Marginalia -- The Journal of the Medieval Reading Group at Cambridge

Like a painting by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Michael Alexander's Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England is a jewel-like, visually showy spectacle. Full-colour plates of pre-Raphaelite paintings, illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, and medievalist stained glass shine out from almost every large, glossy page. Alexander attempts to chart the rise of medievalism - the later reception, appropriation, and interpretation of the literature, art, and history of the Middle Ages - over the course of two centuries from 1760 to 1971, and we canter pleasurably from humorous anecdote to sumptuous illustration, led by his wistful and conversational tone.

Alexander locates the first concerted interest in the Medieval in the 1760s, arguing convincingly that Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, James Macpherson's 'Ossian' poems, and Thomas Chatterton's 'discovery' of the works of Thomas Rowley indicate a heightened moment of Gothic sensibilities and a distinct reaction from the prevalent neo-classical mode. With Walpole's fictional novel published as a 'translation' from an invented 16th-century printed text, and the latter two texts being outright forgeries, we see the importance of creative and slippery imitation of medieval style from the very start. Dr Johnson's view of Macpherson is like William of Newburgh on Geoffrey of Monmouth; they did not accept the idea of historical invention and mimicry (p.36). This Gothic urge would soon develop into an antiquarian search for more 'authentic' relics.

A writer in whom the antiquarian and the Romantic merged was Sir Walter Scott, and Alexander accordingly devotes two chapters to his poetry and novels, which, he notes frankly, are rather rarely read the whole way through. Michael Alexander is likely best known to medievalists as a translator and editor – having translated Beowulf and other Old English verse, and edited The Canterbury Tales – and his knowledge of medieval poetry allows him to produce persuasive close readings that encompass a range of texts, medieval and modern, with learned observation and a benevolent wit. Alexander highlights one amusing moment in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' in which Scott's feasting knights are excessively knighty: 'They carved at the meal,/With gloves of steel,/And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred.' Alexander notes that 'Scott is not entirely serious', this is 'genial comic hyperbole'; he is merely being saucy with his sources (p.41).

Alexander then moves on to examine the medievalism of A.W.Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. Alexander's choice of secondary reading in preparing this book - 'I have read little secondary literature, except in history and art history' (p.xv) – might explain his belief that medievalist literature has never been satisfactorily covered before; 'Architecture…is merely…the best-recognised face of the Medieval Revival, a cultural iceberg with unacknowledged dimensions in literature.' (p.xxii) Readers familiar with Alice Chandler's A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-century English Literature, of huge influence on the inception of medievalism studies when published in 1970, will understand the centrality of literature to the discipline. Alexander is undoubtedly correct that accounts of the 'Medieval Revival' should consider 'its social, political, religious, architectural, and artistic aspects', although his is certainly not the 'first coherent account' to do so (blurb inside cover). However, the non-literary material sometimes feels like a diversion that the author felt obligatory; a purely literary tour from the professor of English might have been more satisfying for a general audience.

Alexander is much better on what Tennyson does to Malory. His comparison of an exchange between Arthur and Bedivere in the Winchester MS, an 1816 edition of Caxton, and Tennyson's verse is particularly rewarding. Malory is 'rapid…[his] eye is for action…[he] is laconic'; Tennyson is 'slow…[with an eye for] description and effect…[his] poetic strain has a dying fall.' (pp.122-123) Study of medievalist literature involves considering how these writers, separated by five hundred years, are reshaping their borrowed material in different ways, and why. However, at this stage, Alexander's subjective tour of the material – 'Readers who, like the present writer, first encountered Tennyson's 'Morte d'Arthur' in a school anthology of the 1950s may like him have received Arthur's dying speech as representing the Victorian age at its most funereal' (p.115) - begins to grate. He states that 'What little I had read on medievalism was not very encouraging. But these are reasons to attempt a subject rather than leave it alone.' (p.xiv) Enough has been written on Tennyson's Arthurianism to sink the Lady of Shalott's funeral barge, but Alexander ignores most of it. Recent works such as Inga Bryden's Reinventing King Arthur have attempted to demonstrate how much Victorian Arthurianism was a wide cultural phenomenon, with manifestations in many literary forms, elite and non-elite, such as plays, popular novels, and poetry by non-canonical authors. They have sought to demonstrate how differently women reinvented the material, such Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's political Lady of Shalott who lives in a cramped nineteenth-century attic and is disabled since, at the age of five 'her mother threw her down stairs, one day, by mistake, instead of the whiskey-jug.' Instead, Alexander gives us the fascinating but traditional roll-call of medievalist figures – Disraeli, Tennyson, Sir Kenelm Digby, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or the 'PRB', as Alexander tells us they somewhat prosaically called themselves).

After covering the late-nineteenth-century art of Whistler, Burne-Jones, and Beardsley, he moves on to Edwardian and then Modernist poetry for three chapters at the book's end. Here he does build on excellent recent work, such as Chris Jones's Strange Likeness, and provides an extremely persuasive case for modernist medievalism, which has been less-frequently discussed than its Victorian predecessor. Alexander's strength is in juxtaposing interesting texts and forming clever comparisons, from Yeats to the Inklings. One substantial criticism might be that Alexander chooses, after Scott and the Romantics, to divide medievalism into 'antiquarian recovery' and 'imaginative adoption' and to only treat the latter for the remainder of the book. It is impossible to assert that when scholarship becomes more philological and 'scientific', that it is no longer a form of medievalism - that anyone can escape carrying the prejudices and perspectives of their own time back into their version of the Middle Ages - but it seems that Alexander does at heart believe this. 'Sophisticated voices have suggested that true historical knowledge is unattainable,' he insists, 'a position which robs enquiry of its point'. (p.263) We are brought back to the scholarly world with Pound, Eliot, Auden, Lewis, and Tolkien, having missed the century in which study of the Middle Ages became an academic discipline.

Medievalism is a work of immense breadth and has a learned hand at the helm. Few works attempt to cover so long a period, and Alexander makes a strong case for doing so, producing a narrative of medievalist thought that is always appealing and knowledgeable. That it is not a work based on original research, that it cuts generalizing swathes through the centuries and flattens thorny issues, is understandable given that it is intended as a general introduction for a popular audience. Alexander has enviable freedom to roam thoughtfully between subjects; his discussion of Ivanhoe includes mention of Tony Blair, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and the events of September 11th 2001. The subject of medievalism certainly needs such a book to cross the line between esoteric and accessible. Anecdotal, rather than analytical, is the order of the day.

Yet it must be acknowledged that the academic field of medievalism is burgeoning. Criticism and research are in rude health. There have been several particularly good collections of essays - perhaps because they allow experts in a variety of periods or subjects to comment collectively on medievalist themes. As a book that demonstrates the vitality of the subject – for medievalists and modernists alike – Medievalism is extremely valuable. It is a noble, if profitable, aim to popularise a subject that has so much to interest a general reader. However, Alexander missed a great deal when he decided that the little criticism he had read about medievalism was 'not very encouraging' and stopped reading. As a result the vague conclusions he draws - that rewriting the medieval past is somehow a way of defining the national present - are not as novel or exciting as they might have been.

Moreover, to then claim that this is the first account to focus on literature, or to move outside the Victorian period, or to 'overturn the suspicion that [medievalism] is by its nature escapist' (blurb inside cover), when each of these have been studied consistently for over thirty years is disingenuous. Much as we may enjoy following Michael Alexander on his aesthetic journey, in charting the 'Medieval Revival' he has turned a blind eye to the 'Medievalism Revival', and some might think that acknowledging that scholarly movement is an essential part of understanding the medievalist impulse. Yet it is still highly agreeable to consider this vast variety of medievalism as part of one story and to feast our eyes on Alexander's beautifully-produced book. As he says about the literature by his medievalising subjects, 'any history written for a general readership needs a story, and stories require prior simplifications.' (p.268)

Helen Brookman, University of Cambridge

© 2004 The authors and the Medieval Reading Group at the University of Cambridge
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