gavan Duffy, George Sigerson, and Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Literature (London: T. Fisher Unwin, ), –, esp. , , . ¹⁹ R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, i. The Apprentice Mage – (Oxford, ), –, , –.
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In terms of institutional support for an engagement with their medieval pasts, Ireland and Wales shared some general characteristics also found elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The publication of medieval sources by the British government’s Record Commission and Rolls Series as well as by London-based bodies (notably the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, revived – and again in , and the Irish Texts Society from ), and the presence of antiquarian societies that helped to promote an interest in the Middle Ages are cases in point.²⁰ But there were differences too. In Ireland, Dublin was an important metropolis, the seat of British administration, including the Ordnance Survey, whose research on history and topography (–), accompanying its mapping of Ireland to revise the basis for taxation, brought together leading Irish antiquaries—led by George Petrie (–), and including the Irish scholars John O’Donovan (–) and Eugene O’Curry (–)—and made a major contribution to the understanding of the Irish past.²¹ Dublin was also home to other institutions that fostered antiquarian and scholarly study of medieval Ireland, notably two universities (Trinity College, founded in , and, from , the Catholic University), the Royal Irish Academy (), Public Record Office (), and National Museum and National Library (both established in and opened in ).²² Antiquarian societies, such as the Irish Archaeological Society (), were likewise established in the city, and the same was true of provincial Irish cities, especially Belfast and Cork.²³ The closest Wales came to the latter cities in the early and mid-Victorian period was Swansea, with its Royal Institution of South Wales,²⁴ but there was no metropolitan centre comparable to Dublin—a reflection of the greater administrative integration with England achieved following Henry VIII’s Acts of Union. True, university colleges were established in Aberystwyth (), Cardiff (), and Bangor (), capped by a federal University of Wales (), while Cardiff ’s increasing prominence as a major coal-exporting port in the late Victorian period led to city status in and its choice
²⁰ Raymond Gillespie, ‘Printing History: Editing and Publishing Historical Documents in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Martin Fanning and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland –: Essays in Honour of Michael Adams (Dublin: Woodfield Press, ), –; Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History in Wales’, in D. Huw Owen (ed.), Settlement and Society in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. Cf. Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ²¹ Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts, ). ²² Marie Bourke, The Story of Irish Museums, –: Culture, Identity and Education (Cork: Cork University Press, ), pp. xxvii, –, –; Gillespie, ‘Printing History’, –. ²³ Murray, Romanticism; Joan Rockley, Antiquarians and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Cork (Oxford: Archaeopress, ). ²⁴ Louise Miskell, ‘Intelligent Town’: An Urban History of Swansea, – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –.
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as the site of the new National Museum of Wales two years later.²⁵ Nevertheless, antiquarian and cultural activity probably relied more than in Ireland on the voluntary efforts of societies and individuals, including the Wales-wide fostering of cultural and scholarly endeavour in both the Welsh and English languages by local, regional, and, from , national eisteddfodau. These in turn provided a model for the Oireachtas, an annual cultural gathering held by the Gaelic League from to foster the Irish language.²⁶
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.................................................................................................................................. In both Ireland and Wales the significance attached to the Middle Ages was contingent on understandings of those countries’ pasts as a whole that had developed since the early modern period. Although aspects of the medieval period were idealized as golden ages in both nations, those aspects differed as did views of the period’s importance compared with what came before and after. On the one hand, traditions, largely going back to the Middle Ages, which traced the origins of both the Irish and the Welsh to a distant pre-Christian era evoked differing responses to the challenge of disentangling legend and history posed by medieval (and later) sources. Those responses in turn reflected contrasting attitudes to patriotism: for some, belief in glorious ancient origins was an essential component of national identity; for others, a source of national embarrassment. The continuing influence of earlier interpretations of the past was also reflected in notions of periodization that conceived of the Middle Ages in terms other than ‘medieval’. On the other hand, interpretations of the modern histories of Ireland and Wales coloured perspectives on the Middle Ages in the arc of national history. Broadly speaking, the histories of both countries were seen as falling into two main phases. In Ireland, the dividing line had been drawn in the late twelfth century, with the end of what Sophie Bryant termed in ‘the Irish period of free development’, as an ancient Gaelic civilization fell prey to Anglo-Norman and English conquest and settlement that opened a new phase of Irish history dominated by a narrative of oppression, dispossession, and resistance that extended into the nineteenth century
²⁵ J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), ch. ; Neil Evans, ‘The Welsh Victorian City: The Middle Class and Civic and National Consciousness in Cardiff, –’, Welsh History Review, (–): –. ²⁶ Hywel Teifi Edwards, The Eisteddfod (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –; Caoimhín De Barra, ‘A Gallant Little “Tírín”: The Welsh Influence on Irish Cultural Nationalism’, Irish Historical Studies, / (): –.
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via Tudor conquest, Cromwellian wars, and the rising of .²⁷ In Wales, by contrast, conquest and eventual political assimilation with England were viewed with equanimity. True, the medieval Welsh kings and princes down to Edward I’s conquest of – were celebrated, as were the literary achievements of their age. Yet the ensuing subjection to England was made palatable, first, by the accession of the partly Welsh Henry VII to the English throne in and, second, by Henry VIII’s Acts of Union (–), which not only gave the Welsh the same legal rights as the English but providentially opened the way for the Protestant Reformation.²⁸ In contrast to Ireland, then, where a Catholic majority suffered discrimination under a Protestant state, and nationalist movements were formed from the late eighteenth century onwards, the history of modern Wales was widely interpreted as the making of a Protestant—and by the mid-Victorian period, predominantly Nonconformist—nation loyal to the British Crown. Understandings of the medieval histories and cultures of both Ireland and Wales were complicated by powerful tendencies to romanticize a pre-Christian past. This is most apparent in the idealization of ‘ancient’ Ireland, whose chronological limits were variously defined, but extended at their widest from the beginning of the third millennium to about .²⁹ This chronological depth was given precision by the medieval chronicle tradition as transmitted by the early seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters, first published in full by O’Donovan in , which commenced with Noah’s Flood, dated to ‘The Age of the World’ (AM) . And it was peopled by the medieval scholars’ conception of early Irish history as consisting of a series of invasions from the east, beginning with Cesair, grand-daughter of Noah and ending with the Milesians, the direct ancestors of the Irish, in AM .³⁰ (O’Donovan criticized the precise dates as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘apocryphal’.³¹) For many of their interpreters in the Victorian period, then, medieval Irish sources mattered most as witnesses to a remote and glorious pre-Christian era rather than as windows on the Middle Ages.
²⁷ Sophie Bryant, Celtic Ireland (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., ), p. x; Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict – (London: Allen & Unwin, ), –; James M. Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), –. ²⁸ Prys Morgan, ‘Iolo Morganwg and Welsh Historical Traditions’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. ²⁹ E.g. Henry O’Neill, The Fine Arts and Civilization of Ancient Ireland (London: Smith, Elder, & Co.; Dublin: George Herbert, ), , , –, . See also Matthew Campbell, ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’, in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ³⁰ Annala Rioghachta Eireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, by the Four Masters, ed. and tr. John O’Donovan. nd edn, vols (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., ), i. [–], –; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘ “An Honour to the Nation”: Publishing John O’Donovan’s Edition of the Annals of the Four Masters, –’, in Fanning and Gillespie (eds), Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland, –; Bernadette Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, ), –. ³¹ Annala Rioghachta Eireann, i, pp. xlii–xlvi.
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However, such views also faced important challenges. One prominent area of debate among nineteenth-century Irish antiquarians, who fell into opposing camps of ‘Paganists’ and ‘Christians’, concerned the extent to which the legendary accounts of pre-Christian origins could be accepted.³² Though critical in many respects, the great Irish scholar Eugene O’Curry accepted the Milesian origins of the Irish, and Mary Ferguson had no hesitation in devoting the opening chapters of her popular history of Ireland to the ‘Mythical’, ‘Heroic’, ‘Atacottic’, and ‘Ossianic’ periods.³³ Such ideas went on to influence the Irish Literary Revival from the s, notably in Standish James O’Grady’s works on Cú Chulainn, a hero presented as a historical figure whose exploits had been preserved by bardic tradition.³⁴ By contrast, George Stokes sought to elevate Brian Boru (d. ) as a national hero on the grounds that he was ‘a truly historical personage’, comparable to King Alfred, rather than a mythical figure, and John T. Gilbert urged the publication of documents in order to hasten the demise of ‘those romances, styled “Irish Histories,” by which Ireland has been . . . historically mistaught and deluded’.³⁵ A critical approach likewise informed studies and editions of medieval Irish texts by Celtic scholars such as Whitley Stokes (–) and Kuno Meyer (–).³⁶ Controversy also turned on the origins and purpose of monuments in the Irish landscape, notably round towers and stones with inscriptions in the ogam alphabet: Petrie’s detailed attempt to establish the Christian character of the former in a prize essay of , eventually published as The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland (), met with considerable opposition from those reluctant to abandon romantic ideas of the round towers as evidence of Phoenician or other early eastern settlers.³⁷ Comparable debates occurred in Wales. Welsh historians still cited, albeit with varying degrees of approval, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain as evidence for the Trojan origins of the Welsh through Brutus, descendant of Aeneas.³⁸ In addition, claims for biblical origins were popular thanks to Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Mirror of the Primitive Ages), first published in and frequently reprinted in the Victorian period, which, adapting Pezron’s work on the
³² Murray, Romanticism, ch. . ³³ Eugene O’Curry, On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, vols (London: Williams & Norgate, ), ii. –, , ; M. C. Ferguson, The Story of the Irish Before the Conquest: From the Mythical Period to the Invasion under Strongbow (London: Bell & Daldy, ). ³⁴ Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, i (London: Sampson Lowe, Searle, Marston, & Rivington, ), pp. iii–xix; McAteer, Standish O’Grady, –, –. ³⁵ George Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church. A History of Ireland from St. Patrick to the English Conquest in (London: Hodder & Stoughton, ), ; [J. T. Gilbert], On the History, Position and Treatment of the Public Records of Ireland. By an Irish Archivist. nd edn (London: J. R. Smith, ), –. ³⁶ Ó Cuív, ‘Irish Language’, –; Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (eds), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (–) (Dublin: Four Courts, ); Seán Ó Lúing, Kuno Meyer, –: A Biography (Dublin: Geography Publications, ). ³⁷ Leerssen, Remembrance, –. ³⁸ Brut y Brenhinedd: Llanstephan MS. Version, ed. Brynley F. Roberts (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ), –.
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Celts, presented the Welsh as the descendants of Gomer son of Japhet.³⁹ Furthermore, Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg; –) had promoted primitivist ideas by arguing that the Welsh bards were direct descendants of the druids, a view elaborated by some of his Victorian successors, including R. W. Morgan, whose The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria () combined it with earlier legendary interpretations by opening with chapters successively on the ‘Gomerian Era’, the ‘Trojan Era’, and ‘The Druidic Religion of Britain’.⁴⁰ Changing attitudes are reflected in the two longest histories of Wales published in the nineteenth century, Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru (History of Wales, –) and R. J. Pryse’s Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (History of the Britons and Welsh, –). One striking feature of the former is its effective revival of a framework that was fundamental to medieval Welsh historical writing, whereby Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth were followed by the chronicles known as Brut y Tywysogyon (The Chronicle of the Princes) in order to trace the history of the Welsh from their Trojan ancestors to the fall of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in .⁴¹ Thus Price opened with sections on the coming to Britain of, respectively, the Welsh, the Romans, the Gospel, and the English, followed by a discussion of the early Church in Wales. This part of his book followed Geoffrey in taking his readers to the late seventh century, before moving on to the subsequent period in a lengthy section headed ‘Y Tywysogion’ (The Princes), furnished with its own introduction that announced a narrowing of focus from a wider Brittonic world to Wales. Here, attention was devoted mainly to the centuries down to the Edwardian conquest with only brief coverage of events thereafter.⁴² True, Price expressed reservations about Geoffrey’s account and at times distinguished sharply between ‘(true) history’ and ‘legend’.⁴³ But he also declared that if all legends were ignored, there would be no early history left.⁴⁴ That R. J. Pryse followed Price’s twostage periodization three decades later and indeed made it more explicit in his title reflects the durability of the medieval historiographical framework on which it was based. However, Pryse was far more critical than his predecessor, declaring that his aim had been to write a history, not a romance like Geoffrey, or a novel like Theophilus Evans.⁴⁵ This approach to sources was strongly influenced by the chemist and literary scholar Thomas Stephens (–), who declared in that ‘one of the imperative duties of Cambrian writers, is to institute a rigid examination of the sources of our
³⁹ Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c. – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. ⁴⁰ Catherine A. Charnell-White, Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ); R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria (Ruthin: I. Clarke []), , , . ⁴¹ Historical Texts from Medieval Wales, ed. Patricia Williams (London: MRHA, ), pp. xxiv–xxv. ⁴² Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru (Crickhowell: Thomas Williams, ), pp. v–vii, –. ⁴³ Price, Hanes Cymru, , –, , , , . ⁴⁴ Price, Hanes Cymru, ; cf. , . ⁴⁵ R. J. Pryse, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, vols (London: Mackenzie, –), ii. [p. iii].
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national history’.⁴⁶ From the s the challenge of distinguishing between legend and history was likewise central to the work of the historian John Edward Lloyd (–).⁴⁷
M
.................................................................................................................................. The aspects of the medieval period that were celebrated in Victorian Ireland and Wales bore some similarities. One common element, which built on ideas elaborated in the early modern period (with medieval antecedents, especially in the Irish case), was the portrayal of the two countries’ early ecclesiastical history as an age of saints.⁴⁸ As Rice Rees declared in : ‘So numerous are the Welsh saints, that their history is in a manner the ecclesiastical history of their time’.⁴⁹ This perception was reflected in editions and studies of medieval Irish and Welsh saints’ Lives: for example, William Rees’s Lives of the Cambro-British Saints (), William Reeves’s Life of St Columba (), and J. H. Todd’s St Patrick, Apostle of Ireland ().⁵⁰ Such works were linked to confessional agendas. In both countries the Anglican Church invoked this early Christian history in order to establish its native credentials and thereby rebut charges that it was merely an English implant. One key concept was the ‘Celtic Church’ allegedly independent of Rome.⁵¹ In Wales, a version of this had been developed by sixteenth-century Protestant churchmen, who argued that the Reformation had restored the early British or Welsh Church, an idea that continued to be promoted by Anglicans in the Victorian period.⁵² From the s the Anglican Church in Ireland, developing a view articulated by Archbishop Ussher in the early seventeenth century, adopted a similar strategy in claiming to be the true successor of the church established by St Patrick, which, so it was alleged, had been corrupted by Rome after the ⁴⁶ Thomas Stephens, ‘The Book of Aberpergwm, Improperly Called the Chronicle of Caradoc’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, rd ser. (), . ⁴⁷ Pryce, J. E. Lloyd, –; Marion Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers and Abandoned Sources: Edward Williams, Thomas Stephens and the Young J. E. Lloyd’, in Neil Evans and Huw Pryce (eds), Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, – (Farnham: Ashgate, ), –, esp. –. ⁴⁸ Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁴⁹ Rice Rees, An Essay on the Welsh Saints or the Primitive Christians Usually Considered to Have Been the Founders of Churches in Wales (London: Longman, ), p. xiii. ⁵⁰ W. J. Rees, Lives of the Cambro-British Saints (Llandovery: W. Rees, ); William Reeves, The Life of St Columba, Founder of Hy, Written by Adamnan (Dublin: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, ); James Henthorn Todd, St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland: A Memoir of His Life and Mission (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, & Co., ). See also Murray, Romanticism, . ⁵¹ Donald E. Meek, The Quest for Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, ), –. ⁵² Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, in his, Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –; Rees, Essay, –; Price, Hanes Cymru, –. Criticism of idea in Pryse, Hanes, i. .
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Anglo-Norman invasion.⁵³ This view was rejected by the Irish Catholic Church, which held that it was descended directly from St Patrick and generally sought to appropriate Ireland’s early Christian heritage as its own, a claim that gained greater prominence as Irish nationalism became increasingly identified with Roman Catholicism in the later decades of the nineteenth century.⁵⁴ Likewise, albeit on a much smaller scale, attempts to revive Roman Catholicism in Wales claimed early Welsh saints and other aspects of the medieval Welsh Christian heritage.⁵⁵ However, in Ireland the early Christian period was regarded not only as holy but also as a cultural and intellectual golden age remarkable for its illuminated manuscripts, carved stone crosses, and intricate metalwork as well as for its scholars, including a number who distinguished themselves on the Continent.⁵⁶ This was much less true of Wales. There, the emphasis remained on the establishment and spread of Christianity, and cultural revival was seen as coming later, as part of a wider ‘awakening’ of nations, namely a flowering of vernacular literature, patronized by Welsh princes, extending from c. to the Edwardian conquest of . Moreover, the prose tales were transferred via Brittany to the Continent, where they played a crucial role in the development of European romance—an interpretation that influenced Charlotte Guest’s decision to translate the Mabinogion.⁵⁷ Attitudes to medieval secular rulers also differed. True, both Irish and Welsh writers condemned the internecine struggles of the Middle Ages and tended to assess rulers according to the extent to which they fostered national unity.⁵⁸ Thus Diarmait Mac Murchada (d. ) was singled out for his treachery in inviting Anglo-Norman invaders to Ireland,⁵⁹ whereas Brian Boru, killed at the battle of Clontarf in , was accorded a heroic role as a high-king who not only united Ireland but defended its ⁵³ Meek, Quest, –; Murray, Romanticism, ; Niamh NicGhabhann, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings in Ireland, –: Building on the Past (Dublin: Four Courts, ), , . ⁵⁴ E.g. James Gaffney, The Ancient Irish Church: Was it Catholic or Protestant? (Dublin: James Duffy, ). See further Kevin Collins, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland – (Dublin: Four Courts, ), –, –; Sheehy, ‘Irish Church-Building’, –; NicGhabhann, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings, ch. ; Philip O’Leary, Prose Literature of the Irish Revival, –: Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), – and n. . ⁵⁵ Louis Nedelec, Cambria Sacra; or, The History of the Early Cambro-British Christians (London: Burns & Oates, ), esp. pp. xv–xxix; Pryce, ‘Culture’, –, , and n. . ⁵⁶ O’Neill, Fine Arts; Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church, esp. Lectures VII, XI; Margaret Stokes, Early Christian Art in Ireland (London: Chapman and Hall, ). ⁵⁷ Price, ‘An Essay’, esp. –, –, –; Price, Hanes Cymru, –; Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry (Llandovery: William Rees, ), –, –; The Mabinogion, tr. Charlotte Guest, vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans; Llandovery: W. Rees, ), i. pp. [xi]–xvi. ⁵⁸ M. F. C[usack], An Illustrated History of Ireland: From the Earliest Period (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., ), ; Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church, , –, ; Price, Hanes Cymru, , ; Jane Williams, A History of Wales, Derived from Authentic Sources (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., ), , . ⁵⁹ C[usack], Illustrated History, . Cf. F. X. Martin, No Hero in the House: Diarmait Mac Murchada and the Coming of the Normans to Ireland (Dublin: National University of Ireland, ), –.
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early Christian civilization through his defeat of the pagan Danes and restoration of churches.⁶⁰ However, Brian Boru was exceptional among Irish rulers in receiving such praise. By contrast, Victorian historians of Wales—following the lead of David Powel in his Historie of Cambria (), a version of which had been published as late as ⁶¹—were readier to celebrate their nation’s medieval kings and princes. Yet generalization is difficult, as some authors found the rulers’ martial qualities distasteful and preferred to highlight the peace and codification of Welsh law allegedly achieved by Hywel Dda (the Good) (d. ) or Llywelyn the Great’s supposed contribution to British liberties through his role in securing Magna Carta ().⁶² The Catholicism of medieval Wales could also cause discomfort among both Anglican and Nonconformist writers.⁶³ Overall, though, Victorian assessments of medieval Wales were more positive than those of medieval Ireland. In particular, a distinctively Welsh national history continued to be seen as having taken place above all in the Middle Ages, especially in the period down to . Moreover, its achievements could be lauded without having to lament, as some did in Ireland, that the following centuries had marked a decline that could be arrested only by fundamental change in relations with Great Britain. In contrast to Ireland and other European nations in multinational states, then, celebration of the medieval Welsh past served, not as a justification for political selfdetermination, but rather as a vindication of Wales’s honourable place in a union with England or Great Britain (even if that might involve a measure of home rule).
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.................................................................................................................................. The contrasts between Ireland and Wales regarding the periods and aspects of the Middle Ages that mattered most are reflected in the art and architecture of the Victorian period. In Ireland, artists followed antiquarians and scholars in focusing on the achievements of the centuries down to the Anglo-Norman invasion (though throughout the period there were also those ready to identify with later medieval Gothic architecture as intrinsic to the island’s cultural and religious inheritance).⁶⁴ Carved stone crosses and Hiberno-Romanesque churches were recorded and analysed, ⁶⁰ C[usack], Illustrated History, –; Ferguson, Story of the Irish, –; Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church, –; Seán Duffy, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ), –. ⁶¹ R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne and the History of Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, (–): –. ⁶² Pryce, ‘Culture’, –; Pryce, J. E. Lloyd, –. ⁶³ Williams, History, , , ; Pryse, Hanes, i. –; ii. . Cf. Paul O’Leary, ‘When was AntiCatholicism? The Case of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Wales’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, (): –. ⁶⁴ NicGhabhann, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings, passim.
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and the resulting publications, with numerous plates, as well as plaster casts of crosses displayed at the Irish Industrial Exhibition in Dublin () and then at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham (–), made the monuments more widely known and thus helped to inspire imitations and adaptations.⁶⁵ The same was true of illuminated manuscripts, housed in Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy, and other repositories. For example, Petrie devised a type based on lettering in the Book of Kells and other early medieval Irish manuscripts for printing Irish texts.⁶⁶ Early Christian metalwork, increasing quantities of which came into the public domain through discoveries on archaeological sites and sales, was turned to commercial use through the manufacture of replicas as jewellery. A notable example was the ‘Tara’ brooch (datable to c.), acquired in by the enterprising Waterhouse company in Dublin, which thus named it as part of an advertising campaign that included its display together with the replica brooches produced by the company at the Great Exhibition in London; Queen Victoria’s subsequent purchase of two replicas further promoted their popularity.⁶⁷ From the s several architects built churches in the Hiberno-Romanesque style found in twelfth-century churches such as Cormac’s Chapel, Cashel.⁶⁸ The early medieval artistic tradition also provided a visual language to commemorate modern political leaders, most strikingly in the case of the memorial to Daniel O’Connell in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, with its Hiberno-Romanesque church and round tower (although this departed from the original design by Petrie, much to his chagrin), and more widely through the erection of ‘Celtic’ stone crosses decorated with interlace.⁶⁹ To the (admittedly limited) extent that they turned to the medieval past, Irish painters also focused on early Christian Ireland, depicting St Patrick or Brian Boru.⁷⁰ Likewise Daniel Maclise’s famous painting The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (), depicting the groom standing on a fallen stone cross before a ruined chapel on a blood-soaked field outside Waterford, may be seen as an elegy to the Christian civilization destroyed by the Anglo-Norman invaders.⁷¹ ⁶⁵ Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture: A History (Dublin: Four Courts, ), ; Elizabeth L. McCormick, ‘ “The Highly Interesting Series of Irish High Crosses”: Reproductions of Early Medieval Irish Sculpture in Dublin and Sydenham’, in Jane Hawkes (ed.), Making Histories: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Insular Art (Donington: Shaun Tyas, ), –. ⁶⁶ Dermot McGuinne, Irish Type Design: A History of Printing Types in the Irish Character (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, ), –. ⁶⁷ Niamh Whitfield, ‘The Finding of the Tara Brooch’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, (): –, –; Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon’, –; Elizabeth McCrum, ‘Commerce and the Celtic Revival: Irish Jewelry of the Nineteenth Century’, Éire—Ireland, / (): –. ⁶⁸ Cyril Barrett, ‘Visual Arts and Society, –’, in Vaughan, New History of Ireland, vi/. –, –. Isolated instances of Hiberno-Romanesque elements earlier in the nineteenth century: Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, n. . ⁶⁹ Sheehy, Rediscovery, –; Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, –, , . ⁷⁰ Cyril Barrett, ‘Irish Nationalism and Art –’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, / (): . ⁷¹ Brian P. Kennedy, Irish Painting (Dublin: Town House, ), , . See also Raghnall Ó Floinn, ‘Antiquarian Influences in The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife’, in Jane Hawkes (ed.), Making
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Wales witnessed similar developments, but on a much more smaller scale and only from the s.⁷² This was largely because much less early medieval art and architecture survived than in Ireland, the main body of material comprising stone sculpture of the seventh to twelfth centuries, which T. H. Thomas (–) not only helped to preserve but celebrated as a source of artistic inspiration for the present.⁷³ By contrast, there was a dearth of illuminated manuscripts and metalwork.⁷⁴ However, the Welsh were readier to commemorate medieval secular figures than the Irish: for example, eisteddfod competitions elicited a sculpture of the fifth-century King Tewdrig of Gwent in and a painting of ‘Hywel Dda Codifying the Welsh Law’ in , while a statue of Llywelyn the Great (d. ) of Gwynedd was made for a fountain in Conwy in .⁷⁵ There were also several abortive campaigns from the s onwards to raise a memorial to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the ‘last prince’ of Wales killed in , an ambition only finally realized in .⁷⁶ Small wonder that in T. E. Ellis thought that more needed to be done to commemorate the medieval Welsh rulers Hywel Dda, the two Llywelyns, and Owain Glyndŵr.⁷⁷ A telling illustration of differing chronological priorities in Ireland was the widespread movement to mark the centenary of the rising by erecting commemorative statues, including one in Dublin of its leader Wolf Tone, which encountered similar delays to the plans for a monument to Llywelyn, being eventually unveiled only in .⁷⁸
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.................................................................................................................................. Irish and Welsh literature also responded to the medieval past by creating new works derived in varying degrees from medieval sources or the medieval histories of Ireland and Wales. In Ireland, manuscript copies and adaptations of medieval texts in Irish as Histories: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Insular Art (Donington: Shaun Tyas, ), –. ⁷² For an excellent overview, see Martin Crampin, ‘Artistic Engagements with Medieval Decorative Arts in Wales: Recording, Interpretation and Invention’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, ), –. ⁷³ Pryce, ‘Culture’, –. ⁷⁴ Huw Pryce, ‘Ecclesiastical Wealth in Early Medieval Wales’, in Nancy Edwards and Alan Lane (eds), The Early Church in Wales and the West (Oxford: Oxbow, ), , –; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Aberystwyth and Cardiff: National Library of Wales, ), –. ⁷⁵ Peter Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –, –; Richard Haslam, Julian Orbach, and Adam Voelcker, The Buildings of Wales: Gwynedd (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), . ⁷⁶ Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and the Welsh Historical Consciousness’, Welsh History Review, (–): –, –. ⁷⁷ Thomas E. Ellis, ‘The Memory of the Kymric Dead’ [], in Ellis, Speeches and Addresses (Wrexham: Hughes & Son, ), –. ⁷⁸ Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, –; Geraldine Higgins, Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .
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well as early modern texts on medieval themes—for example, the poems of the Fenian cycle and the prose tale Cath Cluan Tarbh (The Battle of Clontarf)—continued to be made in the nineteenth century.⁷⁹ From the Gaelic League, reacting to aspersions cast on early Irish literature by Professor Robert Atkinson of Trinity College, Dublin, encouraged the publication of Modern Irish versions of medieval tales; and ballads and songs on Fionn Mac Cumhaill were also collected and printed.⁸⁰ Similar attempts were made to translate medieval Irish prose texts into English, and became a central hallmark of the Irish Revival from the s, beginning with Standish James O’Grady’s various renderings of the tales of Cú Chulainn. True, O’Grady, strongly influenced by Thomas Carlyle, presented his History of Ireland (–) as a new kind of history that would make vivid a distant, pre-Christian past and provide heroic inspiration for the present. But this was no less literary than his professedly literary works on Cú Chulainn.⁸¹ Later attempts to translate and adapt medieval Irish tales into modern English varied from the scholarly work of Eleanor Hull to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (), written in a Hiberno-English dialect modelled on that spoken by the villagers of Kiltartan adjacent to her Coole Park estate, Co. Galway.⁸² New prose writing in Victorian Ireland turned to medieval themes only to a limited extent.⁸³ Historical novels in English largely focused on events from the late sixteenth century onwards, with the exception of Gerald Griffin’s The Invasion (), set in the age of the Viking invasions, and republished c. with extensive notes by Eugene O’Curry.⁸⁴ Likewise Irish prose writing of the Gaelic revival from the late nineteenth century, though occasionally placing its narratives in the time of St Patrick, Brian Boru, or an unspecified ancient Gaelic past, tended to focus on the English conquests of the late sixteenth century and subsequent crises such as the rising and the Great Famine.⁸⁵ On the other hand, Irish-language poetry, ‘the public voice of Gaelic Ireland during the nineteenth century’,⁸⁶ retained a consciousness of its medieval origins in its ⁷⁹ E.g. Gearóid Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , , –, –, –; Duanaire Finn: The Book of the Lays of Fionn, Part I, ed. Eoin MacNeill (London: Irish Texts Soc., , ), pp. [xvii], xxvi; Cath Cluana Tarbh: The Battle of Clontarf, ed. Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail (London: Irish Texts Soc., , ), , , – (a reference I owe to the late Richard Sharpe). ⁸⁰ O’Leary, Prose Literature, –, –, –. ⁸¹ McAteer, Standish O’Grady, chs –; Geraldine Higgins, Heroic Revivals, ch. ; Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. ⁸² Eleanor Hull (ed.), The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature. Being a Collection of Stories Relating to the Hero Cuchullin. Translated from the Irish by Various Scholars (London: David Nutt, ); Gregory, Cuchulain; Leerssen, Remembrance, –. ⁸³ Cf. Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English, –: From Catholic Emancipation to the Fall of Parnell’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . ⁸⁴ Cahalan, Great Hatred, , and chs – passim; Leerssen, Remembrance, –. ⁸⁵ O’Leary, Prose Literature, –. ⁸⁶ Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish’, .
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treatment of modern subjects. Thus Daniel O’Connell (–) was ‘praised in the traditional manner of Irish chieftains in the earlier bardic poetry’, with one Clare poet combining medieval and modern allusions in envisaging him as ‘High King of the country like Bonaparte’.⁸⁷ Irish poets in English also looked back to the Middle Ages. First, several penned verse versions of medieval legends. Thus Denis Florence McCarthy’s ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’ () provided a rendition of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani,⁸⁸ and Samuel Ferguson’s poems Congal () and Conary () were based respectively on the historical tale The Battle of Dun na nGedh and the Battle of Magh Rath (edited and translated by John O’Donovan) and on The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, one of the tales in the Ulster Cycle (available in a manuscript translation by William Hennessy).⁸⁹ In addition, Yeats gave voice to his political sympathies after the defeat of the Irish Home Rule Bill in in The Wanderings of Oisin (), which presented Ossian’s mourning of the Fenians in a dialogue with St Patrick.⁹⁰ Second, the first part of Aubrey de Vere’s poem, Inisfail: A Lyrical History of Ireland () was devoted to the Middle Ages, beginning with the Anglo-Norman invasion but including flashbacks to the early Christian period. De Vere both sought to lend authority to his verse by citing antiquarian scholarship and articulated a medievalist sensibility, notably in the poem ‘Patrick and the Knight; or, The Inauguration of Irish Chivalry’, supported by a reference to O’Donovan.⁹¹ Third, patriotic poetry— including that of Thomas Davis and other authors included in the hugely popular anthology The Spirit of the Nation ()—sought to inspire its readers and listeners by invoking figures and events from the medieval past, although their historical reference points ranged into the nineteenth century too.⁹² A notable instance was Thomas Clarence Mangan’s ‘Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century’ (), which implicitly contrasted the flourishing state of the province under its medieval king ‘Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand’ (Cathal Crobderg; d. ) with its parlous condition during the famine.⁹³ The foundation for new uses of medieval Welsh literature had been laid by the threevolume anthology The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (–), a compendium of prose and poetry—transcribed, without English translations, from medieval and later
⁸⁷ Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish’, –. ⁸⁸ Matthew Campbell, ‘Poetry in English, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁸⁹ Denman, Samuel Ferguson, –, –; Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, –. ⁹⁰ Campbell, ‘Poetry’, –; Campbell, ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’, –. ⁹¹ Aubrey de Vere, Inisfail: A Lyrical History of Ireland (Dublin: James Duffy, ), ; Campbell, ‘Poetry’, –. ⁹² Campbell, ‘Poetry’, –. Popularity of Spirit of the Nation: Margaret Kelleher, ‘Irish Literary Culture’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ⁹³ Seamus Deane (gen. ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols (Derry: Field Day, ), ii. –; Campbell, ‘Poetry’, .
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manuscripts—that remained sufficiently in demand for the publisher Thomas Gee to issue a second edition in .⁹⁴ English translations of various works appeared in both periodicals and books. Most notable of the latter was Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the eleven medieval tales she dubbed The Mabinogion (–), an enterprise inspired by her passion for medieval European romance and facilitated by cooperation with Welsh scholars.⁹⁵ Medieval Wales also inspired new Welsh writing in English, such as Lady Marshall’s long poem A Prince of Wales of Long Ago: A Bardic Legend of the Twelfth Century ().⁹⁶ The same was truer still of writing in Welsh. This was due in part to the encouragement given by competitions at eisteddfodau and literary societies, which offered prizes for poems and prose works on medieval heroes and events such as Llywelyn the Last (d. ) or Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth, both subjects at the Llangollen eisteddfod of .⁹⁷ Another factor was the growing sense of national revival in the later nineteenth century. Thus Owain Glyndŵr (d. c.), the last Welsh leader to lead armed resistance against English rule, was celebrated in poetry, prose, and drama in both Welsh and English, especially from the s, and proved popular among writers aligned with the Cymru Fydd or Young Wales movement within the Liberal Party that advocated Welsh home rule.⁹⁸ Moreover, numerous historical novels in Welsh were set in the Middle Ages, both during and before the age of Glyndŵr; often published in newspapers, these responded to popular interest in Welsh heroes of the past.⁹⁹ It appears, then, that Victorian writing in Welsh was more strongly imbued with medieval themes than its counterpart in Irish. The contrast with Ireland was probably due to the centrality accorded to the medieval centuries, especially down to or at latest , in perceptions of the Welsh past, and the corresponding lack of modern nationalist struggles that inspired Irish writers. Moreover, in both Wales and Ireland there were those who questioned the value of basing modern literature on medieval sources. Throughout the nineteenth century the use in modern Welsh poetry of the twenty-four strict metres defined in the fifteenth century by Dafydd ab Edmwnd, together with the sound-patterning conventions of cynghanedd, provoked strong condemnation, being described by one observer as a
⁹⁴ Constantine, ‘Welsh Literary History’. ⁹⁵ Revel Guest and Angela V. John, Lady Charlotte Guest: An Extraordinary Life (Stroud: Tempus, ), ch. . ⁹⁶ Jane Aaron, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. ⁹⁷ Edwards Hywel Teifi, Gŵyl Gwalia: Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol yn Oes Aur Victoria (Llandysul: Gomer, ), . ⁹⁸ E. Wyn James, Glyndŵr a Gobaith y Genedl: Agweddau ar y Portread o Owain Glyndŵr yn Llenyddiaeth y Cyfnod Modern (Aberystwyth: Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigion, ), –, –; Jane Aaron, ‘The Gregynog Papers #: “A Nation Once Again”: Owain Glyndŵr and the “Cymraec Dream” of Anglophone Welsh Victorian Poets’ [], Wales Arts Review: https://www.walesartsreview. org/the-gregynog-papers--a-nation-once-again-owain-glyndwr-and-the-cymraec-dream-of-anglophonewelsh-victorian-poets/ (accessed Dec. ). ⁹⁹ Millward, ‘ “Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion” ’.
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regrettable symptom of ‘our worship of the past, our literary mediaevalism’.¹⁰⁰ For some writers in Irish, the need largely to rely on English translations, owing to the linguistic difficulties of Old and Middle Irish, was a cause of regret, as was the sheer difficulty of recreating the distant age in which the medieval Irish tales were set.¹⁰¹ Likewise William Magee (‘John Eglinton’) argued in that the remoteness of medieval Irish tales from modern lived experience disqualified them from being a sound basis for a new Irish literature in English that aspired to universality, a charge rebutted by Yeats, who insisted that those tales had the potential to be as universally popular and significant as the Arthurian Romances, or the Norse sagas and Germanic legends staged respectively by Ibsen and Wagner.¹⁰²
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.................................................................................................................................. In conclusion, the medieval cultures and histories of Ireland and Wales received substantial and wide-ranging attention in the Victorian period. Much of this engagement with the Middle Ages was motivated, as in many other nineteenth-century European countries, by a desire to legitimize and promote national identity. Yet the uses made in Ireland and Wales of their medieval legacies differed in significant respects. This was partly because of contrasts between those legacies but resulted more from the fundamentally different directions taken by the histories of both countries after the Middle Ages.¹⁰³
S Bourke, Marie, The Story of Irish Museums –: Culture, Identity and Education (Cork: Cork University Press, ). Boyce, D. George, Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for Stability. Rev. edn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ). Camille, Michael, ‘Domesticating the Dragon: The Rediscovery, Reproduction, and Re-Invention of Early Irish Metalwork’, in T. J. Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival – (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, ), –. ¹⁰⁰ Cf. Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘The Eisteddfod Poet: An Embattled Figure’, in Edwards (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c. – (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –; Thomas Nicholas, Middle and High Schools and a University for Wales (London: Jackson, Walford & Hodder []), . ¹⁰¹ O’Leary, Prose Literature, –, –. ¹⁰² John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, AE, and W. Larminie, Literary Ideals in Ireland (London: T. Fisher Unwin; Dublin: Daily Express Office, []). ¹⁰³ I am very grateful to Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha for valuable bibliographical guidance and to Nancy Edwards and Paul O’Leary for their comments on a draft text.
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Campbell, Matthew, ‘Poetry in English, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Campbell, Matthew, ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’, in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Charnell-White, Catherine A., Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ). Collins, Kevin, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland – (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Crampin, Martin, ‘Artistic Engagements with Medieval Decorative Arts in Wales: Recording, Interpretation and Invention’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, . Cunningham, Bernadette, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘ “An Honour to the Nation”: Publishing John O’Donovan’s Edition of the Annals of the Four Masters, –’, in Martin Fanning and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland –: Essays in Honour of Michael Adams (Dublin: Woodfield Press, ), –. De Barra, Caoimhín, ‘A Gallant Little “Tírín”: The Welsh Influence on Irish Cultural Nationalism’, Irish Historical Studies, / (): –. Denvir, Gearóid, ‘Literature in Irish, –’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Doherty, Gillian M., The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Duddy, Thomas, A History of Irish Thought (London: Routledge, ). Duffy, Seán, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ). Edelstein, T. J. (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival – (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, ). Evans, Neil, and Huw Pryce (eds), Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, – (Farnham: Ashgate, ). Higgins, Geraldine, Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Kelleher, Margaret, ‘Irish Literary Culture’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Kelleher, Margaret, ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English, –: From Catholic Emancipation to the Fall of Parnell’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. . Kreilkamp, Vera (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, ). Leerssen, Joep, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, ). Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Lord, Peter, The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ).
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Morgan, Prys, ‘Early Victorian Wales and its Crisis of Identity’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.–c. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. Morgan, Prys, ‘Iolo Morganwg and Welsh Historical Traditions’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ), –. Murray, Damien, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies, – (Maynooth: National University of Ireland, ). NicGhabhann, Niamh, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings in Ireland, –: Building on the Past (Dublin: Four Courts, ). Ó Cuiv, Brian, ‘Irish Language and Literature, –’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, vi. Ireland Under the Union, . – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. O’Leary, Philip, Prose Literature of the Irish Revival, –: Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ). Ortenberg, Veronica, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, ). Pryce, Huw, ‘Culture, Identity, and the Medieval Revival in Victorian Wales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, / (): –. Pryce, Huw, J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ). Pryce, Huw, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, (): –. Sheehy, Jeanne, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival – (London: Thames and Hudson, ). Williams, Mark, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
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N- in Victorian Scotland is a diverse phenomenon, finding expression in Gothic architecture; paintings and murals; book illustration; fiction, poetry, revivals of ballad and romance; the founding of scholarly and antiquarian societies; Arts and Crafts-related educational practices—all throughout the reign of a British monarch, of course, who had famously loved Scotland since her first visit in . Given such diversity across medium, expression, and purpose, Scottish neo-medievalism lacks the sustained coherence or unity of a ‘movement’ in this period. Still, its purpose and ethos can best be understood by the artistic and cultural phenomena which ‘bookend’ it: its Romantic precedents and its modernist culmination. Neo-medievalist impulses and interests are seeded in the earlier eighteenth-century period, becoming a powerful facet of the imagination in the Scottish Romantic period and developing during Victoria’s reign into sustained scholarly practices and endeavours. Literary historians and editors construct and collect a distinct national cultural and literary narrative; and, as a variety of writers and artists harness the aesthetic and socio-political implications of neo-medieval style and subject, they re-energise the creative possibilities of Scottish art and culture. Into the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘Renaissance’ movements—both ‘Celtic’ and Hugh MacDiarmid’s own—differently perceive medieval literary culture as a key means of imaginative and political redefinition. Recurrent ideological, cultural, and political associations emerge in these various neo-medieval preoccupations: for example, Catholicism; Anglo-Scottish relationships and Wars of Independence; Jacobitism and political rebellion. In that respect, Scottish Victorian neo-medievalism in its diversity is unified by being a rereading or reimagining of salient and highly charged ‘moments’ in Scotland’s past; and, like most neomedievalism, it is highly partisan, motivated by different types of nostalgia and desire. In this chapter, we chart some of the main literary and artistic practices of Victorian Scotland; and we have chosen to ‘delimit’ the potentially vast scope by focusing on
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those which can be termed ‘vernacular’ in subject—in other words, Scottish or ‘Celtic’ in subject matter. Prior to the Victorian period, Scottish literary culture had experienced other kinds of medieval revivals. Although Scotland’s Calvinist reformation had been keen to deride the ‘superstition’ and ‘bawdry’ inherent in the world of the old faith, the medieval had endured in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature in the persistence of particular poetic modes and styles (e.g. dream vision—even in the Protestant Elizabeth Melville’s text; the resurgence of flyting; romance models; allegory, stressing at least aesthetic continuities between later medieval Scots tradition and early modern). However, the first stirrings of a medieval revival had been felt in the earlier part of the eighteenth century in the antiquarian work of the poet, Allan Ramsay (-).¹ In homage to the author of the first vernacular Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid—with its transposition of classical ideas of political imperium, its defence of Scots’ eloquence, and its critique of the limited linguistic, imaginative, and moral horizons of other vernacular versions (specifically William Caxton’s)—Ramsay changed his literary nickname from Isaac Bickerstaff to Gavin Douglas (c.–), one of the famous trinity of medieval Scots poet makars which included William Dunbar and Robert Henryson. As the principal reviver and collector of vernacular Scots literature, Ramsay’s medieval nom de plume is significant, ‘indicating his intimacy with a literary circle in post-Union Edinburgh that attempted to preserve . . . the Scottish humanist tradition’.² ‘Medievalism’ in eighteenth-century Scottish literary circles, then, meant engagement with perceived ‘lost’ ideals and traditions—‘nationalism’, humanism, vernacular language, and the recovery and preservation of song culture, as exemplified in James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Song () and Ramsay’s own The Tea-Table Miscellany ().³ Between and , Ramsay produced his edition of the poem, Christ’s Kirk on the Grene, a vernacular carnivalesque celebration of public disorder which in its opening stanza alludes to an anonymous fifteenth-century Scots poem. The cultural shape and pattern of the late Middle Ages which early eighteenth-century Scottish ‘custodians’ such as Ramsay promulgate for a new readership encompasses a demotic ‘folk’ vision of anti-authoritarianism sanctioned by that ultimate embodiment of authority, a king himself. In the variable attribution of Christ’s Kirk to two Stuart kings, James I and James V, Ramsay’s edition signalled Jacobite allegiance, and had followed in the wake of another Jacobite medievalist production, the edition of Douglas’s Eneados in , produced by Thomas Ruddiman. The latter also printed Ramsay’s collection, The Evergreen (), which included poems by William Dunbar (The Golden Targe, The Dregy, The Flyting, albeit in slightly modernized Scots orthography, for Ramsay was not strictly an antiquarian;
¹ See Thomas Crawford, ‘The Medievalism of Allan Ramsay’, Scottish Studies, (): –. ² Steve Newman, ‘The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Modern Language Quarterly, / (Fall ): –. ³ Cf. Leith Davis, ‘Imagining the Miscellaneous Nation: James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems’, Eighteenth-Century Life, / (): –.
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rather, the medieval ‘past’ was a sign of literary continuity with the present, and of renewed vernacular, and political, energy).⁴ Ramsay’s friend, and a contributor to his Tea-Table Miscellany, William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (?–), published a translation in of the fifteenth-century Scots poetic epic, The Wallace, ascribed to ‘Blind Hary’. For much of the eighteenth century, this Jacobite-medievalist conjunction persisted,⁵ being found in the use of Scots generally and in specifics such as the use of the Christ’s Kirk stanza for ‘modern’ poetry by Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. Elsewhere the medieval world was put to slight use, for instance, by James Thomson in his Seasons (–), where both Columba and William Wallace make understated appearances, though largely pressed into service against, respectively, the despotism of Rome and the supposed creeping despotism of early Georgian England. By Burns’s time, however, something slightly different is occurring. In , when provided patronage by the Dumfriesshire Riddell family in their home at Friar’s Carse, Burns begins imaginatively to deploy medievalism. We see this in his constructing of a poetic persona, ‘the Beadsman’, in his ‘Written In Friar’s Carse hermitage on the bank of the Nith—June—’, a remarkable turn in the work of a presbyterian poet. Likewise inspired by a newly expansive Enlightenment historiography were Walter Scott’s long narrative poems such as Marmion (), about the Battle of Flodden in , and The Lady of the Lake (), set in the time of James V and providing inter alia an important moment in nineteenth-century Mariology in its lyric of ‘Ave Maria’, so famously set to music by Schubert in . Scott’s predilection for medievalist fantasy is well-known, his baronial pile at Abbotsford often seen as his enactment of that fantasy, stoked by his archival, bibliophilic, and material fascination for the Middle Ages (including the world of the border ballads). But Scott’s role as editor of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (–) was highly significant in bringing together medieval and folk material in a way that anticipates the later careers of Gregor and Lang, and his particular obsession with Scotland’s thirteenth-century fairy communicant and poet, Thomas the Rhymer, produced an important symbolic conflation between medieval and Romantic literary identities, epitomized by his edition of the medieval romance of Sir Tristrem.⁶ In his novels of the Middle Ages too (Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Talisman, The Betrothed, Count Robert), Scott demonstrates his affinity for European neo-medieval romanticism but also begins to allow sympathy to a greater or lesser degree for an indigenous or vernacular medieval world; for example, in his portrait of the early modern but significantly Catholic monarch, Mary, Queen of Scots, in The Abbot (). Scott’s early Gothicism too, nurtured by his immersion in German ⁴ Cf. Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Dunbar and his Readers: From Allan Ramsay to Richard Burton’, Studies in Scottish Literature, – (): –. Cf. also Newman, ‘Scots Songs’. Interestingly, Ramsay’s work was republished in the latter half of the nineteenth century. ⁵ Cf. Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). ⁶ Cf. Sarah Dunnigan, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of Scott, Scotland, and the Grimms’, in Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew (eds), Scotland and the Nineteenth Century World (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, ).
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culture, might be read as symbiotic with the turn against French culture, with its iconoclastic revolution, during the s. Scott’s advancement of an old, lost world of medieval chivalry takes place against the background of the French Revolution’s shattering of the Ancien Régime. And Scott himself belonged to an extensive network of other antiquaries, historians, and collectors — Henry William Weber (–), Henry Ellis (–), for example, who each had a distinctive but interrelated set of interests in the recovery and restoration of ‘ancient’ texts—pointing to a collective preoccupation with the medieval past and, in particular, with the reception and editing of medieval romances. Scottish writers and historians such as Robert Jamieson (–) and John Leyden (–) were also fascinated by the German and Scandinavian medieval literary heritage, those romance and ballad texts which shared some commonality with Scottish tradition, such as Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (). Scott’s supposedly backward-looking medievalism was cited for being party to the rise of the Oxford Movement, an idea that gained stature after John Henry Newman celebrated Mass at Abbotsford in and again in . Newman was a friend of James Robert Hope Scott who, on his marriage to Scott’s grand-daughter, Charlotte, had inherited Abbotsford. However, it was John Crichton-Stuart, rd Marquis of Bute (–), received into the Catholic Church in whose powerful wealth drove the restoration of institutional Catholicism in much grander style than might otherwise have been the case in the late Victorian period, as well as the trend towards Gothic architecture and the medieval imagination more generally. The eponymous character of Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair (), the fabulously wealthy aristocrat with a Frankish name, is a reimagined Bute, who despite the powerfully romantic attractions of the medieval world in the s and the medieval/renaissance glories of Rome which he visits, steps back from the brink of conversion. At the same time, Lothair also turns away from his dour, Calvinist-tinged Scottish background, finding a happy medium in the Church of England. Disraeli’s novel is at once a slightly despairing plea that Reformation Britain might not be undone and a large admission that the old medieval, Catholic world had returned not simply as fictional romance but at the heart of the life of the British establishment. Bute’s own antiquarian endeavours played their part alongside the likes of the editions of the Scottish Text Society (see below) in opening up a lost medieval world, such as the body of Celtic Latin monastic hymns and the rich history of Scotland’s ancient ecclesiastical capital, St Andrews, work which he published in the s and s.⁷ No nineteenth-century Scottish novelist after Scott, however, showed a similar appetite for imaginative depictions of medieval Scotland, England, or Europe. Rare exceptions include Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow () dealing with the Wars of the Roses, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company (), portraying
⁷ See John, rd Marquess of Bute, Essays on Home Subjects (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, ). Cf. his edition, Altus of St Columba (); he also delivered a lecture on William Wallace at Paisley in .
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the years – during the Hundred Years War. These novels showed that for the nineteenth century, unlike the one that followed, ancient English as much as Scottish history was attractive to the Scottish literary eye. Likewise, Thomas Carlyle’s hymning of Samson of Tottington, the twelfth century Abbot of Bury, St Edmunds, as an exemplary leader in Past and Present () shows a positive interest in the preReformation period in England that he nowhere demonstrates towards the land of his birth. Nineteenth-century Scottish historical fiction writers seemingly prefer to engage with the subjects of the Reformation, the Covenanting period, and the Jacobite and Hanoverian conflicts. Douglas Gifford suggests that this turning away from medievalism in nineteenth-century Scottish historical fiction illustrates a marked divergence from its English counterpart, and that this may be attributed to the effect of the Disruption which arguably resurrects a more immediate or recent history of Scotland’s religious and civil divisions (in other words, mid–late seventeenthcentury conflict and eighteenth-century rebellion). In similar respects, too, Scottish poetry in the Victorian period largely dispensed with the medievalism so prominent in both thematic and formal terms in Scott and James Hogg. Arguably, the most formidable work demonstrating medieval influence by a Scottish Victorian poet is James (B. V.) Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (–), steeped in its author’s reading of Dante’s Purgatory. The work of Robert Buchanan (–) is infused with a Gothic, neo-Catholic eroticism which recalls the earlier Romantic neo-medieval ballad imitations of Hogg and Leyden. As well as imitations of medieval chivalric and Scandinavian epic, his work also transmutes aspects of Scots ballad tradition, seen especially in the thematic recurrence of the motif of the changeling, second sight, and child morbidity. Elsewhere, however, those emblems of Scottish medieval resistance, freedom, and nationalism—William Wallace and Robert the Bruce—imaginatively return. In a sense, they had never entirely disappeared from poetic incarnation, appearing in Wordsworth and Southey as well as Burns, Joanna Baillie, and Alexander Pennecuik. This is arguably a consequence of the fact that two epic poems, John Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Hary’s Wallace, were among the most frequent medieval Scottish reprintings of the eighteenth century (often published alongside each other).⁸ It is not difficult to see why these martial, heroic epics appealed both to a burgeoning antiquarian and popular readership in the period. To post-Union cultural sensibilities, they embody the poetic vision of an independent sovereign nation whose individual heroes (albeit in very different ways, which is why the repeated conflation of both texts is interesting) marshal their warrior strengths, redoubtable armies, and political nous against English oppressors. Ostensibly, both texts are romances but of a peculiar kind: their teleology works towards the liberation of the nation, its own transformed identity, rather than that of an individual knightly protagonist; if political ‘fredome’ is their primary goal, then other facets of high
⁸ It was Pinkerton’s edition of which Scott was rather disdainful in a letter (the only extant one) to Jacob Grimm.
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medieval romance are jettisoned in its pursuit—for example, amour courtois and the veneration of women.⁹ This has an effect on their Victorian poetic incarnations. In ‘A Song of Scottish Heroes’ (), John Stuart Blackie (–) invokes them amongst those ‘heroes who bled for the old Scottish cause’, though the poem’s nostalgic romance of nationalistic masculinity is an historically eclectic mix, blending John Knox, the Covenanters, and Burns in heroic resistance to ‘the Southron’.¹⁰ Blackie’s Scottish medieval martyrology is echoed by other British poets. Menella Bute Smedley (–) imagines an oddly serene ‘sacrifice’ for her hero in ‘The Lay of Sir William Wallace’ (), and in her poem on Bruce seems to pay homage to Barbour’s epic in portraying at length James Douglas’s ill-fated journey to the Holy Land with the reliquary of Bruce’s heart. Smedley commends the chivalric ethos embodied in Douglas’s act of heroic fidelity by blending a tender homosociality with celebration of Scottish martial masculinity.¹¹ In some respects, this ‘resurrection’ of Bruce and Wallace is predictable, and continues a tradition of Romantic eulogy (Smedley’s ‘lay’ of Wallace ends in Melrose, sanctified as the final location of Bruce’s heart and of Scott’s memory too). Perhaps more surprising is the imaginative return or rehabilitation of James I, the first Stuart king. In her ‘Lay of King James I in his Captivity’ (), Smedley ventriloquizes the erotic and philosophical dilemma of the love poem famously ascribed to him, The Kingis Quair, itself full of echoes and allusions to European and English traditions of allegorical love poetry: Known but dimly from afar, Seen but through a dungeon-grate, Still thine eye hath been my star,— Still thy smile shall be my fate, Throned upon that brow serene, Strength, hope, purity, are seen. (ll. –)
Smedley’s interest in James and his poem may have been stimulated by the poem’s considerable reprintings in the early nineteenth century. The Quair also provided inspiration for the murals created by the painter and poet, William Bell Scott (–), for Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, who also turned to Border history and tradition for the paintings he produced for Wallington Hall in Northumberland. The Quair has its own Pre-Raphaelite associations, not just in the artistic style and signature of Scott’s work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had apparently watched Scott working on the Penkill murals,¹² also wrote a Jamesian-inspired poem, ‘The King’s Tragedy’, completed in , which narrates the king’s plight through the narrative voice of
⁹ Cf. Sergi Mainer, The Scottish Romance Tradition c.-c. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ). ¹⁰ From Lyrical Poems (), ll. , . ¹¹ From Lays and Ballads of Ancient History (). ¹² Dwight and Helen Culler, ‘The Sources of “The King’s Tragedy” ’, Studies in Philology, (): –, .
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Catherine Douglas, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. As in Smedley’s homage, the Quair—which Rossetti called a ‘lovely poem’¹³—is deliberately echoed: And he kissed her hand and took his harp, And the music sweetly rang; And when the song burst forth, it seemed ’Twas the nightingale that sang. ‘Worship, ye lovers, on this May: Of bliss your kalends are begun: Sing with us, Away, Winter, away! Come, Summer, the sweet season and sun! Awake for shame,—your heaven is won,— And amorously your heads lift all: Thank Love, that you to his grace doth call!’ (ll. –)
One of Rossetti’s sources appears to have been The Life and Death of King James the First of Scotland, printed in by the Maitland Club, a copy of which he owned; whilst the legend of Catherine was itself based on Hector Boece’s The History and Chronicles of Scotland (), reprinted in . The Rossetti-Quair association offers a small but significant example of a creative response to a larger phenomenon which is the reprinting and editing of medieval Scottish texts. The scholarly recovery of medieval Scottish literature is a vital aspect of Victorian medievalism in Scotland, establishing detailed philological and editorial standards to which modern medieval and early modern Scottish scholarship is still indebted. This can be seen in a series of publications throughout the century, culminating in the work of the Scottish Text Society.¹⁴ Walter Scott’s antiquarianism not only had consequences for Romantic aesthetics but also resulted in the founding of scholarly societies such as the Bannatyne Club (modelled on the Roxburghe Club) which he founded in and which ran until . This was named after the Bannatyne manuscript, the most important collection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scots poetry, so-called on account of its chief compiler and transcriber, George Bannatyne, an Edinburgh merchant whose extraordinary manuscript points to the creative and intellectual networks of the courtly, civic, and mercantile classes in early modern Scotland.¹⁵ The Bannatyne manuscript was a resource which had been used by Ramsay for his anthology The Evergreen but was fully published by the Bannatyne Club
¹³ Culler and Culler, ‘Sources’, . ¹⁴ Cf. Padmini Ray Murray, ‘Antiquarianism’, in Bill Bell (ed.), The History of the Book in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –. ¹⁵ Cf. Theo van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Interaction between Literature and History in Queen Mary’s Edinburgh: The Bannatyne Manuscript and its Prosopographical Context’, in A. A. Macdonald et al., (eds), The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan (Leiden: Brill, ), –.
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between and , which produced volumes.¹⁶ Also involved in the founding of the club was David Laing (–), librarian of the Signet Library from and one of the most eminent collators and collectors of medieval and Renaissance Scottish culture and literature. Laing’s manuscript collections were bequeathed to the University of Edinburgh in . His two volumes of William Dunbar’s poetry (), his edition of Henryson (), and of Andrew Wyntoun’s Cronykil of Scotland (–) comprise some of the major work of the Bannatyne Club which also included a reprinting of the Charteris edition of Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. A third major player from the Bannatyne Club was Cosmo Innes (–), a voracious inquirer into burgh and ecclesiastical records of the Scottish medieval period and who exerted a formative influence in making inquiry into pre- Scottish history an academic discipline.¹⁷ These Victorian clubs, driven by the obsessive collecting endeavours of writers and historians such as Scott and Laing, were therefore the chief means by which the literary culture of medieval Scotland found material and textual re-embodiment. Alongside the Edinburgh-based Bannatyne Club, Glasgow had the Maitland Club founded in and which ran until , named in allusion to the Lothians poet and lawyer, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (–) and again dedicated to the publishing of early Scottish texts which were eclectic and diverse (including one of the few early Scottish romance texts, Clariodus; Pitcairne’s Ancient Criminal Trials; Marian history as well as seventeenth-century interest too, as in Napier’s book on Montrose and printings of Drummond and Urquhart). In , the Scottish Text Society (STS) was founded, and in its first series, in –, produced sixty-five volumes of medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation texts.¹⁸ Here for the first time for modern Scotland were proper editions of Barbour’s Bruce, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, saints’ lives, fifteenth-century alliterative verse, and a wide panoply of other Middle Scots writing became newly available. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there had arguably been a sea-change in Scotland’s attitude to its medieval (Catholic) heritage. In a larger perspective, two converging influences might be seen as leading to the founding of the STS: first of all a new emphasis abroad in Europe on ‘folklore’, and secondly the long nineteenthcentury movement from the Gothic to medievalism going back at least as far as the taste-changing interventions by Walter Scott and Blackwood’s Magazine. In the case of the former impetuses, one of the founding figures of the society was Walter Gregor (–), whose interests were powerfully formed by his involvement in the Folklore Society established in London in , as well as his interest in the Early English Text Society which had been established in . To some extent, one might argue that the previous ideological, cultural nationalist, and confessional associations of medieval
¹⁶ Cf. Elizabeth Elliott, ‘Ransacking Old Banny: The Bannatyne Manuscript, the Bannatyne Club, and the Making of Edinburgh Communities’, Edinburgh Review, (): –. ¹⁷ Richard A. Marsden, Cosmo Innes and the Defence of Scotland’s Past c.– (Farnham: Ashgate, ). ¹⁸ See Alexander Law, The Scottish Text Society – (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, ).
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Scottish literature had been largely shed by the s so that collecting old Scots texts was a ‘harmless’, antiquarian pastime that could shed light on what from the perspective of the late Victorian mindset might appear to be the rich, ‘regional’ past of Scotland. The career of Andrew Lang (–) also shows something of this new lens through which the long Scottish past might be viewed in his pioneering status as a scholar. This reconfiguration, then, perhaps paves the way for the striking early twentiethcentury creative and critical receptivity towards medieval Scotland. Particularly vocal literary advocacy for medievalism can be seen in the poetic manifesto of Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid, –), ‘Back to Dunbar’, as well as in the work of Edwin Muir (–) who idealized the cultural and literary ‘golden age’ of the reign of James IV. MacDiarmid also appropriated the idea of the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, or being the site of a meeting of extremes, from G. Gregory Smith (–), a literary critic and historian, who derived this concept from his view of the medieval ‘outlook’, espoused in the most influential of all books of generalist, Scottish literary criticism, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (). This influential work was the culmination of Smith’s work in the Victorian and Edwardian period which capitalized on the solid foundations of the Scottish Text Society established in . Smith’s The Days of James IV – (London: David Nutt, ), part of a series of ‘Scottish History by Contemporary Writers’, was essentially a gathering of historical documents from the period, but he was clearly absorbed by the relationship which he drew between this (relatively short-lived) reign of political stability and what he describes as ‘the golden days of Scottish literature’. Ten years later, The Transition Period () would explore the broader literary culture of fifteenthcentury European literature but the ‘special excellence’ of Scottish as opposed to English literature in this period was signalled, and presents a different, more nuanced version of the ‘Scottish Chaucerian’ label or category by which late medieval Scots literature was usually defined as ‘palely imitative’. The emphasis on technique and form is emphasized again; he sees Dunbar rather than Douglas as the locus of an emergent sensibility (which he describes as a proto-Renaissance individuality and humanity); and he returns to identifying the continuities between the medieval and eighteenthcentury periods in Scottish literature as part of his important shaping of a critical and cultural vernacular narrative. Smith’s Specimens of Middle Scots (), in particular, brought the voice of a powerful critic as well as editor to bear on those Scottish writers in the early twentieth century who would become the most nationalist. This is a work which capitalized on the long, late Victorian immersion by scholars in medieval texts as its editor sought both to draw comparison and mark differences with Middle English. Among other judgements, Smith established the high cultural and artistic import of medieval Scottish literature: ‘Middle Scots was, more exclusively than any companion phase in the languages of north-west Europe, the special affair of literary habit, as distinguished from spoken dialect’.¹⁹ Whilst Smith was exact in his tracings of the
¹⁹ Smith, Specimens of Middle Scots (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, ), p. xi.
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etymological and linguistic roots and origins of Lowland Scots, and its partial derivation from northern English, he was fascinated by its status as a ‘national literary language’,²⁰ and the sense, evoked in the previous quotation, of its rhetorical capacities and sheer artfulness. This also involved a slight renegotiation or different awareness of the relationship between Scots and ‘Celtic’, in other words, Irish and Scots-Gaelic literary and linguistic cultures which he sees as having little influence on and exchange with Lowland culture. (Indeed, in the Transition Period, Smith draws attention to Dunbar’s parody of Highland cultures and so internal schisms and divisions between different medieval cultures in Scotland, thereby complicating the problem of ‘national unity’ or cohesiveness.) The idea of an historically traceable and distinct Scottish literary culture significantly emerges out of Victorian intellectual and antiquarian enterprises. It can be seen also in a variety of other publications from this period such as T. F. Henderson’s Scottish Vernacular Literature () and J. H. Millar’s A Literary History of Scotland (), and earlier D. Irving’s History of Scotish [sic] Poetry (); but the particular critical narrative shape which Smith gave to this body of recent medieval scholarship gave Scottish modernist writers a new touchstone of aesthetic and historical value. In the decades of the s and s, neo-medievalism flourished in other ways. The Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland which, as elsewhere, embodied a variety of artistic mediums and material cultures, melded a renewed fascination for the aesthetic power of medieval arts with the contemporary and fashionable inspirations of European Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Like the English Arts and Crafts movement driven by a political vision of the empowering inclusivity of the arts across society and culture, fin-de-siècle Scottish neo-medievalism has a social purpose. Shaped by a number of different artistic and political influences, one movement or phenomenon in which neo-medievalism plays a significant role is the Celtic Revival, or ‘The Celtic Renascence’. This threads back to Romantic and early nineteenth-century neomedievalism in its identification between cultural, ideological, and national identities and the renewing sources of medieval literature and art. One of the most concrete expressions of the movement is the journal called The Evergreen. Relatively short-lived, its four issues printed in – ably fulfilled its remit as ‘a northern seasonal’. Echoing the politically and socially informed artistic practice of William Morris and others, it was also underpinned by the aims of social and practical renewal associated with one of its founders, Patrick Geddes (–). An ecologist, polymath, and social visionary, Geddes helped to ensure that the journal’s contents consistently reflected the holistic interrelationship between the arts and sciences which he saw as inseparable from broader processes of civic and political renewal. The first spring issue, for example, contains essays by William MacDonald, J. Arthur Thomson, and Geddes which articulate their utopian vision of an allencompassing regeneration which begins with the restoration and transformation
²⁰ Smith, Specimens, .
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of material environments: ‘[W]ith this . . . there arises a corresponding renewal of economic and moral function which shall yet be Industry, the renewal and development of Life as well—what shall yet be Education. And then even painter and poet find, through what seemed to them an irrelevant science, new space for beauty and new stimulus of song’.²¹ For Geddes, the emblem of civic, and therefore cultural, renewal had specific embodiment in the ‘current resuscitation of old Edinburgh’,²² and the precedent of Ramsay’s Evergreen. The debt was not only titular; Geddes wanted ‘our new Evergreen’ to reincarnate what he perceived as a radical early eighteenth-century fusion of ‘local tradition and living nature’, and so add ‘a fresh page to that widely reviving Literature of Locality’,²³ resulting in a process of ‘radical decentralization, shifting focus away from London and toward the Celtic fringe’.²⁴ And in more literal, architectural terms, the building and extension of Ramsay Gardens in Edinburgh— accommodation for students, artists, and Geddes’s own family as well as the University School of Art—took shape around the home which once belonged to Allan Ramsay. The neo-medieval vein which runs through the reborn Evergreen and its ethically and socially regenerative framework is culturally eclectic. Its diverse medieval ‘Celticity’ is seen in the inclusion of ‘retellings’ of ‘Breton’ tradition by Edith Wingate Rinder (who was also William Sharp’s lover). Her prose fantasies, including ‘Amel and Penhor’ and ‘Telen Rumengol’, mark a larger and distinctive contribution by women artists to the journal, which included work by the Irish writers, Rosa Mulholland (–), Katherine Tynan (–), and Nora Hopper (–). It is early medieval English lyric tradition which appears in modernized versions (‘Old English Spring’; ‘Blow Northern Wind’ in the first issue) rather than Scots,²⁵ though one of the early visual illustrations, ‘Robene and Makyne’, by the Scottish-trained artist Charles Hodge Mackie is an unacknowledged reference to a pastoral lyric by Robert Henryson. Geddes’s spring issue manifesto only partly imagines a nascent Scottish ‘Renascence’ in the mythic terms of medieval Lowland Scotland—‘[t]he prophetic Rhymer listens from Elfland, Arthur sits in the Eildon Hills, Merlin but sleeps in his thorn’—yet the ‘Celticity’ of this vision draws most strongly from the Gaelic medieval culture of the western highlands and islands. For Geddes, the ‘revival of ancient Celtic design’, the ‘expression of youngest Scottish art’,²⁶ was core to his vision of an organic aesthetic and social renewal based in vernacular art. In the Evergreen’s interplay of word and image, interlacing knots and
²¹ The Evergreen. A Northern Seasonal (Spring ): . ²² The Evergreen, . ²³ The Evergreen, , . ²⁴ Julian Hanna, ‘Manifestos at Dawn: Nation, City and Self in Patrick Geddes and William Sharp’s Evergreen’, International Journal of Scottish Literature, (), http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue/hanna. htm, accessed Nov. . ²⁵ One exception is the poem ‘Ane Playnt of Luve’ by the sculptor and poet, James Pittendrigh Macgillivray (–) (he also contributes to the second issue), which strongly recalls the love lyrics of the mid-sixteenth-century Scottish Bannatyne manuscript (issued in a facsimile edition in by the Hunterian Club). ²⁶ Evergreen, .
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spirals ‘after the manner of Celtic ornament’, principally by female artists (one of whom, Helen Hay, taught at Geddes’s Edinburgh Arts and Crafts School, founded in ), are significant embellishments and central figures of decoration and ornamentation. For Geddes and others, Celtic design combined beauty and the practicability of traditional and new crafts, and so became central to the revival of fin-de-siècle Scottish art, design, and education; interestingly, Charles Rennie Macintosh’s first professional commission ‘was the design of a Celtic cross to commemorate Alexander McCall, Chief Constable of the City of Glasgow Police. With a bronze inset portrait by Pittendrigh Macgillivray, it was inspired by medieval west Highland work.’²⁷ What Geddes described as ‘the vastest and most elaborate Celtic illumination in the modern world’²⁸ were painted in - the Common Room of the University Hall at Ramsay Garden by Helen Hay, Helen Baxter, and John Duncan. Duncan, a key visual artist of late nineteenth-century Scottish neo-medievalism and close collaborator with Geddes, paints episodes from Celtic and British Arthurian myth (e.g. ‘The Taking of Excalibur’, c.). (Indeed, Scottish Arthurianism in this period is largely visual rather than literary.²⁹) Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, European Symbolism, and Italian Renaissance art, Duncan also painted Joan of Arc—‘Jehanne d’Arc et sa Garde Ecossaise’, c.—at the suggestion of Geddes and Andrew Lang, a member of the FrancoScottish Society, founded in Edinburgh in ,³⁰ and who would later write a study of la pucelle. Interestingly, this points to the broader feminized neo-medieval Catholic strain which runs through the Evergreen (and through the poetry of Robert Buchanan). Allusions to the Cúchulainn and Fenian cycles in the Evergreen bind early Irish tradition to Scottish, reflecting the coalescence of revivalist energies in Ireland and Scotland in the s. William Sharp (–), another of the journal’s contributors, keenly attributed the burgeoning ‘Scoto-Celtic’ movement of the early s to the Ossianic heritage and ‘immediately’ to ‘the rising of the sap in the Irish nation’.³¹ A co-collaborator with Geddes on the Evergreen project (informing him in that he sought ‘to centralise in Edinburgh all the Celtic work now being done by Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers’),³² and correspondent of Yeats in the s, Sharp controversially
²⁷ Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, ), . ²⁸ Qtd Cumming, Hand, . ²⁹ The Scottish painter, William Dyce (–), was commissioned to decorate the Queen’s Robing Room in (and therefore at an early stage in the nineteenth-century rehabilitation of Arthurian legend) with illustrations from Malory’s legends, but their apparent eroticism was problematic; as a compromise, Dyce opted for emblematic illustrations of chivalric virtues but died before completion of all seven. See Christine Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), ch. . ³⁰ John Kemplay, The Paintings of John Duncan: A Scottish Symbolist (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, ), . ³¹ Elizabeth Sharp, William Sharp/Fiona MacLeod: A Memoir (London: William Heinemann, ), . ³² Qtd in Hanna, ‘Manifestos’.
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and prolifically wrote under the pseudonym ‘Fiona MacLeod’. The alterity of this writerly alter ego—feminine, Gaelic, Catholic—is mirrored in the division between the Sharp/‘MacLeod’ inclusions in the Evergreen itself: a ‘legendary romance’ concerning Brigid, ‘Mary of the Gael’, is MacLeod’s, echoing the feminized, mystical discourse, a blend of paganism and neo-Catholicism, which characterizes his other published work as MacLeod (e.g. his prose fantasy, Pharais, published in , the year in which he met Geddes). Sharp is naturally a controversial figure, and his is a particularly egregious kind of ‘Celticity’, a ‘racial revival’, in Geddes’s words,³³ conjured out of mythic essentialism (Hugh MacDiarmid erased Sharp/MacLeod from his otherwise fulsome praise for Geddes’s and the movement’s cultural cosmopolitanism). But Sharp’s work should be seen as a significant creative and imaginative counterpart to the renewed collection and gathering of medieval Highland culture by Alexander Carmichael for the Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations Collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the last Century (), an idealized, aestheticized pan-Celtic vision which provokes interesting questions about sexual and cultural identities in fin-de siècle Scotland. Another pivotal exponent of the s Scottish neo-medieval aesthetic is the Irishborn artist Phoebe Anna Traquair.³⁴ A prolific painter and practitioner (working with a variety of different materials, including embroidery, enamelling, and other material crafts such as mural decoration), her work in this decade, like Geddes’s, gathers together different influences, past and present, most notably with William Morris (who came to Edinburgh in for a meeting of the National Association of the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry),³⁵ John Ruskin, and the PreRaphaelite circle. She illustrates Morris’s ‘Defence of Guinevere’ and ‘The Song of Solomon’ (), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (–). Like Duncan’s, Traquair’s work absorbs the influence of Italian medieval art and manuscript illumination: this can be seen in the illustrations she produced for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’; and for an edition of Dante’s La Vita Nuova (–). Traquair’s art also presents an embodied visual legacy and heritage which, redolent of Geddes’s vision, has civic value and import, as seen in the murals which she created in Edinburgh between and for the chapels of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children; the Song School of St Mary’s Cathedral; the Catholic Apostolic Church in East London Street; the glowing angelic figures which serenely evoke medieval Italian illuminations have the poignant purpose of ‘comforting bereaved families’³⁶ whilst fulfilling Traquair’s belief in the spiritual potential of the arts. Traquair is the first professional woman artist in Scotland and her vision is singular but she is also representative of a community of female artists who, in the s in Edinburgh and Glasgow, carved out a new creative and social space, enabling them to combine literary and visual arts through the crafts of book binding, design, and ³³ Cumming, Hand, . ³⁴ Cf. Elizabeth Cumming, Phoebe Anna Traquair (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, ). ³⁵ Cumming, Hand, . ³⁶ Cumming, Hand, –.
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illustration, many of which were medievalist in subject and form, as in the work of Annie S. MacDonald (–). Morris’s poetry was also illustrated by other artists as well as Traquair, such as Jessie M. King (–) (who also illustrated BurneJones and whose work is frequently fantastical, medievalist, and fairytale-esque), and by Margaret and Frances MacDonald (‘The Defence of Guenevere and other poems’, ). The work of the MacDonald sisters in particular exemplifies how the Celtic art revival permeated beyond Geddes and the Edinburgh circle, reflected in Frances’s early work where her ‘angular, humorous, and attenuated’ female figures resemble ‘details on the pages of illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells’.³⁷
S Burkhauer, Jude, Glasgow Girls. Women in Art and Design – (Edinburgh: Canongate, ). Bawcutt, Priscilla, ‘Dunbar and his Readers: From Allan Ramsay to Richard Burton’, Studies in Scottish Literature, – (): –. Cumming, Elizabeth, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, ). Davis, Leith, ‘Imagining the Miscellaneous Nation: James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems’, Eighteenth-Century Life, / (): –. Dunnigan, Sarah, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of Scott, Scotland, and the Grimms’, in Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew (eds), Scotland and the Nineteenth-Century World (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, ), –. Hanna, Julian, ‘Manifestos at Dawn: Nation, City and Self in Patrick Geddes and William Sharp’s Evergreen’, International Journal of Scottish Literature, () [web]. Kemplay, John, The Paintings of John Duncan: A Scottish Symbolist (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, ). Mainer, Sergi, The Scottish Romance Tradition c.–c. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ). Marsden, Richard A., Cosmo Innes and the Defence of Scotland’s Past c.– (Farnham: Ashgate, ). Newman, Steve, ‘The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Modern Language Quarterly, / (Fall ): –. Pittock, Murray G. H., Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Poulson, Christine, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ).
³⁷ Jude Burkhauer, Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design – (Edinburgh: Canongate, ), .
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A defined as ‘the most curious book in the world’,¹ Boccaccio’s Decameron first appeared in Victorian England in the Italian edition of published by William Pickering with an introduction by the famous Italian poet Ugo Foscolo.² Despite its ‘gross and disgusting licentiousness’,³ the Decameron appears to be a treasure of good tales written by a ‘most divine writer’⁴ who was able to arouse the desire to write in the Victorian reader, the pleasure of production reserved only for eminent readers and potential writers. It is not by chance that many eminent Victorians such as Thomas Moore, John Cam Hobhouse, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Swinburne were deeply affected by the stylistic and conceptual innovations of the Decameron, in which there is no Aristotelian distinction between honest love, love for delight, and love for utility. Far from considering the Decameron as family reading, to be read aloud in the family circle in the presence of wives and daughters and for the instruction of children in their
¹ D. G. Rossetti, qtd in H. G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, ), . ² The poet Ugo Foscolo (–) was an exile in England from onwards. ³ Wright, Boccaccio in England, . ⁴ Wright, Boccaccio in England, .
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moral duties, eminent Victorian authors took pleasure in rewriting Boccaccio’s medieval tales of love. A ‘fusion of horizons’,⁵ medieval and Victorian, is activated in particular by Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne experiencing an elitist pleasure derived from reading the Decameron which appears to be a ‘writerly text’⁶ or ‘text of bliss’, i.e. a text of sublimity which not only stimulates the reader’s creativity but imposes the desire to rewrite, imitate, and emulate the original text. From this perspective, the Decameron is a text of pleasure in the Barthesian sense, not only because it deals with the sensualistic and epicurean vision of the ars amandi but also because it stimulates the reader’s creativity, imposing a state of desire on the reader, discomforting and unsettling the consistency of his tastes, values, and memories. Boccaccio’s medievalism as envisioned in the Decameron establishes this kind of relationship with its cultured readers who are infused with boundless pleasure and with the impelling desire to write and rewrite this epic collection of medieval tales. It is my objective here to investigate Rossetti’s, Morris’s, and Swinburne’s indebtedness to Boccaccio through George Lakoff ’s notion of conceptual metaphors as expressed in the Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought,⁷ as well as through the logic of ‘remediation’⁸ as theorized by Bolter and Grusin, which provide an illuminating framework for discussing how Rossetti’s, Morris’s, and Swinburne’s mind styles were deeply affected by Boccaccio’s creatural medievalism. Combining high and low social classes, knights at arms and ‘knights of the florin’,⁹ Boccaccio’s Decameron represents a new kind of medievalism, what Auerbach would call ‘creatural’¹⁰ medievalism based on materiality and carnality, on ‘the vitalisticdynamic triumph of the physical body and its functions’.¹¹ This kind of innovation, along with Boccaccio’s conceptual ambiguity and stylistic experimentalism, ravished the minds of such medievalist writers as Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Five centuries after its publication, the Decameron appealed to the Victorian readership and in particular those eminent readers dreaming of what Umberto Eco calls ‘the Middle Ages of Decadentism’,¹² for its fleshly pleasures taken to the extremes of human experience.
⁵ Hans Robert Jauss, Wege des Verstehens (Munich: Fink, ), . ⁶ Roland Barthes coined the term ‘writerly text’ as opposed to the ‘readerly text’, the classic text which can be read but not written. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, ), . ⁷ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (eds), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, ). ⁸ Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ). ⁹ Viktoria Kirkham, ‘The Tale of Guglielmo Borsiere’, in Elissa B. Weaver (ed.), The Decameron First Day in Perspective: Volume One of the Lecturae Boccaccii (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . ¹⁰ Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . ¹¹ Auerbach, Mimesis, . ¹² Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), .
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In line with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and John William Waterhouse who painted pictures illustrating the tales of the Decameron, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne operated their own remediations of Boccaccio’s questions of love. In their cross-cultural translations of the Decameron, Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne seem to appropriate and refashion Boccaccio’s medievalism in unique works of art.
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.................................................................................................................................. Like his father Gabriele, author of Sullo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la Riforma (), his brother William Michael who translated Boccaccio’s Filostrato, and his sister Christina, author of ‘Dante, An English Classic’ (), an essay investigating Boccaccio’s poetry, Rossetti translated Boccaccio’s rhymes in The Early Italian Poets (), and created such double works of art as Bocca Baciata (), and A Vision of Fiammetta (). Defined by Ford Madox Ford as ‘purely pagan who satisfied his desires as they came’,¹³ Rossetti fell under the spell of Boccaccio’s medievalism in . After visiting the Louvre in , , and later in , he changed his philosophy, leaving ‘Stoicism for Epicureanism’.¹⁴ What stirred Rossetti’s interest was the Italian sensual hedonism as embodied by Fiammetta, Boccaccio’s beloved and muse, who took up multiple roles appearing as the queen of the court of love in the Filocolo (–), as a femme fatale in La Teseide (–), and as one of the seven nymphs of the Ameto (–). Rossetti seems to be haunted by the figure of Fiammetta, endowing his mistress Fanny Cornforth with the same shape-shifting ability as Boccaccio’s muse, since she is depicted as a fallen woman in Found (), as a femme fatale in The Blue Bower (), and as a seducing goddess in Venus Verticordia (–). In Sentences and Notes (), Rossetti offers an ante-litteram definition of remediation, whose blending mode is described in beautiful and sensual terms: ‘Picture and poem bare the same relation to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection.’¹⁵ Behind these words, there lies Rossetti’s vision of artistic remediation, according to which perfection may only be achieved in mediating between opposite poles, between picture and poem, between man and woman who are incorporated and represented in another medium,
¹³ Ford Madox Ford, Rossetti: A Critical Essay on his Art (London and New York: Duckworth & Co., ), . ¹⁴ W. H. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (New York: AMS Press, ), . ¹⁵ D. G. Rossetti, ‘Sentences and Notes’ (), in The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis & White, ), .
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in what Maryan Wynn Ainsworth calls the ‘double work of art’.¹⁶ Found (), Golden Water (), Bocca Baciata (), Proserpine (), Astarte Syriaca (–), and Fiammetta (), are only a few examples of remediation, i.e. a combination of poetry and painting in a unique work, a kind of inter-semiotic translation able to promote the conceptual aspects of the image and the iconographical powers of the text. The leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aimed at recovering the primitive art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—illustrating, borrowing, repurposing the stories from medieval literary and historical sources (including the dolce stil novo of the early Italian poets, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and Boccaccio’s Decameron). By taking property from one medium and reusing it in another remediation, Rossetti, author of about thirty Sonnets for Picture,¹⁷ started a conscious interplay between media which can be appreciated only if the reader or viewer happens to know both versions and can compare them. If the implicit and sometimes explicit goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media, then Rossetti’s triple works of art and the immaterialized Perlascura project¹⁸ of publishing a dozen autotypes of Jane Morris in a book (Twelve Coins for One Queen) appear as innovative forms of remediation. Rossetti, ‘the most innovative artist of the period, the inventor of a style’,¹⁹ reformed his double works of art into a new medium: the triple work of art, ‘fulfilling the unkept promise of the older medium’.²⁰ Following the rhetoric of remediation which claims that a new medium makes a good thing in terms of immediacy and hypermediacy even better than its predecessor, the female subjects of Bocca Baciata (), and A Vision of Fiammetta () oscillate between inter-textual media, and their subjectivities are determined by those oscillations. In Bocca Baciata, the female subject is assured of existence by the fact that she can enter into immediate relationships with the various media that surround her: the inscription (from Boccaccio’s Decameron, Day , Story ) which is written on the back of the picture (‘bocca baciata non perde ventura’) and Rossetti’s ekphrastic poem, ‘The Song of the Bower’, (‘Large lovely arms and a neck like a tower’,
¹⁶ Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art (Hartford, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, ), . ¹⁷ In the fourth issue of The Germ, Rossetti published Sonnets for Picture, a collection of seven sonnets on famous paintings in the Louvre and other museums on the Continent. In this collection, Rossetti includes paraphrases and comments on his own paintings as well as his highly subjective reinterpretations of paintings by such artists as Hans Mammeling, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, and Ingres. ¹⁸ In August Rossetti decided to publish some dozen autotypes of Jane Morris in a book. The idea emerged from Rossetti’s involvement with Frederick Shields, a partner in the English Picture Publishing Company, which set about to publish photographic reproductions of the work of contemporary and earlier British artists. It is not possible to ascertain which images of Mrs Morris Rossetti may have thought to include in the Perlascura series, but the first to be published was the drawing of Mrs Morris figured as La Donna Della Finestra. ¹⁹ Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), . ²⁰ Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, .
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ll. –).²¹ The different titles chosen for the picture (Bocca Baciata) and the poem (‘The Song of the Bower’ recalling the Bible’s Song of Songs) operate a blending between the profane and the sacred that becomes such a crucial part of Rossetti’s works from forward. For the sensuous use of colour, and the Venetian aspect of the female figure, the painting, which applies Rossetti’s principle of ‘the mere gratification of the eye’,²² appears to be a most innovative triple work of art. In the process of transmutation of media and cultural contamination, Rossetti’s Fiammetta is also reminiscent of Alatiel, the daughter of the Sultan of Babylon featuring in tale II., who is kissed a thousand times by her lovers. This cross-cultural reference may be seen as an allusion to Fanny Cornforth, a prostitute by profession, who used to meet Rossetti and George Boyce in the notorious Argyll Rooms in Piccadilly. The obscenity of the proverb ‘A mouth that is kissed loses no flavor, but, like the moon, is renewed’ is echoed in the poem ‘The Song of the Bower’ (‘My mouth to thy mouth as the world melts away’, l. )²³ and visually rendered in the red lips, flowing red hair, ruddy cheeks, and exposed neck. All the decorative details appearing in the painting—the coral necklace, the white rose, the marigold, and the ripe apple—are, according to Ruskin, ‘wonderful in their realism; . . . awful in their coarseness’.²⁴ Those signs of female sexuality, conveying what Hunt calls ‘animal passion . . . a gross sensuality of a revolting kind’,²⁵ are exquisitely Rossettian in their symbolic ambivalence and contradictory message. For example, the marigold is a visual reminder of Aphrodite and her pains of love but at the same time, as D. M. R. Bentley underlines, is also ‘a flower whose name is a compound of (the Virgin) Mary and gold’.²⁶ Likewise, the ripe apple on the shelf may well be associated with both the biblical story of the Fall and the mythological judgment of Paris. This logic of distortion calls for representations of the real that in fact multiply the signs of mediation and in this way try to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience. Rossetti’s female subject is defined as a succession of relationships with various media (verbal and visual) and cultures as envisioned in Boccaccio’s Decameron and The Arabian Nights, whose reference is evident in the Oriental exoticism of Alatiel’s story. Thus, Rossetti’s female figure oscillates between media (moves from the visual to the verbal and vice versa), between models of sexualized women (Fanny, Fiammetta,
²¹ D. G. Rossetti, ‘The Song of the Bower’, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh (London: Dent, ), . ²² William Holman Hunt, letter to Thomas Combe, Feb. , cited in Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (–): A Catalogue Raisonné, vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), i. . ²³ D. G. Rossetti, ‘The Song of the Bower’, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Marsh, . ²⁴ John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Sir Edward Tyas Cook, and Alexander Dundas Ogilvy Wedderburn (London: G. Allen ), xxxvi. . ²⁵ W. H. Hunt, letter to Thomas Combe, Feb. , cited in Surtees, Paintings and Drawings, . ²⁶ D. M. R. Bentley, ‘Love for Love: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata and “The Song of the Bower” ’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, (Fall ): .
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and Alatiel), and her subjectivity is determined by those oscillations. As J. B. Bullen remarks, ‘the figure in Rossetti’s Bocca baciata is not Alatiel, and none of the incidents in her life is illustrated in the painting, yet between them Boccaccio’s text and Rossetti’s image both speak of the infinitely self-regenerative aspects of human desire’.²⁷ From this perspective, Rossetti’s sexualized woman is endowed with the ability to occupy points of view and by the fact that she can enter into immediate relationships with the various media or media forms that surround her. Another peculiar form of remediation is represented by A Vision of Fiammetta () whose frame is inscribed with three texts: () the sonnet by Boccaccio ‘Sovra li fior vermigli e’ capei d’oro’, imbued with Petrarchan sensuality (‘Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi’²⁸) and the dolce stil novo lexicon (‘nugoletta’, and ‘angioletta’) that inspired Rossetti’s painting; () Rossetti’s translation of that sonnet ‘On His Last Sight of Fiammetta’, unable to maintain Boccaccio’s epiphora of the word ‘oro’ (‘Lucida più che mai argento o oro / E qual candida perla in anel d’oro’, ll. –; ‘D’oriental zafir vestita e d’oro’, l. );²⁹ () Rossetti’s own original (ekphrastic) sonnet composition that explicitly doubles the picture. Almost a quadruple work of art, A Vision of Fiammetta may be seen as the reforming of the triple work of art, the triple work of art as the reforming of the double work of art, and the double work of art as the reforming of the work of art. In each case that inadequacy is represented as a lack of immediacy, thus, A Vision of Fiammetta, the quintessential representation of media reform is more immediate than common painting, offering new opportunities for hypermediacy. Inspired by Boccaccio’s sonnet, A Vision of Fiammetta appears to be a heterogeneous mixture of signs, albeit unable to render the semantic fullness of Boccaccio’s text. Only the first quatrains are visually transposed in the symbolic chromatism of Fiammetta’s portrait, which lacks the eroticism of previous representations. It is highly significant that the model for this painting is Marie Spartali Stillman, one of Rossetti’s favourite muses for her Greek beauty and subtle charms which were, according to Rossetti, difficult to recreate: ‘I find her head about the most difficult I ever drew. It depends not nearly so much on real form as on subtle charm of life which one cannot re-create.’³⁰ Far from the overt sexuality of Fanny Cornforth, Marie Spartali Stillman was characterized by elegant features and the mystery of shadowed eyes that gave life to a new and spiritual version of Boccaccio’s muse. For his last sight of Fiammetta, Rossetti prefers to reproduce the intellectual and ethereal figure of Marie Spartali Stillman in order to acquire the truthfulness of life in death and maintain the continuity between depicted and real space.
²⁷ J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . ²⁸ Francesco Petrarca, Le rime (Florence: Leonardo Ciardetti, ), . ²⁹ Giovanni Boccaccio, Rime (Livorno: Tommaso Masi, ), . ³⁰ Andrea Rose, Pre-Raphaelite Portraits (Yeovil: Oxford Illustrated Press, ), .
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Almost like a Dantesque vision, the figure is split between the chromatic dualism holy gold/deadly red as clearly expressed in the very first line of the sonnet: ‘Sovra li fior vermigli e’ i capei d’oro’ (‘Round her red garland and her golden hair’). As Julian Treuhers aptly summarizes ‘Fiammetta wears a flame-colored dress in allusion to her name . . . . [she] stands entwined in the branches of an apple tree surrounded by emblems of the departing soul a shower of falling red and white blossom, a blood-red bird (the messenger of death), butterflies (symbols of soul), and an angel in the aureole around her head.’³¹ Despite such a profusion of glowing colours symbolizing the brief moment between life and death, the painting under-translates the verbal message of the source text, overlooking the suffering of the poet who ‘with these strings of sorrows and with life’s most weary load / [He] dwell[s]’ (ll. –).³² Rossetti’s incapacity to translate Boccaccio’s turmoil in the pictorial medium confirms what Dinda Gorlée calls ‘informational loss which is highest in intersemiotic translation, since the semiosis shows maximum degeneracy’.³³ The mysterious message of the painting may be explained by the enigmatic personality of the poet-painter whose aesthetic credo is defined by Jerome McGann as ‘an art of pastiche and ritual form’.³⁴ This eclectic procedure is also employed by Boccaccio who experimented with the tension between lyric and narrative components, facilitating what N. J. Perella calls ‘the confluence of various literary currents: the aulic, stil novo tradition, the popular poetry of the time, the burlesque trend . . . and his own tendency toward realism’.³⁵ From this view, Boccaccio and Rossetti were nearly kindred spirits for their innovative artistic veins, and the overall dominance of sensual pleasures in their works. As a mediator of cultures, Rossetti accomplishes the task of remediating older media into new ones, into double, triple, and quadruple works of art, thereby establishing his own space of cultural meaning.
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.................................................................................................................................. Writing to Georgiana Burne-Jones from Verona in , Morris reveals his fascination with Italy characterized by ‘magnificent and wonderful towns’³⁶ that capture his ³¹ J. Treuherz, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in R. Dorment, and T. Barringer (eds), Pre-Raphaelites and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, ), . ³² D. G. Rossetti, ‘Of his Last Sight of Fiammetta’, in The Early Italian Poets (London: Smith: Elder & Co., ), . ³³ D. I. Gorlée, Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, ), p. . ³⁴ McGann, Rossetti and the Game, . ³⁵ N. J. Perella, ‘Boccaccio’s Lyric Poetry’, Italica, / (Mar. ): . ³⁶ William Morris, letter to Mrs Burne-Jones, May , in The Collected Letters of William Morris: –, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), i. .
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imagination and draw him into a dream in which he feels a strange exaltation of spirit: ‘I am really much excited at all I have seen and am seeing, though sometimes it all tumbles into a dream and I do not know where I am.’³⁷ What stirred Morris’s interest was not the noble Italian art of the earlier Renaissance with which he had but little sympathy, but the natural beauty of Italy with its sublime Alps and Apennines and wonderful lakes like Lake Garda, that gave him such a shock of delight that he ‘really thought [he] had fallen asleep and was dreaming of some strange sea where everything had grown together in perfect accord with wild stories’.³⁸ For the Victorian dreamer of dreams whose ‘work was the embodiment of dreams’,³⁹ those ‘bits of the great world’,⁴⁰ as Morris calls them, gave him the impression that Italy was a ‘country like a garden’,⁴¹ an earthly paradise whose dream-like landscapes are fictionally reproduced in The House of the Wolfings (), The Roots of the Mountains (), and The Wood Beyond the World (). But even before visiting Northern Italy (Florence, Oneglia, Genoa, Venice, Padua, and Verona) first with Burne-Jones in , and later on with his wife in , Morris was deeply affected by the Italian medievalism of Dante and Boccaccio and in particular by the mixture of the sublime with the low. This interest in Italian medievalism is expressed in Morris’s review of Rossetti’s The Early Italian Poets (), in which he reveals his appreciation of the figural realism of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the fleshly medievalism of Boccaccio’s lyrics: ‘The book is complete and satisfactory from end to end . . . it gives to the very symbols the personal life and variety of mankind . . . . It deals wonderfully with all real things that can have poetic life given by passion.’⁴² Also very relevant in this sense is the copy of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus, purchased by Morris in , containing the biographies of more than notable women, and full of woodcut illustrations printed at Ulm in . That was a very fine clean crisp copy bound in sixteenth-century vellum stained yellow which was highly recommended by Burne-Jones: ‘Buy the book by all means’,⁴³ was Burne-Jones’s advice, ‘how much better worth it is than any number of books of less value’.⁴⁴ For Morris, the Middle Ages were a conceptual metaphor, a correspondence between medieval concepts across conceptual domains, which projects an alternative world of beauty wherein the material and the spiritual are successfully integrated. A paramount example of this cognitive process is expressed in The Earthly Paradise,⁴⁵ ³⁷ Morris, letter to Mrs Burne-Jones. ³⁸ J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (New York: Longmans, ), i. . ³⁹ William Morris, letter to Cornell Price, , in The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends, ed. Philip Henderson (London: Longmans, ), . ⁴⁰ Mackail, Life of Morris, . ⁴¹ William Morris, letter to Jane Morris, Apr. , in Collected Letters: –, . ⁴² William Morris, ‘Review of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems’, in Art and Architecture: Essays – (Holicong: Wildside Press, ), . ⁴³ Mackail, Life of Morris, . ⁴⁴ Mackail, Life of Morris, . ⁴⁵ Unless otherwise stated, Morris’s poems are taken from The Earthly Paradise, ed. Florence Boos (New York: Routledge, ).
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Morris’s collection of twenty-four narrative poems into four volumes and more than , lines which are held together by a framework, after the fashion of Boccaccio’s Decameron and which employs occasionally the rhyme scheme of Dante’s Divine Comedy, later fully adopted in The Defence of Guenevere. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, which according to Florence Boos ‘aligns itself with a secular tradition of narrative and romance, . . , reworking earlier disclaimers, such as Boccaccio’s in the Proem to the Decameron’,⁴⁶ projects the medieval metaphors ‘life is a quest’ for an earthly paradise and ‘love is a garden’ of endless bliss which needs cultivation to produce its richest fruits. These conceptual metaphors included in such Morrisian lines as ‘we [wanderers] had reached the gates of Paradise / And endless bliss, at what unmeasured price / Man sets his life’ (‘Prologue. The Wanderers’, ll. –) and ‘nearby on the grass did stand / Seven white-skinned damsels, wrought so fair / . . . That his heart sickened, and quickfire, / Within his parched throat seemed to burn.’ (‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, ll. –, –) are mapped on the target domain of medieval abstractions (such as quest, romance, and dream) which could be easily ascribed to both Dante and Boccaccio. If the former set of verses recalls Dante’s metaphorical projection of heavenly visions, the latter lines reflect Boccaccio’s cognitive structures of pleasure in the medieval garden of love as envisioned in Filocolo (), Teseida (), Ameto (), Amorosa visione (–), Ninfale fiesolano (), and in the Decameron⁴⁷ () whose gardens are used as framing devices. Apart from the titular similarity between The Divine Comedy⁴⁸ and The Earthly Paradise, activated by Dante’s use of indirect antonyms ‘disdegnoso gusto’, Inferno XIII, ; ‘levate dal viso i duri veli’, Inferno XXXIII, ; ‘arsura fresca’, Inferno, XIV, ; ‘vergine madre’, Paradiso, XXXIII, , and Morris’s predilection for direct oxymorons,⁴⁹ there is no shadow of Dante in the largest and most important of all Morris’s poetical works as clearly expressed by the poet himself: ‘Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, / I cannot ease the burden of your fears’ (‘Prologue. The Wanderers’, ll. –). From this perspective, the process by which we cognitively reconstruct the meanings of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise by making conceptual projections from the formal shape of the text’s linguistic characteristics seems to be mapped out in close proximity
⁴⁶ Florence Boos, The Design of William Morris’ The Earthly Paradise (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, ), . ⁴⁷ According to Naomi Miller, ‘the gardens of the Decameron . . . are expressions of goodness, hope and joy—the earthly paradise’: ‘Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains’, in Elisabeth B. MacDougall (ed.), Medieval Gardens (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, ), . ⁴⁸ For a masterly reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy see Robert Hollander, Dante: A Life in Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). ⁴⁹ See Jerome McGann, ‘ “A Thing to Mind”: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris’, HLQ (): –.
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to Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione,⁵⁰ an allegorical poem in which, as John Dixon Hunt maintains, ‘the garden of love topos is interwoven with the equally topical and complex theme of the journey/pilgrimage to narrate the palyngenesis and restoration provoked by love’.⁵¹ Both The Earthly Paradise and the Amorosa visione represent the quest for immortal love through allegorical figures, a popular medieval convention which reveals the balance between actions in the world and cultural patterns loaded with expectations in our minds. The subject of Morris’s twenty-four tales and Boccaccio’s fifty cantos is erotic love⁵² achieved or failed, triumphant over or destroyed by fate, and woman is the pure anima, the preserver of man’s morality whose cathartic arena is a medieval garden of love. Boccaccio’s Fiammetta,⁵³ ‘donna gentile e valorosa, / di biltà fonte, com di luce sole’ (Amorosa visione, L, –), is the virtuous woman prototype on whom we would map numerous examples of Morris’s women (Atalanta, the swan-maiden, Psyche, Morgan Le Fay, and so forth). Onto the Boccaccian source domain of individual member or prototypical member we can map classes of persons in the Morrisian target domain. However, when we map from a category’s prototype (Fiammetta) to other members of the class (Morris’s women), two more domains are introduced. That is, mapping from a person to a virtue, and from a prototype to a class member, suggests that four domains are involved. This is when blending theory⁵⁴ can be useful, as an integration in the mental network within whose structure a separate, blended mental space is projected from input mental spaces. If the Amorosa visione is the source story, then the twenty-four tales comprising The Earthly Paradise represent the target stories whose female allegories bring to life the metaphorical source domain through parabolic mappings. In Boccaccio’s parable of love, the poet after entering ‘un nobile castello . . . e alquanto tenebroso’ (Amorosa visione, I, , –) whose allegorical murals depict the triumph of Love (as exemplified by the figures of Jason and Medea, Hercules and Dianira, Paris and Helen, Aeneas and Dido, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Iseult, and so forth), is led into a beautiful garden ‘fiorito e bello com di primavera’ (Amorosa visione, XXXVII, ) where he encounters his beloved Fiammetta. In this medieval hortus conclusus, Boccaccio ⁵⁰ For a bilingual edition see Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione, tr. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, ). ⁵¹ John Dixon Hunt, The Italian Garden: Art, Design and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), . ⁵² See Tobias Foster Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). ⁵³ For an article on the influence of Fiammetta on D. G. Rossetti’s literary imagination see Eleonora Sasso, ‘ “Bocca baciata non perde ventura”: D. G. Rossetti e la traduzione intersemiotica delle Rime di Boccaccio’, in Gianni Oliva (ed.), I Rossetti e l’Italia (Lanciano: Carabba, ), –. ⁵⁴ See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, ‘Conceptual Integration Networks’, Cognitive Science, / (): –, as well as Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper (eds), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, ).
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projects his prototypical love story in which love is closely associated with other concepts, such as desire, respect, and devotion. Though moved by intense desire on seeing Fiammetta’s ‘bocca bella e piccoletta / vermiglietta rosa e fresca’ (Amorosa visione, XV, –), the poet is urged to postpone erotic fulfilment by a reflective Fiammetta, whose virtuous attitude is reminiscent of Morris’s virginal Atalanta, innocent Psyche, benevolent Morgan Le Fay, and the reluctant and apprehensive swanmaiden of ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’. Fiammetta and Morris’s seductive women share the same conceptual structure of love which consists of a series of tests (ordeals) aimed at proving their lovers’ ardour and commitment. In terms of love tests postponing pleasure, ‘Atalanta’s Race’ is undoubtedly the Morrisian tale which best exemplifies the ritualistically codified practices of fin amour. Atalanta, daughter of King Schoeneus, not willing to lose her virgin’s state, made it a law to all suitors that they should run a race with her in the public place, and if they failed to overcome her they should die unrevenged. The Arcadian hunter Melanion, struck by Atalanta’s beauty (‘Too fair for one to look on’, ‘Atalanta’s Race’, l. ) as exemplified by her Fiammetta-like ‘shining head’ (l. ) and shining eyes (‘shine eyes glisten’, l. ), prepares himself spiritually for the race for sixty-two days. At last he is able to outrun Atalanta in the foot-race with the help of Venus, thereby gaining the virgin who is now wrapped in a sweet embrace, ‘in new unbroken bliss’ (l. ). More similar to Fiammetta’s main stages of amorous relationship is the tale ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, in which the most beautiful swan-maiden of a magical realm appears to John, a shepherd tortured by ‘longings sweet / Piercing his heart’ (ll. –). In constant fluctuation between denial and affection, the maiden, who recalls Fiammetta for the ‘rosy flame of inner love / glowing through her’ (ll. –), tells John that he must make a painful choice to gain her love: he must renounce the mortal world to enter her own fairy land. Likewise, albeit from a different perspective, Psyche, ‘the soul of innocent desire’ (‘Cupid and Psyche’, l. ), the embodiment of Victorian passive virtues, earns the love of Cupid, a male of divine station, after accomplishing the tasks given her by Venus, as a prerequisite to recovering Eros. In the fair gardens of the palace in Cyprus, ‘Hedged roundabout with woodbine and red rose’ (l. ), Cupid finds Psyche sleeping within a white-thorn shade; he is so ravished by the maiden’s beauty that he wonders if his heart ‘would e’er forget / The perfect arm that o’er her body lay’ (l. ). The last tale worth mentioning is ‘Ogier the Dane’, featuring the sensuous witch Morgan Le Fay who gives the knight Ogier the ring of perpetual youth in order to let him enjoy the bliss of immortal love, but only at the cost of great personal sacrifices, of what Boos calls ‘great fragmentation of the heroic identity’.⁵⁵ In the garden scenario of Avalon, Ogier is mesmerized by Morgan’s golden tresses tumbled luxuriously down her shoulders (‘did he behold / The wandering tresses of her locks of gold / Upon her shoulders’, ll. –). Though driven by a Boccacesque impetus, a desire for physical
⁵⁵ Boos, Design of Morris’ Paradise, .
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contact, ‘For in his heart still burned unquenched the fire’ (l. ), Ogier is able to restrain his ardour and is gently led hand-in-hand by the fairy Morgan through a dreamy green place. With Boccaccio and Fiammetta in the source domain, and Atalanta and Melanion, John and the swan-maiden, Cupid and Psyche, Ogier and Morgan Le Fay in the target domains of courtly love, frames such as devotion, fidelity, and respect provide a generic structure for this conceptual mapping. This generic background informs the construction of both Boccaccio’s story and Morris’s stories, and it is also vital for conceptualizing the allegory of love. Indeed, we can see the blend of the general with the specific coming into action when we see Atalanta, the swan-maiden, Psyche, and Morgan Le Fay as members of the virtuous women category within which Fiammetta would be a prototype. This is a recurring theme in the Amorosa visione but this particular sequence can be listed as follows: . Boccaccio is seduced by Fiammetta in a garden.⁵⁶ . Boccaccio’s desire is calmed down by Fiammetta’s rationale.⁵⁷ . Boccaccio has become an accomplished practitioner of courtly love.⁵⁸ The three narrative strands listed offer enough data for a reader to see how the Boccacian tale relates to the Morrisian narrative poems: . Women seduce men in medieval gardens. . Women are erotic dominants (dominatrixes). . Women are custodians of virtues. In terms of cognitive linguistics and notion of motion events, Boccaccio, like Melanion, John, Cupid, and Ogier is a figure whose path is contrasted with the ground (i.e. garden), which functions as a reference point or landmark for sexual orientation. Analysing the motion events of Boccaccian and Morrisian lovers in relation to gardens, we can determine their mapping scopes whose source concept or goal-oriented movement is metonymically related to a wider target concept or intended action. To put it into more simplified terms, the motion event that involves the motion towards a garden is related to the sole purpose of erotic love. The following occurrences of the
⁵⁶ ‘Dintorno a sé tutto il prato allegrava, / come se stata fosse primavera, . . . ] A rimirar contento questa onesta / donna mi stava, che in atti dicesse / parea parole assai piene di festa’ (Amorosa visione, XV, –, –). ⁵⁷ ‘mille fiate credo la basciai / pria si svegliasse la bella angioletta. / Ma subito stordita a dir:—Che fai?—/ cominciò isvegliata,—deh, non fare! / se quella donna vien, come farai?—’ (Amorosa visione, XLIX, –). ⁵⁸ ‘Dunque, donna gentile e valorosa, / di biltà fonte, com di luce sole, / rimirate alla fiamma che nascosa / dimora nel mio petto, ed ispegnete / quella con l’esser verso me piatosa’ (Amorosa visione, L, –).
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word ‘garden’ well exemplify the similarities between Boccaccio’s gardens of love, and Morris’s paradisal gardens: Entered a garden fit for utmost bliss (‘Ogier the Dane’, l. ) Upon the garden where he walked of yore, / Holding the hands that he should see no more (ll. –) Went through the gardens with one dame alone (‘Ogier the Dane’, l. .) she swept o’er me when I was laid / upon the grass beside her feet (‘Ogier the Dane’, ll. .–) About the garden to and fro, / Plucking the flowers from bough and stalk (‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, ll. –) A meadow meet to make him glad / Full oft because of its sweet grass, (ll. –) Where Psyche dwelt, and through the gardens fair / Passed seeking her (‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, ll. –) Then in the gardens heard the new birds sing (l. ) Amidst the sweetest garden was she laid (‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, l. .) Ere midst the gardens they once more were met (‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, l. .)
The verbs of motion reach, enter, go through, pass through, meet midst in relation to gardens as exemplified by such Boccaccian lines as ‘presi il sentiero per lo bel giardino’ (Amorosa visione, XXXIX, ), ‘com’io mirando andava quel giardino’ (Amorosa visione, XXVI, ), ‘Entriam,—diss’io—in questo orto vicino’ (Amorosa visione, XXXVII, ) are always related to goal oriented movements which project the conceptual metaphor ‘love is a garden’. In Morris’s ‘Ogier the Dane’, ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, and ‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, the courtly garden becomes laden with allegorical symbolism both sacred and profane and is the locus of the lady’s domain and the epitome of courtly love. The large collection of directional satellites (‘upon’, ‘through’, ‘’Twixt’, ‘to and fro’, ‘Amidst’, ‘o’er’, and so forth) encode a target path which leads always to the centre of the garden, a temenos-centre dimension in terms of spiritual renewal, a taboo area where the dreamer is able to meet his beloved and thereby activate what Morris calls ‘the romance of the garden’.⁵⁹ In the lecture titled ‘Making the Best of it’, Morris underlines the importance of gardens defined as ‘positive necessities if the citizens are to live reasonable and healthy lives in body and mind’.⁶⁰ From this perspective, gardens are to Morris cross-cultural spaces in which he can blend the medieval romance of the garden with its ecological and harmonizing function.
⁵⁹ William Morris, ‘Making the Best of it’, in Christine Poulson (ed.), William Morris on Art and Design (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, ), . ⁶⁰ Morris, ‘Making the Best’, .
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Deeply obsessed with the quest for earthly paradises, for locational conceptual metaphors reflecting the totality of human experience, Morris seems to operate a conceptual blending, a conceptual integration between Dante’s figural realism and Boccaccio’s creatural medievalism. The joint influence of those input domains may clarify the complex and multi-faceted representations of the Middle Ages in Morris’s writings in which the dream of Italy is now embodied by a Fiammetta prototype to whose loyal and everlasting service Boccaccio religiously dedicates his heart and now by an angelic Beatrice ‘la dolce vista / de la mia vita, e d’ogni ben radice’ (Canzone, XVIII, –) who guides Dante to heavenly salvation.
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.................................................................................................................................. Commonly known as a ‘master of literary imitation’,⁶¹ Swinburne appears to be a writer of pleasure in the Barthesian sense, whose texts disrupt the stereotype according to a logic of distorting repetition, a principle of absolute instability which respects nothing. This mode of rewriting leads Swinburne to produce an erotic repetition of the Decameron, which is also aimed at increasing the fantastic and melancholy tones of Boccaccio’s tales. Author of Poems and Ballads (), a revolutionary collection of poems in both form and content, inaugurating a new aesthetic sensibility in poetry, Swinburne shares with Boccaccio a propensity for the fleshly and erotic representation of love. Deeply inspired by Rossetti’s and Morris’s configurations of medievalism, as exemplified by such Arthurian writings as Rosamund (), Queen Yseult (), Tristam of Lyonesse (), and The Tale of Balen (), Swinburne, like Boccaccio, tends to dramatize the sensuous voices of women who, according to Antony H. Harrison, ‘appear as the object of a man’s consuming passion [and] dominate Swinburne’s work’.⁶² According to Herbert G. Wright, many eminent Victorians experienced the pleasure of rewriting Boccaccio’s medieval tales. See, for example, Thomas Moore who, in his Spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron (), rewrites the story of Lydia and Pyrrhus (Day , Tale ) about deception and abuse of men. Likewise, John Cam Hobhouse took pleasure in reproducing in the poem ‘The Miracle’⁶³ the satirical tone of the tale of Masetto (Day , Tale ), a mockery of the religious quest for Eden, in which all of the convent nuns have sexual relations with Masetto. It is also worth mentioning Tennyson’s dramatic adaptation of Boccaccio’s ninth story for the fifth day, The Falcon, a love story between Federigo degli Alberighi and Monna Giovanna, widely recognized ⁶¹ D. G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ), . ⁶² A. H. Harrison, Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press, ), . ⁶³ A poem published in Imitations and Translations from the Ancient and Modern Classics.
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as one of his most successful ventures in the theatre. And last but not least, George Eliot and Swinburne offer their own personal versions of the seventh tale of the tenth day of the Decameron, in which Lisa, an apothecary’s daughter, having seen king Peter of Aragon at a tournament, becomes deeply enamoured of him. Dedicated to all unhappy ladies, who ‘keep the flames of love hidden within their delicate breasts’⁶⁴ (‘Esse dentro a’ dilicati petti . . . tengono l’amorose fiamme nascose’⁶⁵), the Decameron is seen as a love manual in disguise, a playful text to be read for pleasure, as a literary text should be. For this reason, Swinburne, disciple of de Sade, who considered pleasure and pain as intrinsic to sexual and poetic experience, decides to translate those tales particularly appealing to his aesthetic sensibility, that is to say the sixth story for the fourth day about the miseries of unfortunate love, as well as the seventh tale of the tenth day, staging an impossible and destructive love between Lisa Puccini, a beautiful maiden of lowly birth, and king Peter of Aragon. As early as Swinburne starts writing a cycle of twenty prose tales, to be called the Triameron, a series of interlocked tales modelled on Boccaccio’s Decameron. But unfortunately, only ‘Dead Love’ (), the tale of the series in the Italian style, was published in the popular magazine Once a Week, while such other prose stories as ‘The Marriage of Monna Lisa’ and ‘The Portrait’ were privately printed in . The genesis of Swinburne’s Triameron is clearly reported by Edmund Gosse who underlines Swinburne’s rivalrous rewriting of Boccaccio’s Decameron: Swinburne . . . was occupied with a scheme which had begun to take shape at Oxford and which was not finally abandoned till much later. This was the composition of a cycle of nineteen or twenty prose stories to be issued as the Triameron, in rivalry with Boccaccio . . . The only one of these tales which Swinburne printed was Dead Love, which he sent to Once a Week in , and published in book form in . But several others were written . . . and three still exist.⁶⁶
All written in , the short stories ‘Dead Love’, ‘The Marriage of Monna Lisa’ (of which only seven copies were printed), and ‘The Portrait’ are connected in the Triameron in the manner of Boccaccio’s Decameron. As Watts-Dunton explains, ‘The Portrait’ appears to be the most ‘powerful and striking . . . the cleverest in prose that we hitherto know Swinburne to have written. It exemplifies his marvellous gift for catching the note of a remote and exotic literature.’⁶⁷ Unlike ‘Dead Love’, a horrific and uncanny tale imbued with Gothic nuances recalling the necro-fetishism of Lisabetta da Messina (‘she wrapped [Lorenzo’s head]
⁶⁴ Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, tr. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: Norton & Compton, ), . ⁶⁵ Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, ), i. . ⁶⁶ Sir Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vol. xix of The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vols, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (London: Heinemann, –), . ⁶⁷ T. J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Heinemann, ), .
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in a lovely piece of cloth and put it inside a beautiful large pot of the sort people use for growing marjoram and basil’⁶⁸) and of Andreuola da Ponte Carraro (‘a piece of silk cloth . . . that she spread . . . out on the ground and laid Gabriotto’s body on it’⁶⁹), ‘The Portrait’ is criticized by Watts-Dunton for its stylistic resemblance to Agnolo Firenzuola’s novels: but I think that Swinburne’s model was of later date, and more refined. I think that he was consciously imitating the ‘little novels’ of Agnolo Firenzuola, which were excessively popular in the sixteenth century. There is a considerable resemblance in style. The teller of The Portrait is evidently a priest, a dissolute abbot, who shows his calling by an ironical attack on art and beauty and nakedness, an attack so obviously ironical that it makes the soldiers and the ladies’ laugh more exceedingly than before.—[From the Prefatory Note.]⁷⁰
As suggested by Watts-Dunton in The Writings in Prose and Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne, the first prose tales of the Triameron⁷¹ were inspired by the Novellino, the most successful and original example of vernacular prose literature of the Duecento, while such a tale as ‘Dead Love’ employs an extra-diegetic narrator in the manner of Matteo Bandello (c.–), a Dominican story-teller who was immensely admired during the Renaissance. Despite the widespread popularity among the Pre-Raphaelites of the ill-fated story featuring Lorenzo and Isabella in Boccaccio’s Decameron (IV, ), rendered visually in the paintings by John Everett Millais (Lorenzo and Isabella, ), William Holman Hunt (Isabella with the Pot of Basil, ), and John William Waterhouse (Isabella and the Pot of Basil, ), Swinburne is interested in the lesser known novella of Andreuola (IV, ), who secretly falls in love with Gabriotto, a man of low estate. Swinburne is drawn to the figure of Andreuola, young and beautiful and unmarried, a tragic lover in the city of Brescia whose harrowing story recalls the fatal destiny of Tristan and Iseult, Paolo and Francesca, Romeo and Juliet. Originally titled ‘The White Hind’, in order to render Boccaccio’s chromatic symbolism as embodied by a she-goat whiter than snow (‘una cavriuola . . . più che la neve bianca’⁷²) that Gabriotto dreams of meeting in a fair and pleasant wood, Swinburne’s poem was later revised as ‘The Two Dreams’⁷³ (). This latter is a poetical remediation of Boccaccio’s tale, repurposing the medieval tale and taking property from one medium (narrative) and reusing ⁶⁸ Boccaccio, The Decameron, . ⁶⁹ Boccaccio, The Decameron, . ⁷⁰ Wise, Bibliography of Swinburne, . ⁷¹ Here is the list of the tales in the order of appearance for the first and the second days of the Triameron: ‘The Two Kisses’, ‘Lescombat’, ‘The Portrait’, ‘Mistress Sanders’, ‘Dead Love’, ‘Accoranibuoni’, ‘Dream of a Murder’, ‘Sans Merci’, ‘A Man Loved by a Witch’, ‘A Chateaubrun of Rococo Period’, ‘A Story of Queen Fredegond’, ‘A Friend of Madame Dubarry’s’, ‘The Feast of Ladies’, ‘Bogey’, ‘A Lover of Brinvilliers’, ‘Romance’, ‘Case of René Aubryat’, and ‘Bianca Capello’. ⁷² Boccaccio, Decameron, i. . ⁷³ A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Two Dreams’, in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, i (London: Chatto & Windus, ). All quotations are taken from this edition.
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it in another remediation (poetical). Swinburne’s desire for Boccaccio’s medievalism leads to a process of appropriation by which his poetical medium appears to reshape, pervert, and distort Boccaccio’s narrative medium by accentuating the morbid aspects of Andreuola’s story. According to Swinburne’s perverted logic of remediation, the dream-frame narrative facilitates the distortion of images, which are eroticized through a sensuous use of chromatism (‘Their red mouths open till the rose-heart ached’, l. ), metonymic references (‘Thereat he kissed her hands and yellow head / And clipped her fair long body many times’, ll. –) and musical language (‘and sound of veins that beat / As a lute should play of its own heart’, ll. –). In Andreuola’s and Gabriotto’s dreams, Swinburne finds a place of Eros and Thanatos, of condensation and displacement, the ideal dimension for freeing the power of his imagination as well as his drive energies. Largely employed by Boccaccio as a premonitory and revealing means in the tales of Lorenzo and Isabella, Talano d’Imolese (IV, ) and Nastagio degli Onesti (V, ), the dream mode of ‘The Two Dreams’ allows Swinburne to eroticize and aggrandize the Gothic nuances of the original tale. A case in point is the garden where Andreuola and Gabriotto secretly meet, a locus amoenus which in Boccaccio’s description appears to be ‘one of the most accomplished forms of medieval gardens’.⁷⁴ In Swinburne’s remediating process, Boccaccio’s beautiful garden in the city of Brescia becomes a rose-garden in Florence ‘More fair than many’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ), as if to allude to a Dantesque hortus conclusus, where there is a blending of visual and audible codes (‘the green waxed audible’, l. ). The garden, aptly defined as an ‘imaginative container’⁷⁵ by Lakoff, is the location of Andreuola’s and Gabriotto’s prophetic dreams into which the sinful protagonists project their sense of guilt through animal figures. Having consummated their secret marriage, Andreuola and Gabriotto are haunted by such terrifying zoomorphic images as a dark and terrible thing issuing from Gabriotto’s body (‘una cosa . . . la forma della quale essa [Andreuola] non poteva conoscere’⁷⁶) and a coal-black greyhound, hungry and terrifying to look at (‘una veltra nera come carbone, affamata e spaventevole’⁷⁷). Almost as an exercise of replacement, Swinburne radically changes Boccaccio’s dark and terrible thing into ‘a live thing flaked with black / Specks of brute slime and lepercoloured scale, / A devil’s hide with foul flame-writhen grail’ (‘The Two Dreams’, ll. –). Likewise, the coal-black greyhound dreamt by Gabriotto is turned into a femme bestiale whose vampiresque wilderness (‘And her mouth caught like a snake’s mouth’, ‘The Two Dreams’, l. ) increases the uncanny atmospheres of Boccaccio’s death-in-the-garden story. From this perspective, the Gothic imagery envisioned by Swinburne appears to be more horrific and sensuous than Boccaccio’s dream symbols.
⁷⁴ T. Matteini, ‘Giardini scomparsi: Note per un itinerario toscano’, in Guido Ferrara, Giulio G. Rizzo, and Mariella Zoppi (eds), Paesaggio: Didattica, ricerche e progetti (–) (Florence: Florence University Press, ), . ⁷⁵ Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, . ⁷⁶ Boccaccio, Decameron, i. . ⁷⁷ Boccaccio, Decameron, i. .
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More similar to a ‘horror, breathing between life and death’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ), Swinburne’s remediation reshapes Boccaccio’s cavriuola, the animalesque double of Andreuola, into what Rebecca Stott calls ‘melodramatic shapes’,⁷⁸ i.e. ‘monsters, snakes, bats, vampires, dwarfs, hybrid beasts, devils, reflections, femmes fatales’.⁷⁹ Many others are the acts of replacement performed by Swinburne who consciously decides not to translate Boccaccio’s prefatory note about the truthfulness of dreams and to reduce the number and roles of characters (the figure of the Podestà is lacking and the narrative function of the ‘fante’ figure is minimized). All evidence suggests that Boccaccio’s text of pleasure is remediated into a text of bliss which perverts the stereotype. As Barthes maintains, the text of bliss is ‘absolutely intransitive, defined by extreme perversion, unpredictable, mobile, extreme, void’.⁸⁰ It is not by chance that Boccaccio’s simplicity of style is replaced by Swinburne’s abundant figurative language characterized, as Yisrael Levin suggests, by ‘the interplay between sensation, language and cognition in the act of seeing’.⁸¹ This is what happens in ‘The Two Dreams’ and in particular in Andreuola’s visual event according to which she envisions a black crawling thing with specks of ‘leper-coloured scale’ (l. ). Swinburne aggrandizes this horrific description through a crescendo of adjectives and uncanny colours creating the image of a devil bursting into flames producing unbearable and disgusting heat: ‘A devil’s hide with foul flame-writhen grail / Fashioned where hell’s heat festers loathsomest’ (‘The Two Dreams’, ll. –). Behind such a fantastic-marvellous remediation of Boccaccio’s medievalism, there lies what Todorov calls ‘the themes of the other’⁸² comprising all variations on the theme of sexuality, that is to say, the relation of man with his desire and his unconscious. This is clearly exemplified by Gabriotto’s dream, in Swinburne’s erotic version, projecting the theme of sexuality as embodied by the motif of the female vampire, a femme fatale who is connoted metonymically by her deadly kiss, as deadly as the kiss of a snake biting his prey and leaving on his flesh a ‘red mark’ (l. ) as a tangible sign of evil. Like Lucrezia Borgia whose mouth ‘makes beat . . . blood in feverish rhymes’ (‘A Ballad of Life’, l. ),⁸³ Anactoria who according to Swinburne ‘no mouth but some serpent’s found [her] sweet’ (‘Anactoria’, l. ),⁸⁴ and Fragoletta who has a serpent in her hair and whose mouth is ‘made of fire and wine’ (‘Fragoletta’, l. ),⁸⁵ Andreuola appears as a vampire seductress, the epitome of deadly beauty, combining Eros and Tanathos.
⁷⁸ Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), . ⁷⁹ Stott, Fabrication, . ⁸⁰ Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, ), . ⁸¹ Yisrael Levin (ed.), A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . ⁸² Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (New York: Cornell University Press, ), . ⁸³ A. C. Swinburne, ‘A Ballad of Life’, in Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁸⁴ Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁸⁵ Poems and Ballads, i. .
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From this perspective, Swinburne’s translation strategy is all the more evident. As a translator of Catullus, Sappho, and Villon, who is able to write in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, Swinburne applies the Italian proverb traduttore-traditore in ‘The Two Dreams’ remediating Boccaccio’s uncanny tale into a fantastic-marvellous poem. A paramount example of Swinburne’s betrayal of Boccaccio’s medieval text can be found in the decision of not to render the Boccaccian opposition white goat/black greyhound (cavriuola bianca/veltra nera), a symbolic chromatism which is lacking in Swinburne’s poem. As explained by Vittore Branca, author of Boccaccio medievale, black and white colours in Boccaccio’s Decameron ‘indicate women’s traits and sentimental status’,⁸⁶ but Swinburne prefers to celebrate the female nakedness of the maids bathing in ‘sweet fierce water’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ) reflecting the green and gold profusion of the surroundings. Commonly known as a sea worshipper (‘the sea my nursing-mother’, ‘A Ballad at Parting’, l. ;⁸⁷ ‘Mother and lover of men, the sea’, ‘The Triumph of Time’, l. ⁸⁸), to the point that Gaston Bachelard in his seminal study Water and Dreams⁸⁹ will name a complex after him ‘The Swinburne Complex’, i.e. the pleasure and pain deriving from the physical struggle against the aquatic element, Swinburne eroticizes the female body through the visual qualities of water. Like Venus who, on walking out to sea, turns the foam into fire in the sensual union of archetypal contraries (‘making the foam as fire whereon she trod, / And as the inner flower of fire was she’, ‘Laus Veneris’, ll. –),⁹⁰ and Queen Bersabe whose long and wet hair takes the form of a drawing net, decorating her body with a sensual tattoo (‘And her long hair withouten let / Spread sideways like a drawing net’, ll. –),⁹¹ the maids bathing themselves in Gabriotto’s erotic dream metamorphose into aquatic flowers floating on water. The flower motif also characterizes the burial of the dead Gabriotto whose body, resting on Andreuola’s cloth, was covered with roses: ‘She then closed the eyes and mouth, shedding the while many a tear, wove for him a wreath of roses, and strewed upon him all the roses that he and she had gathered.’⁹² The deadly romanticism of such a burial scene is preserved and accentuated in Swinburne’s translation which not only replaces the Boccaccian roses with the majestic red hues of leaves from ‘some withered red’ (‘The Two Dreams’, l. ) to ‘some / Fair and fresh-blooded’ (l. ), but it also emphasizes the melancholy tones of Bocaccio’s text through such symbolic flowers as the marigold and the sunflower. In Swinburne’s empire of signs, a spoiled marigold and a spent sunflower, originally lacking in Boccaccio’s medieval tale, increase the sense of beauty and sadness in death. ⁸⁶ Vittore Branca, Boccaccio medievale (Florence: Sansoni Editore, ), . ⁸⁷ A. C. Swinburne, ‘A Ballad at Parting’, in The Poems of Swinburne, vi. . ⁸⁸ A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Triumph of Time’, in Poems and Ballads, i (London: Chatto & Windus, ), . ⁸⁹ Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundations, ). ⁹⁰ A. C. Swinburne, ‘Laus Veneris’, in Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁹¹ A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Masque of Queen Bersabe’, in Poems and Ballads, i. . ⁹² Boccaccio, The Decameron, .
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According to the secret language of flowers,⁹³ the marigold sprang from the tears of Venus moaning her lover’s death, and the sunflower, despite its nutritive qualities and solar symbolism, may epitomize unfortunate love as in the case of Clytie, the nymph who was turned into a sunflower by her unhappy love for Apollo. Those fleurs du mal, flowers producing pain of love, are particularly appealing to Swinburne’s decadent aesthetics for their symbolic dualism. This is clearly expressed in a letter to William Bell Scott ( December ) in which he describes the marigold of Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata as ‘more stunning than can be decently expressed’.⁹⁴ Likewise, the sunflower acquires a dual dimension in ‘The Complaint of Lisa’ (), Swinburne’s rewriting of Boccaccio’s tale (Decameron, Day , Tale ), in which Lisa Puccini projects the conceptual metaphor ‘unhappy love is a sunflower’. Fatally fallen in love with king Peter, Lisa called Mico da Siena, ‘in those days quite a good rhymester’,⁹⁵ to compose a poem for the king. This melancholy canzonet about Lisa’s pain of love is supposed to be sung by Mico da Siena in Boccaccio’s tale, but Swinburne, whose strategy is always aimed at pushing feelings to the extreme, makes Lisa sing the poem. Boccaccio’s principle of tertium non datur does not hold in Swinburne’s system, and Lisa’s complaint focusing on the leitmotif of the sunflower appears to be even more heart wrenching. Once more Swinburne is confirmed as a master of literary misinterpretation since Mico da Siena’s poem is artfully perverted and distorted with the help of the image of the heliotropic flower, standing for both royal nobility and painful love. Like George Eliot, who radically changed Boccaccio’s tale into a long poem entitled ‘How Lisa Loved the King’ (), Swinburne sometimes under-translates sometimes over-translates the Decameron with the intent of reforming Boccaccio’s simplicity of expression with semantic ambivalence, overabundance of style, artificiality of images, and obscure melody. Under close analysis, Swinburne’s translation of Mico da Siena’s canzone does not respect the metrical rhythm of the source text whose alternate rhymes are replaced with double sestinas which Dante mentions in the De Vulgari as a new poetic experiment. By applying the retrogradatio cruciata organization to twelve line end-words (i.e. breath, her, way, death, sunflower, sun, day, bed, thee, dead, done, and me) in order to obtain a double sestina pattern, Swinburne aims at focusing attention on the metaphor of the sunflower. The end-words chosen by Swinburne create the semantic opposition life/death throughout the poem as exemplified by the following six rhyming pairs of end-words: breath/death, thee/me, sunflower/her, day/way, sun/ done, and bed/dead. Another act of betrayal which is worthwhile mentioning is Swinburne’s omission of the final meeting between Lisa and the king, a pivotal scene in order to understand the king’s generous nobility revealed in his intention to lavish precious gifts and domains ⁹³ See Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ). ⁹⁴ Cecil Y. Lang (ed.), The Swinburne Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, –), i. . ⁹⁵ Boccaccio, The Decameron, .
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upon Lisa’s poor husband. But such a diegetic loss is compensated with the obsessive repetition of the word ‘sunflower’ by Lisa who defines herself as ‘the least flower in [the king’s] flowery way’ (‘The Complaint of Lisa’, l. ), as well as ‘a worm in [her] lord’s kingly way’ (‘The Complaint of Lisa’, l. ). Lisa’s self-destructive monologue is based on the dynamics of the female gaze (‘since I beheld my sunflower’, l. ; ‘I may look up and see my sunflower’, l. ) since she is constantly looking at king Peter, a ‘lordly sunflower’, whose face is always turning towards the sun. Almost blindsighted by the ‘black sun’ of depression (‘while in the sun’s sight I make moan all day’, l. ), Lisa comes to the heliocentric truth about the kingly sunflower shining like a fire of unhappy love that ‘lights [her] pyre of death’ (l. ). This luminous imagery was probably inspired by the Arthurian solar myth as envisioned by authors such as Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, and Matthew Arnold, whose influence is attested to in the fifth stanza of ‘The Complaint of Lisa’ in which there is a reference to Launcelot and Guinevere, the damned lovers ‘lost in the underworld’ (l. ). Sharing with Boccaccio the awareness that the Middle Ages were a predominantly materialistic rather than spiritual period, Swinburne reproduces the danse macabre of the Middle Ages, the creatural realism emphasizing our bodily functions, our mortality, the inevitable disintegration of the human body and all those physical agonies of unhappy love. Swinburne, the poet advocating freedom in Songs before Sunrise (), a volume of poems dedicated to the cause of freedom and democracy and championing the Italian struggle for independence, appears to be the most original re-mediator of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the medieval human comedy which shocked middle-class Victorian readers, thereby activating a pleasure of reading, a desire to find one’s identity in absolute freedom. To conclude, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne are confirmed as exponents of what Robert Buchanan termed ‘the fleshly school of poetry’ for emphasizing the subversively erotic elements in their medieval recreations of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The lure of Boccaccio’s romance is anchored to the medieval notion of courtly love as embodied by Fiammetta, Andreuola, and Lisa, female representatives of the objectified women of the lyric tradition, differing from Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura for their corporeal, sexually charged, and uncanny traits. But more than this, Boccaccio’s Decameron, widely recognized as a true encyclopedia of early modern life and a summa of late medieval culture, appealed to Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne for its living dialogue between past and present.
S Boos, Florence, The Design of William Morris’ The Earthly Paradise (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, ). Boos, Florence (ed.), The Earthly Paradise (New York: Routledge, ). Bullen, J. B., The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
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Eco, Umberto, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ). Foster Gittes, Tobias, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). Harrison, A. H., Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press, ). Hollander, Robert, Dante: A Life in Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). McGann, Jerome, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Poulson, Christine (ed.), William Morris On Art and Design (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, ). Seaton, Beverly, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, ). Treuherz, J., ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in R. Dorment and T. Barringer (eds), Pre-Raphaelites and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, ), –. Weaver, Elissa B., The Decameron First Day in Perspective: Volume One of the Lecturae Boccaccii (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ).
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I the introductory lines to ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’, his verse retelling of the thirteenthcentury Icelandic Laxdæla saga, William Morris describes Iceland as a strange and awful land Where folk, as in the hollow of God’s hand, Beset with fearful things, yet fearing nought, Have lived their lives and wondrous deeds have wrought.¹
Medieval Iceland, its fearless people, and the literature recording their wondrous deeds attracted an unprecedented level of interest in Victorian Britain. Of foreign literatures, only those of France and Italy proved equally fruitful sources for Victorian medievalism. In Iceland itself there was a continuous popular reception of the island’s medieval literature into the modern period, but the British general reading public discovered the island’s rich corpus of medieval verse and prose for the first time during the ‘long nineteenth century’ (c.–). Building on foundations laid by scholars and enthusiasts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Victorian Icelandophiles introduced British readers to the full range of Old Norse-Icelandic texts through translations into English and for the first time provided editions of texts in the original language with English-language apparatus for those who wished to pursue the subject further. Enthusiasm for medieval Icelandic literature inspired some to undertake the arduous trip to Iceland to see saga-sites for themselves; others stayed at home but availed themselves of guides to Icelandic that became available in the second half of the century and learned to read the literature in its original language. Through the combined industry and enthusiasm of scholars, writers, and travellers, medieval ¹ William Morris, ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, vols (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., –), v. .
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Icelandic literature came as near as it has ever done to a central position in British culture during the Victorian period.
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.................................................................................................................................. Iceland was discovered by Scandinavian seafarers during the Viking Age and was settled from around onwards, mainly by families of Norwegian origin, though many spent time en route in Orkney, the Hebrides, or Ireland and there acquired Celtic wives, concubines, or slaves. Medieval Icelanders, like mainland Scandinavian Vikings, spoke and wrote a Germanic language that modern scholars call either Old Norse or Old Icelandic (they themselves referred to it as dönsk tunga, the ‘Danish tongue’, or sometimes as norrœnt mál, ‘Nordic speech’). This language is the parent of modern Danish and Swedish (descending from Old East Norse) and Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese (from Old West Norse). The vast majority of surviving medieval texts—and very nearly all those of literary interest—were preserved in Iceland, however, so for many purposes Old Norse and Old Icelandic may be regarded as synonymous, though a lingering suspicion, especially on the part of some modern Icelanders, that ‘Norse’ really means ‘Norwegian’ has led to increasing use of the ungainly but precise term ‘Old Norse-Icelandic’ in recent scholarship. Icelandic has changed very little in its passage from Old to Modern, unlike other modern Scandinavian languages which have diverged much further from Old Norse. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries Iceland produced as rich and extensive a vernacular medieval literature as anywhere in Europe; the north Atlantic island was the main repository of legendary and mythological material once shared by speakers of Germanic languages across northern Europe and in addition preserved a corpus of uniquely intricate verse and a wealth of historical and historical-fictional prose for which there is no parallel elsewhere in the period. Pre-Christian mythological and legendary material was preserved in a collection of anonymous poems known as the Poetic Edda (often referred to as Sæmundar Edda in the nineteenth century, owing to a mistaken attribution to the twelfth-century scholar Sæmundr inn fróði). Norwegian court poetry from the ninth century onwards (much of it by Icelandic poets and almost all of it preserved in Icelandic manuscripts) and other poetry employing the same extraordinarily complex verse forms is known as skaldic (or scaldic) poetry, from the Icelandic skáld, ‘poet’. Both kinds of verse provided source material for Snorri Sturluson’s (Prose) Edda (c.). In the course of this handbook for poets Snorri provides the most comprehensive surviving account of pre-Christian Norse mythology, though it is filtered through his thirteenth-century Christian perspective. Skaldic verse also provided some of the source material for the great prose (or, more strictly, prosimetric) narratives known throughout the world by their originally Icelandic name, the sagas. Different saga genres are distinguished on the basis of their subject matter: all are concerned with the more or less distant past, but they vary in
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historicity; as one Victorian translator remarked, ‘There are many kinds of Sagas, of all degrees of truth’.² All these different kinds of writing attracted British readers in the Victorian period, but, as we shall see, tastes sometimes differed from those of earlier and later periods. Norse-speaking Vikings settled in parts of England from the ninth century onwards alongside speakers of Old English, a related and probably more or less mutually intelligible Germanic language. Though Norse eventually died out, many words were borrowed into English and the genetic, cultural, and linguistic inheritance that Britain owed to Scandinavia was a major stimulus to scholarly and other interest in Viking and medieval Scandinavia and Iceland in the Victorian period.³ Scholarly interest in Old Norse language and literature in Britain began in the seventeenth century and reached an early high point in the work of George Hickes (–), whose Thesaurus Linguarum Septentrionalium of – included, among much else, an account of the language and a version of what became one of the most frequently translated poems, ‘The Waking of Angatýr’, the first complete translation of an Old Icelandic poem into English. Bishop Thomas Percy (–) published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (), which included both Icelandic texts and English translations (drawing on previously published versions in Latin and Swedish), and Northern Antiquities (), an edited translation of Paul-Henri Mallet’s Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc.⁴ Mallet’s writings provided late eighteenth-century Europe with much of what it knew of Viking and medieval Scandinavia and continued, in revised versions of Percy’s Northern Antiquities ( and ), to provide scholarly orientation well into the Victorian period.⁵ The revision and expansion of Percy’s translation edited by I. A. Blackwell replaced Percy’s translation of Mallet’s partial rendering of Snorri’s Edda with a version of the mythological sections of that work (Gylfaginning and part of Skáldskaparmál) directly from Old Icelandic: this became the primary source for Victorian knowledge of Norse mythology. Blackwell’s edition also reprinted an abstract of Eyrbyggja saga made by Sir Walter Scott (from a
² George Webbe Dasent (tr.), The Story of Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ) p. v. ³ See Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), on the impact of J. J. A. Worsaae’s An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: Murray, ) on British attitudes towards their Norse inheritance. ⁴ See Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols, ); Thomas Percy, Northern Antiquities: or, A Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern nations; Including those of our own Saxon Ancestors (London, ); new edn revised by I. A. Blackwell (London: Bohn, ); and for further context, Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain, – (Trieste: Edizione Parnaso, ). ⁵ Either the or printing of Percy’s Northern Antiquities was the source for Matthew Arnold’s Balder Dead (), for example.
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Latin version) that had first been published in , one of the earliest more or less complete English retellings of a saga of Icelanders or Family Saga.⁶ The earliest British scholars and enthusiasts of the Icelandic and Scandinavian Middle Ages were heavily dependent on foreign scholarship, including the pioneering printed editions of medieval texts produced in Sweden and Denmark in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often still the standard editions in the Victorian period.⁷ Access to this material was facilitated by the provision of translations and editorial material in Latin, the international scholarly language of the time. Early English translators of Norse-Icelandic texts often depended on Latin, Danish, or Swedish intermediary versions, but William Herbert (–) produced competent English translations directly from the originals in his Select Icelandic Poetry of –. The earliest translations of saga prose into English consisted of extracts concerning events in Britain. Passages of this kind translated from Snorri Sturluson’s voluminous history of the kings of Norway, Heimskringla, were among those translated by James Johnstone (d. ), who set a pattern that was to be widely followed in the Victorian period (and, indeed, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) by collaborating with an Icelander, in his case Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín (–), best known to Anglophone readers for his ground-breaking but error-laden editio princeps of the Old English poem, Beowulf.⁸
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.................................................................................................................................. Whereas much eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British interest in Icelandic literature had been in the mythological and legendary poetry so congenial to readers of Ossianic epic or Gothic fiction, in the Victorian period interest shifted towards the prose (or prosimetric) sagas, which engaged ‘a reading public for whom the realistic novel had become the dominant literary genre’.⁹ The first complete Icelandic saga to be published in English translation appeared two years after Victoria’s accession: an ⁶ Sir Walter Scott, ‘An Abstract of the Eyrbyggja-Saga’, in Robert Jamieson and Henry Weber (eds), Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, ), –; reprinted in Percy, Northern Antiquities (), –. See further Julian D’Arcy and Kirsten Wolf, ‘Sir Walter Scott and Eyrbyggja saga’, Studies in Scottish Literature, (): –. ⁷ For an overview of pre-Victorian scholarship on Old Icelandic literature see Andrew Wawn, ‘The Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic Literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, and – for brief discussion of Norse scholarship and reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe. ⁸ On Johnstone see Clunies Ross, Norse Muse, –; John Kennedy, Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response (Turnhout: Brepols, ), –. ⁹ Wawn, ‘Post-Medieval Reception’, . Wawn’s The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), a work of extraordinary scholarship and engaging humour, is the essential starting point for anyone interested in the Victorian
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eccentric, Scandinavia-based English scholar, George Stephens (–), was the first of several Victorian translators to publish an English version of Friðþiófs saga hins frækna, a romantic saga of the legendary past that was extraordinarily popular throughout the nineteenth century (often in the form of a verse paraphrase by the Swedish bishop Esaias Tegnér, also several times translated into English).¹⁰ It is now very marginal to the study of Old Norse literature, but it was a central text in the canon of medieval Icelandic literature as received in Victorian Britain. It appealed no doubt to a sentimental streak in Victorian sensibility, but the saga is partly set in Orkney, so that, like other sagas popular in the nineteenth century, it has an obvious British connection. In the course of the rest of Victoria’s reign a very large proportion of the surviving literature of medieval Iceland found its way into English. Landmark translations from the period helped establish a canon for Anglophone readers and in many cases continued to be read widely well into the twentieth century; there is space here to consider just a few prominent examples: Samuel Laing’s version of Heimskringla, George Webbe Dasent’s The Saga of Burnt Njal, Muriel Press’s Laxdæla Saga, and the numerous saga translations produced by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon. The Orcadian Samuel Laing (–) published a translation of Snorri Sturluson’s monumental history of the kings of Norway, Heimskringla, in , prefixing to it a long ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ which played an important role in shaping mid-century perceptions of the Viking and medieval north.¹¹ His translation had a long shelf life, being reprinted in and again (with updated editorial material) in the Everyman’s Library series as late as .¹² Laing had spent three years in Norway (–) and shared with George Stephens an animosity towards Germany which manifested itself in an appreciation of the closeness of the ties between Scandinavia and the British Isles. Laing had a limited knowledge of Icelandic and, unlike many other translators of the period, did not avail himself of the help of a native speaker; instead he relied on versions in Latin, Swedish, Danish, and especially Dano-Norwegian. He set out to produce a translation for ‘the ordinary reader of history,—for the common man’,
reception of ‘the old North’. A survey of saga translations in the period including helpful chronological lists of translations is split across chapters and of Kennedy, Translating. ¹⁰ On the popularity of this saga (and Tegnér’s poem) in Victorian Britain, see Andrew Wawn, ‘The Cult of “Stalwart Frith-thjof ” in Victorian Britain’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, ), –, and Vikings and Victorians, ch. . On Stephens’s enthusiasms and numerous publications, see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, ch. . ¹¹ Samuel Laing (tr.), The Heimskringla or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, ), i. –. For a fuller discussion of Laing than is possible here, see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, ch. . ¹² Wawn has demonstrated the depth and longevity of Laing’s influence on creative writers (Charles Kingsley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, R. M. Ballantyne, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson) and, via Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, on the composer Edward Elgar: see Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, –.
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though he also recognized that the text was a ‘work of great literary merit’;¹³ his version has been called a ‘plain faithful translation’ for a ‘plain English reader’.¹⁴ As an example of Laing’s readability, one may quote a passage from the saga of King Óláfr Haraldsson: Thorstein Knararsmed struck at King Olaf with his axe, and the blow hit his left leg above the knee. Finn Arneson instantly killed Thorstein. The king after the wound staggered towards a stone, threw down his sword, and prayed God to help him. Then Thorer Hund struck at him with his spear, and the stroke went in under his mail-coat and into his belly. The Kalf struck at him on the left side of the neck. But all are not agreed upon Kalf having been the man who gave him the wound in the neck. These three wounds were King Olaf ’s death.¹⁵
The frequent skaldic verses incorporated in the narrative often, however, depart quite a distance from the original in both content and, even more, tone. This verse appears shortly after the above prose passage: The marshal Biorn, too, I find, A great example leaves behind, How steady courage should stand proof, Though other servants stand aloof. To Russia first his steps he bent, To serve his master still intent; And now besides his king he fell,— A noble death for scalds to tell.¹⁶
Though the sense is clear enough, this does read like second-rate Victorian poetry. George Webbe Dasent (–) produced the first, and for long the only, complete English translation of the greatest of all Icelandic sagas, Brennu-Njáls saga. His avoidance of archaism (busk, bourn, and redes excepted) wore well and, as Heather O’Donoghue writes, ‘he may be said to have formed the modern taste for saga literature’.¹⁷ Dasent’s Burnt Njal was largely drafted when the author was a diplomat in Sweden in but not published until when he had become professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College, London. Wawn notes that it
¹³ Laing, Heimskringla, i, pp. v, iv. ¹⁴ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . ¹⁵ Laing, Heimskringla, ii. . Compare the forms of personal names influenced by mainland Scandinavian spellings with the forms in Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon’s version quoted below. ¹⁶ Laing, Heimskringla, ii. . ¹⁷ Heather O’Donoghue, ‘Old Norse/Icelandic’, in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Cf. George Webbe Dasent (tr.), The Story of Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, ), preface, pp. xv–xvi, on his limited use of archaic vocabulary. He also employs the archaic second person singular pronoun and verb forms in conversations.
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achieved pre-publication sales of a thousand copies.¹⁸ Like Laing’s Heimskringla, it had wide circulation well into the twentieth century thanks to reprints in the Everyman Classics series in and ; indeed, it had the field to itself until a second English translation of Njáls saga was published in . Whereas Dasent’s translation of Snorri’s Edda was, in Wawn’s words, a literal version ‘bordering at times on transliteration’, Burnt Njal achieved a more idiomatic English style without sacrificing accuracy (except where Victorian sensibilities called for greater reticence than had been displayed by the Icelandic saga-author, as in the description of Hrútr Herjólfsson’s marital problems).¹⁹ The virtues of Dasent’s style are evident in this passage from the first main climax of the saga, the attack on Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi: Gunnar made a stout and bold defence, and now wounds other eight men with such sore wounds that many lay at death’s door. Gunnar keeps them all off until he fell worn out with toil. Then they wounded him with many and great wounds, but still he got away out of their hands, and held his own against them a while longer, but at last it came about that they slew him.²⁰
The original, two-volume, publication of Burnt Njal included a vast battery of editorial material (a wide-ranging introduction of more than two hundred pages, notes, maps, a nearly seventy-page appendix and an exceptionally detailed index), but almost all of this was omitted in later reprintings. Dasent went on to produce a version of Gísla saga () and also contributed translations to the Rolls Series (see below), but it was Burnt Njal that fired the imagination of Victorian readers. William Morris (–) has justly been called ‘late Victorian Britain’s most celebrated Icelandophile’.²¹ The many saga translations he produced with his Icelandic collaborator exerted a seminal influence on Victorian and later enthusiasm for Old Icelandic literature: a recent commentator claims that ‘probably no serious saga translator since has been totally uninfluenced’ by their work, though such influence has often taken the form of a reaction against their stylistic approach.²² Morris’s earliest published writings already evince knowledge of Norse material but this became a dominant interest when he began to learn to read Icelandic with the English-resident Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon (–), whom Morris met in .²³
¹⁸ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . ¹⁹ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, –, . Wawn notes, however, that Dasent took considerable liberties in changing the order of some chapters. ²⁰ Dasent, Burnt Njal, . ²¹ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . ²² Kennedy, Translating, . ²³ Eiríkr describes their meeting and collaboration in William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, The Saga Library, vols (London: Quaritch, –), vi, pp. vii–xvi. See also Andrew Wawn, ‘Fast er drukkið og fátt lært’: Eiríkur Magnússon, Old Northern Philology, and Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge:
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In just a few years the two men made a remarkable number of translations of Icelandic sagas: most were produced between and the early s, though some were published only twenty years later as part of a six-volume collection, The Saga Library. Their version of Grettis saga appeared in the middle year of Victoria’s reign and was followed the year after by their Völsunga saga (including a selection of relevant eddic poetry); Three Northern Love Stories of combined translations previously published in periodicals with new translations and included both sagas of Icelanders (Gunnlaugs saga and Víglundar saga) and legendary fornaldarsögur (the second English version of Friðþjófs saga and ‘The Tale of Hogni and Hedinn’). The six volumes of The Saga Library, completed after Morris’s death, included more sagas of Icelanders (Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, Bandamanna saga, Hœnsa-Þóris saga, Eyrbyggja saga, Heiðarvíga saga) and the great kings’ saga compilation, Snorri’s Heimskringla.²⁴ The prominence of sagas of Icelanders (or Family Sagas) is a noteworthy shift in emphasis in the context of Victorian saga translation: only four examples of the genre had previously appeared complete in English, though it has gone on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to be the most widely read and admired Icelandic saga genre. The translation of Völsunga saga—described by Morris as ‘the best tale pity ever wrought’—was of particular significance. Towards the end of their introduction the translators write: We must again say how strange it seems to us, that this Volsung Tale, which is in fact an unversified poem, should never before have been translated into English. For this is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks—to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been—a story too—then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been for us.²⁵
Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge, ). Eiríkr spelled his name thus in his publications, though the normal modern Icelandic spelling is Eiríkur. ²⁴ Later posthumously published translations include forty chapters of Egils saga in William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), The Story of Egil the Son of Scaldgrim, in May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), –, and William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (tr.), The Story of Kormak the Son of Ogmund (London: William Morris Society, ). Further unpublished translations and fragments remain in manuscript: see the list provided by the Morris Online Edition at http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/listtranslations.html, accessed Jan. . ²⁵ William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (trs), Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (London: Ellis, ), p. xi. This first English translation of Völsunga saga coincided closely with the first performances of the opening two instalments of Richard Wagner’s operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, based in part on the saga and other Icelandic sources: Das Rheingold premiered on Sept. , and Die Walküre on June (the complete cycle was first performed in and premiered in England in ). On Wagner’s use of Old Icelandic material see Árni Björnsson, Wagner and the Volsungs: Sources of der Ring des Nibelungen (London: Viking Society, ). Morris took a dim view of Wagner’s work: ‘I look upon it as nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera . . . the idea of a sandy-haired German tenor tweedle-deeing over the unspeakable woes of
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As Matthew Townend has recently pointed out, this passage is characteristic of Victorian interest in early Iceland and its literature in two ways: ‘it declares the availability of a northern Germanic alternative to a southern, Mediterranean culture, and a medieval alternative to a classical one’.²⁶ For other Victorians besides William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon the medieval literature of Iceland was not a foreign treasury, but a rightful inheritance. The highly distinctive style that Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon adopt for their translations from Old Icelandic has evoked strongly critical reactions from many readers ever since the earliest reviews, though there have also been a few more positive responses. A famous attack came in the introduction to Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale (discussed below): There is one grave error into which too many English translations of old Northern and Icelandic writings have fallen, to wit, the affectation of archaism and the abuse of archaic, Scottish, pseudo-Middle-English words. This abominable fault makes a Saga . . . sound unreal, unfamiliar, false.²⁷
In Dorothy Hoare argued that ‘in the ingenious search for the words which come nearest to the actual form of the Icelandic, the life and nearness, the directness [of the original] has vanished’.²⁸ The effect is, she claims, ‘entirely different’ from that obtained by reading the Icelandic for oneself. While their approach certainly emphasizes the alterity of the medieval text by using archaic vocabulary and morphological forms, their preference for linguistic forms that English shares (or shared) with Icelandic focuses attention on historical connections between the English and Icelandic languages.²⁹ As J. N. Swannell suggests, the result is, ironically, that the saga translations of Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon can best be enjoyed by those readers whose own knowledge of Old Icelandic (and, one might add, of the history of English) enables them to appreciate the linguistic connections to which the translators draw attention by their stylistic choices: readers with little need for a translation in the first place.³⁰ There is, nevertheless, a vigour to the translations of Morris and his collaborator which Sigurd . . .’ Letter of Nov.r in Philip Henderson (ed.), The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends (London: Longmans, Green & Co., ), –. ²⁶ Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, . Townend goes on to provide a sensitive explication of the use of ‘race’ in this passage (–). ²⁷ Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell (eds and trs), Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century, vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), i, p. cxv. Eiríkr Magnússon defended the approach he and his late collaborator took in Saga Library, vi, pp. vii–viii. ²⁸ Dorothy M. Hoare, The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . ²⁹ John Kennedy draws an apposite distinction between archaism and ‘Icelandicized’ translation, arguing that the translations of Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon exemplify the latter: Kennedy, Translating, –. ³⁰ J. N. Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter of Old Norse’, Saga-Book, (): .
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even readers innocent of Icelandic may savour. The virtues and defects of their approach may be gauged by comparing the following passage with the version by Laing quoted above, though this is a relatively restrained example of their style: Thorstein Shipwright smote at King Olaf with an axe, and the blow struck the left leg anigh the knee and above it. Finn Arnison smote Thorstein down forthwith. But at this wound the king leaned him up against a stone and threw away his sword, and bade God help him. Then Thorir Hound thrust a spear at him. The thrust came on him below the byrny, and ran up into the belly. Then Kalf hewed at him, and the blow took him on the left side of the neck. But men are sundered on the matter, where Kalf gave the king the wound. These three wounds the king got towards the loss of his life.³¹
Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon are particularly successful in the almost impossible task of translating skaldic verse: their idiosyncratic and ingenious diction is peculiarly suited to rendering skaldic artifice. Here is their version of the verse quoted from Laing’s version above: Eke heard I that erst Biorn Learned marshals thoroughly whatwise ’Twas due to hold liege-fealty: He, too, was in the onset. He fell in the host of battle At the head of the king fame-wealthy; That death is all be-praisèd ’Mongst the faithful men king-warding.³²
To the extent that this resists interpretation some might claim that it replicates the experience of reading skaldic verse in the original. Two long poems by Morris which Dorothy Hoare describes as ‘free renderings of the Norse matter’ reached a wider readership than his translations proper and probably did more to inspire interest in Iceland’s medieval literature. ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is a constituent tale in the collection that secured Morris’s poetic reputation, The Earthly Paradise; it retells the story of Laxdæla saga and its popularity prepared an audience for the publication of Muriel Press’s translation of the saga in . Sigurd the Volsung, said by Morris’s daughter to be the central work of his life and the one for which he most wished to be remembered, is a long poem of around , lines that reworks material from both Völsunga saga and the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda. These two major poems have been called ‘by far the best Victorian poems on eddic and saga subjects’.³³ ³¹ Morris and Magnússon, Saga Library, iv. . ³² Morris and Magnússon, Saga Library, iv. . ³³ Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, . For further discussion of these poems, see Hoare, Works, –, Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’, –; on Sigurd see also Amanda Hodgson, The Romances
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Victorian saga scholarship was far from a purely masculine endeavour and, appropriately enough given the text’s particular interest in female characters (and, according to some modern scholars, its possible female authorship), the first translation of Laxdæla saga was by a woman, Muriel Press.³⁴ Her version appeared with minimal apparatus: chapter headings with dates, a brief editorial note acknowledging the contribution of ‘a competent Icelander’, one map, and a note on some verses. Besides pioneering translations of texts that have continued to seem central to Old Icelandic literature, Victorian translators were also attracted to texts, like Friðþjófs saga, that now seem more marginal to the corpus. Several sagas translated in the Victorian period have never yet been retranslated. These include two major kings’ sagas, the Great Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason and Sverris Saga, both translated by John Sephton in the s.³⁵ There was also an interest in religious literature on the part of Anglo- and Roman Catholic saga enthusiasts who translated some of the bishops’ sagas, a genre in which there has been little further interest on the part of translators until very recently. Mrs Disney Leith wrote that ‘the ecclesiastical Sagas have been left hitherto almost entirely unregarded. Yet they are no less remarkable, and no less interesting—to Churchmen possibly more—than the secular branch’.³⁶ Her straightforward and accurate versions did not, however, win many converts and bishops’ sagas were largely ignored by translators for most of the twentieth century.³⁷ Mythological texts, on the other hand, seem not to have attracted Victorian translators as much as they have in other periods. The main source for nineteenth-century discussions of Norse mythology remained Blackwell’s revision of Percy’s Northern Antiquities and otherwise only Dasent produced a (partial) translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda (). Eddic poetry had attracted considerable interest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but there was no complete translation of the Poetic Edda until Benjamin Thorpe’s version, followed eventually by the version in Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale ().³⁸ of William Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. , David Ashurst, ‘William Morris and the Volsungs’, in David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (eds), Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ), –, and Richard Frith, ‘ “The Worship of Courage”: William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and Victorian Medievalism’, in Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren (eds), Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. ³⁴ Muriel A. C. Press, Laxdæla Saga (London: Dent, ). Like other Victorian translations, this was given a new lease of life when republished with new editorial material by Everyman Classics in . ³⁵ As Reader in Icelandic Studies at University College, Liverpool (–), Sephton was the first Englishman to hold a major university position in Icelandic. ³⁶ Mrs Disney Leith, The Stories of the Bishops of Iceland (London: Masters, ), . ³⁷ The translation of Lárentius saga biskups by another Anglo-Catholic, Oliver Elton, is also a notable example of Victorian bishops’ saga translation; it remains the only published English version of that text. ³⁸ On the history of translations of eddic poetry see Carolyne Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda into English’, in David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (eds), Old Norse Made New: Essays on the PostMedieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, ), –.
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Much of the impetus for saga translation in Victorian Britain came from a sense of national or local affinity with Iceland and Scandinavia. Just as the pioneering saga editions produced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Denmark and Sweden expressed national pride, so many who turned to Icelandic literature in Victorian Britain did so in celebration of the contribution that the Vikings were perceived to have made to British (or English or Scottish) national identity and character. But as recent research has emphasized, Victorian interest in Scandinavian and Icelandic antiquity was often motivated by a sense of its relevance to local, rather than national, identity.³⁹ The interest in Icelandic sources relating to the former Norse earldom of Orkney exemplifies this tendency: even more telling than the partly Orcadian setting of Friðþjófs saga and Samuel Laing’s Orcadian origins, is the fact that the Victorian period saw the publication of two translations of the Icelandic history of Orkney, Orkneyinga saga.⁴⁰
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.................................................................................................................................. As with translations, religious, national, or local allegiances often influenced the choice of texts for editing in the original language with English editorial material. Morris’s Icelandic collaborator, Eiríkr Magnússon, produced solo editions of Icelandic texts with English translations and editorial material. Both were religious works, of the kind that attracted more attention from British scholars in the Victorian period than they have tended to do since: an edition of the fourteenth-century Marian devotional poem, Lilja (with facing verse translation, extensive introduction, and full glossary), and an edition and translation of the Icelandic saga of St Thomas Becket for the Rolls Series.⁴¹ The edition of Lilja was the first Icelandic text in an English edition made directly from the manuscript sources; it became ‘a favourite of Anglo- and Roman Catholics’.⁴² The Cambridge-based Eiríkr Magnússon had an Oxford-based rival in the other leading Icelandic scholar working in Victorian Britain, Guðbrandur Vigfússon, whose British publications gave his name in Anglicized form as Gudbrand Vigfusson.⁴³
³⁹ See e.g. Matthew Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and his Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ), and ‘Victorian Medievalisms’. ⁴⁰ Jón A. Hjaltalín and Gilbert Goudie (trs), The Orkneyinga Saga, ed. Joseph Anders