Ellie Crookes and Ika Willis introduce this new collection of essays with a discussion of "Genealogical and Conceptual Entanglements." For Victorianists, the word “medievalism” can have one meaning only: it refers to “that slightly skewed form of archaic realisation of the past that characterises the Victorian period” (23), as David Matthews puts it in the first essay. In Medievalism and Reception, however, the noun signifies something rather different. It is used in a considerably newer sense: here, neo-medievalism refers to an academic discipline, which could be defined as the study of medievalism, the latter including not only the “Medieval Revival” which started in the second half of the eighteenth century and lasted until the end of the Victorian era, but also the various “ways in which we engage the medieval in a postmedieval present” (2). While medieval studies are concerned with the “real” Middle Ages, medievalism examines “ill-defined, and sometimes non-existent, objects which nonetheless often have more of a hold on cultural and political imaginaries than do specific texts” (6). This posterior appropriation is more of the essence than the “supposedly stable, original text” to which Matthews refers (23). In other words, as another contributor, Kavita Mudan Finn, puts it later, the collection "is concerned not with the reality of the medieval world but with how we respond to that reality without our own mythmaking and storytelling” (69). Perhaps it is naive to ask — but since a specialist of the Middle Ages is usually called a medievalist, and a specialist of medievalism is, quite logically, a “medievalismist” (the word is repeatedly used in the volume), should not this “newer” discipline be called medievalismism? Of course, this would be too awkward a neologism. But it would prepare the reader for the extra layer of theory brought to bear here on the more traditional approach.

The opening page of The Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales in Morris's edition.

Since this collection looks at all sorts of medievalised content, from the screening of Robin Hood narratives in Australia, to the translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales into Turkish, it is only partly concerned with the Victorian Medieval Revival. However, Medievalism and Reception devotes at least four of its ten chapters to the nineteenth century. Before looking more closely at those four essays, let us mention the chapter devoted to “Chaucerian Medievalism,” where one might be surprised to read that “Chaucer became increasingly unavailable for creative appropriation during the Medieval Revival” (26) — this, at a time when patient Griselda from "The Clerk's Tale" became and remained the very epitome of the long-suffering obedient wife, and when William Morris’s Kelmscott Press devoted a volume to Chaucer, illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones. It seems, however, that this assertion applies to the lack of “creative rewritings” of works by Chaucer (i.e., translations into modern English) — something that might be too much to expect at a time when Chaucer was still well understood in the original by the better educated.

In “Reading the Ripples of Reception: Reviewing the Crusades in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, Mike Horswell and Elizabeth Siberry examine how two books published in 1820 and 1821 were “received” by the press. Here, the early-nineteenth-century publishing dates are rather misleading: one of the two works under scrutiny, Joseph-François Michaud’s Histoire des croisades, was only translated into English in 1852, and became popular even later, thanks to its illustrations by Gustave Doré, first published in 1877. These pictures then indeed became influential, “by attaching long-lasting and iconic visual cues to episodes of the crusades” (48). Thinking of the crusades, it seems unfortunate that Carlo Marochetti's sculpture of Richard Coeur de Lion on horseback falls outside the scope of this discussion. A key symbol of Victorian aspirations, it first welcomed visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and then, cast in bronze, was sited in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, where it is still to be seen.

In perhaps the most relevant essay for Victorianists in the collection, “‘Liege Lady’: Queen Victoria’s Political Medievalism,” Clare Broome Saunders shows how “Victoria consistently used images and figures from medieval literature and history to formulate a convincing public persona for herself, and curated a persona for her husband using positive medieval iconography” (89). It has to be said that, in the first example considered, the queen’s accession speech of 1837, one would be hard put to discover any explicit medieval references. It seems that sometimes, medievalism is in the eye of the medievalismist, rather than anywhere else. However, the Eglinton Tournament was a much more blatant exercise in medievalism, with its use of chivalry — as indeed was the fancy-dress ball at Buckingham Palace in 1842 where Victoria appeared as Queen Philippa of Hainault, and her husband as Edward III, the aim being “to increase Albert’s popularity by presenting him as the epitome of an English chivalric gentleman, and the queen’s knight” (96).

Left: Richard Doyle's comic take on the Eglinton Tournament of 1840. Right: Sir Edwin Landseer's Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842 (1842-46).

Stephanie Russo's “Medievalism or Tudorism? Ambivalence and the Past in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Anne Boleyn,” is also of interest to Victorianists. Russo sets out to show that Anne Boleyn was a “liminal point” as she “stood on an important historical precipice between the medieval and the modern” (105). At first, the reader may be surprised to read assertions about “the nineteenth century” with hardly any quoted material from the period itself, but only from modern specialists of medievalism; but Russo does eventually examine a range of historical books and novels, all published in the nineteenth century. Among these are Elizabeth Benger's Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn (1821) and Anne Jameson's Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women (1831). This is most welcome, as it represents not only a fresh engagement with medievalism, but, since most of the authors are women, a less frequently examined aspect of nineteenth-century women's writing in general.

Anne Boleyn, after Holbein, in the frontispiece of
Benger's Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn
(1822 ed.) in the Hathi Trust copy of the book
in the University of California Libraries.

Finally, in “Embodied Medievalism: The Beatricified Persona of ‘Lizzie Siddal’”, Ellie Crookes, one of the co-editors of the volume, focuses on one of the most famous models of the Pre-Raphaelites, and an artist in her own right, as recently shown by The Rossettis exhibition at Tate Britain or by Jan Marsh in a new biography (Elizabeth Siddal, Her Story, Pallas Athene, 2023). Siddal's face is shown in the crescent moon in Rossetti's painting, Dantis Amor, reproduced on the cover of this collection. Much is made here of the spelling “Siddal” instead of “Siddall”, as if it were one more proof that “Lizzie Siddal” was “a curated persona constructed by Rossetti” (130), whereas the spelling of family names was still extremely fluctuant in the nineteenth century. One has to agree, however, when Crookes mentions “Rossetti’s practice of treating his wife’s image and identity as ‘text’, as something to be overwritten” (135). Still, it might be a good idea to give John Ruskin credit for knowing what he was talking about: when he wrote that Siddall looked like “a Florentine fifteenth-century lady (…) out of a fresco”, he was probably thinking of the works of Ghirlandaio or his contemporaries, and not at all of Dante’s Beatrice, and it is therefore quite contestable that “His dates are off by over a hundred years ... but his evocation of the famed Florentine Beatrice is clear” (140).

The linking of reception theories with older critical methodologies, as well as the wide range of subjects covered, make Medievalism and Reception a challenging read. There are also various points at which one may beg to differ from the contibutors' assertions. But the collection does suggest new approaches and is likely to ignite new interest in this fast developing field of studies.

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Bibliography

Medievalism and Reception, edited by Ellie Crookes and Ika Willis. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2024. 202 pp. Hardcover, £77.97. ISBN 978-1843847304


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Created 15 January 2025