Medievalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Medievalism is the name given to a centuries-long conversation between the present and the Middle Ages. In the 1330s, a poet named Petrarch looked back at the thousand years since the fall of Rome and declared them a kind of darkness, a "Dark Ages" of stagnated culture. That verdict, offered as a lament, would paradoxically ignite one of the most persistent creative obsessions in Western history. Why would artists, architects, politicians, and philosophers keep returning to an era they had been taught to consider barbaric? What did they find there that their own time could not supply? Those questions thread through every chapter of this story, from the spires of nineteenth-century Gothic cathedrals to the swords-and-sorcery novels on airport bookshelves today.

• 2. Naming a Dark Age

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  Petrarch's complaint in the 1330s was specific: the loss of classical Latin texts and the corruption of the Latin language itself had, in his view, dragged European culture into stagnation since Rome fell in the fifth century. Renaissance historians picked up that framework and gave it formal shape. Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo developed a three-tier outline of history composed of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern periods. The Latin phrase media tempestas, meaning "middle time", first appears in a document from 1469. The more familiar term medium aevum, from which "Medieval" derives, is first recorded in 1604, and the Anglicised form "Medieval" itself does not appear until the nineteenth century.

  Protestant reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had their own reasons to condemn the intervening millennium. Where Renaissance humanists mourned lost Latin literature, Protestants saw a church that had ruled as kings, endorsed the veneration of saints' relics, and institutionalised what they called moral hypocrisy. Most Protestant historians placed the start of the modern era not at the Renaissance but at the Reformation itself.

  By the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers had folded both critiques together. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1789, drew heavily on the Protestant critique of the medieval church. Voltaire attacked feudalism, scholasticism, the Crusades, and the Inquisition as symptoms of an age dominated by religion and opposed to reason. The words Enlightenment writers chose for the Middle Ages tell the story plainly: "these dark times", "the centuries of ignorance", "the uncouth centuries". The stage was being set, almost in spite of itself, for a powerful reaction.

• 3. Gothic Stone and Gothic Fiction

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  The Gothic Revival began in England in the 1740s as an architectural movement. Its early admirers were drawn to medieval forms as a contrast to the classical styles that dominated polite taste. By the early nineteenth century the movement had deepened into something more philosophical, tied to a resurgence of "High Church" or Anglo-Catholic identity and shaped decisively by the Catholic convert Augustus Welby Pugin. Pugin produced important Gothic buildings across England in the 1840s, including cathedrals at Birmingham and Southwark, as well as the British Houses of Parliament.

  In France, Viollet-le-Duc restored the entire walled city of Carcassonne along with Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Across the Atlantic, Ralph Adams Cram became a leading force in American Gothic, most ambitiously in his work on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, one of the largest cathedrals in the world, and in the Collegiate Gothic buildings at Princeton Graduate College.

  The architectural movement had a literary twin. Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, and the Gothic novel was born. The genre's medieval backdrops, dark themes, and supernatural elements ran through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818 and John Polidori's The Vampyre in 1819, two works that helped found the modern horror genre. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" in 1839 and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" in 1836 carried the impulse into American letters. Herman Melville took elements from both in Moby-Dick in 1851. By the end of the century Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) had brought the Gothic tradition fully into the modern age.

• 4. Romanticism and Chivalric Revival

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  The word "Romanticism" itself is derived from the medieval genre of chivalric romance, and the movement that bore the name leaned heavily on that origin. Arising in the second half of the eighteenth century, Romanticism was partly a revolt against Enlightenment rationalism and partly an escape from the pressures of industrialisation and population growth. It reached for the medieval as an antidote to the present.

  The Ossian cycle, published by Scottish poet James Macpherson in 1762, was an early signal. It inspired Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen in 1773 and stirred the young Walter Scott, whose Waverley Novels, including Ivanhoe in 1819 and Quentin Durward in 1823, shaped popular images of the medieval era for generations. The illustrations of William Blake carried the same impulse in a visual key.

  Translation was another engine of the revival. Medieval national epics reached new audiences in vernacular form: the Nibelungenlied in Germany in 1782, The Lay of the Cid in Spain in 1799, Beowulf in England in 1833, The Song of Roland in France in 1837. These texts became the foundations of literary and artistic work across Europe. The Romantic fixation on the knight, the distressed damsel, and the dragon as shorthand images for the Middle Ages was disproportionate to how much actual medieval literature featured such figures, but it proved durable precisely because it was simple and evocative.

  The Nazarenes, a group of German Romantic painters, carried the movement's medieval impulse directly into studio practice. Formed in 1809 by six students at the Vienna Academy as the Brotherhood of St. Luke, four of them, including Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr, moved in 1810 to the abandoned monastery of San Isidoro in Rome. They lived a semi-monastic existence to re-create the conditions of a medieval artist's workshop. Major fresco commissions for the Casa Bartholdy between 1816 and 1817 and the Casino Massimo between 1817 and 1829 brought them international attention. By 1830 most had returned to Germany and the group had dispersed, but many went on to become influential teachers who shaped the next generation of German art, including the later Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England.

• 5. Social Critique in Medieval Costume

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  William Cobbett's History of the Protestant Reformation, published between 1824 and 1826, launched a new use for medieval imagery: social critique. Cobbett drew on John Lingard's History of England among other sources and attacked the Reformation as having transformed a once-unified England into a land of "masters and slaves", contrasting the pre-Reformation diet of meat and beef with what he portrayed as a post-Reformation diet of dry bread and oatmeal porridge.

  Thomas Carlyle pushed the critique further in Past and Present in 1843, which Oliver Elton described as "the most remarkable fruit in English literature of the medieval revival". Carlyle drew on Jocelyn de Brakelond's twelfth-century account of Samson of Tottington's abbacy at Bury St Edmunds Abbey to answer what he called the "Condition-of-England Question". He set the medieval monastery against the modern workhouse and called for a "Chivalry of Labour" built on cooperation rather than the "Cash-payment" nexus.

  John Ruskin extended the argument into architecture and political economy. In works including Modern Painters Volume II (1846), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), Ruskin connected the quality of a nation's buildings with its spiritual health. At Carlyle's urging, he adapted that thesis to economics in Unto This Last in 1860 and sketched an "Ideal Commonwealth" in Time and Tide in 1867, drawing on the medieval guild system, feudal structures, chivalry, and the church.

  The political movement Young England, led by Lord John Manners and Benjamin Disraeli in the 1840s, drew explicitly on medievalist writers including Walter Scott, Robert Southey, and Kenelm Henry Digby alongside Carlyle. It developed in parallel with the Oxford Movement, which has been defined as "medievalism in religion".

• 6. Arts, Crafts, and Brotherhood

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  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Four more members, including William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner, joined to make it a seven-person group. Their target was what they saw as the corrupting influence of Raphael and Michelangelo's Mannerist successors on academic art teaching. They singled out Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, as an example of formulaic technique. Their alternative was the abundant detail, intense colour, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish painting.

  The Arts and Crafts movement grew directly from those roots but shifted the emphasis. Inspired by the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin and spearheaded by William Morris, a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and a former apprentice to Gothic-revival architect G. E. Street, the movement turned away from aristocratic Gothic toward the idealised peasantry and medieval community, particularly of the fourteenth century. It reached its height between about 1880 and 1910.

  Morris formed Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. in 1861 to produce furnishings and furniture, often with medieval themes, for the emerging middle classes. He also wrote medieval-themed poetry and the medieval Utopia News From Nowhere in 1890. The first Arts and Crafts exhibition in the United States was held in Boston in 1897, after which local societies spread across the country. Unlike the Gothic Revival's focus on ecclesiastical and military architecture, the Arts and Crafts movement looked to rustic and vernacular medieval housing as its model.

• 7. Nationalism, Fantasy, and Neo-Medievalism

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  By the nineteenth century, medieval imagery had become a currency of European monarchical propaganda. German emperors displayed medieval costumes in public and rebuilt the great castle of the Teutonic Order at Marienburg. Ludwig II of Bavaria constructed Neuschwanstein and decorated it with scenes from Wagner's operas. In England, the Magna Carta of 1215 was invoked as the birthplace of democracy, and the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 attempted to revive medieval grandeur for the monarchy and aristocracy. Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King in 1842 and Thomas Westwood's "The Sword of Kingship" in 1866 recast contemporary themes in Arthurian settings. The same imagery later appeared in Nazi Germany's plans for extensive building in the medieval style and its attempts to revive the symbolism of the Teutonic knights, Charlemagne, and the Round Table.

  Film brought medieval imagery to the widest audiences yet. The first medieval film was also among the earliest films ever made, a 1900 depiction of Jeanne d'Arc, while the first Robin Hood film dates to 1908. Influential European productions included the German Nibelungenlied in 1924, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky in 1938, and Bergman's The Seventh Seal in 1957. Hollywood issued periodic remakes of the King Arthur, William Wallace, and Robin Hood stories, including the MGM adaptation of Ivanhoe in 1952 and the epic El Cid in 1961.

  Fantasy literature formalised medieval elements into a genre. George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin in 1872, William Morris's The Well at the World's End in 1896, and Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter in 1924 set tales in worlds drawn from medieval sources. J. R. R. Tolkien set the template for high fantasy in a pseudo-medieval setting mixed with elements of medieval folklore, and subsequent writers including Terry Pratchett in the Discworld novels have engaged with and parodied that tradition.

  The term neo-medievalism was first popularised by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1973 essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages". Hedley Bull applied the concept to international relations in 1977, arguing that a world of growing non-state actors and cross-border jurisdictions was moving toward a form of neo-medievalism that challenged the exclusive authority of the nation-state. Bruce Holsinger extended the analysis in 2007 with Neomedievalism, Conservativism and the War on Terror, identifying how George W. Bush's administration used medievalising rhetoric to characterise al-Qaeda as stateless and elusive.

• 8. Studying the Obsession

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  Medievalism as a subject of academic study came into its own in the 1970s. Louise D'Arcens, in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism published in 2016, traced the earliest scholarship on the phenomenon to Victorian specialists including Alice Chandler, whose 1971 monograph A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth Century England was published by Taylor and Francis, and Florence Boos, whose edited volume History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism appeared from Garland Publishing in 1992.

  The International Society for the Study of Medievalism was formalised in 1979 with the launch of its journal Studies in Medievalism, organised by Leslie J. Workman. By 2016, D'Arcens noted, medievalism was taught on hundreds of university courses around the world, with at least two dedicated scholarly journals: Studies in Medievalism and postmedieval.

  Eileen Joy, co-founder and co-editor of the postmedieval journal, offered a sharp reframe of the field's boundaries. She argued that the very idea of a medieval past as something that can be separated and cordoned off from other historical periods was itself a form of medievalism, and that practising medievalists should therefore pay close attention to how the Middle Ages are used and misused in contemporary discourse. That position stood in contrast to concerns expressed by Gabrielle Spiegel, then president of the American Historical Society, who worried that scholars of the historical medieval period might consider themselves licensed to intervene in contemporary uses of the term.

  Medievalism is now an annual feature at the International Medieval Congress hosted at the University of Leeds and the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, confirming that the study of the modern obsession with the Middle Ages has itself become a permanent fixture in the academic landscape.