In the 1330s, a single Italian poet named Petrarch declared that European culture had stagnated and drifted into what he called the Dark Ages, creating a historical label that would define the next seven centuries of Western thought. This was not a neutral observation of history but a deliberate rhetorical strategy to elevate the Renaissance as a new age of light. Petrarch argued that the fall of Rome in the fifth century had triggered a thousand-year decline, marked by the loss of classical Latin texts and the corruption of language in contemporary discourse. Scholars of the Renaissance, including Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo, adopted this three-tiered outline of history composed of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern to validate their own era as a rebirth. The Latin term media tempestas, meaning middle time, first appeared in 1469, while medium aevum, the Middle Ages, was not recorded until 1604. The word medieval itself did not enter the English language until the nineteenth century, proving that the concept of the Middle Ages was a much later invention than the period it described. This historical framing allowed Renaissance thinkers to position themselves as liberators from a self-imposed prison of ignorance, setting the stage for centuries of cultural debate about what the Middle Ages actually were and what they should represent.
Gothic Revival And Architecture
The Gothic Revival began in the 1740s in England as an architectural movement that would eventually reshape the skyline of the Western world. Its popularity grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century when increasingly serious and learned admirers of neo-Gothic styles sought to revive medieval forms in direct contrast to the classical styles prevalent at the time. In England, the epicentre of this revival, the movement became intertwined with deeply philosophical movements associated with a re-awakening of High Church or Anglo-Catholic self-belief. Augustus Welby Pugin, a Catholic convert, became a leading figure who produced important Gothic buildings such as Cathedrals at Birmingham and Southwark and the British Houses of Parliament in the 1840s. Large numbers of existing English churches had features such as crosses, screens and stained glass, which had been removed at the Reformation, restored or added, and most new Anglican and Catholic churches were built in the Gothic style. Viollet-le-Duc was a leading figure in the movement in France, restoring the entire walled city of Carcassonne as well as Notre-Dame and Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In America, Ralph Adams Cram was a leading force in American Gothic, with his most ambitious project the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, one of the largest cathedrals in the world, as well as Collegiate Gothic buildings at Princeton Graduate College. On a wider level, the wooden Carpenter Gothic churches and houses were built in large numbers across North America in this period, creating a visual language that connected modern life to a romanticized past.
Romanticism was a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe, gaining strength during and after the Industrial and French Revolutions. It was partly a revolt against the political norms of the Age of Enlightenment which rationalised nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature. The name Romanticism itself was derived from the medieval genre chivalric romance, contributing to the strong influence of such romances, disproportionate to their actual showing among medieval literature, on the image of the Middle Ages. A knight, a distressed damsel, and a dragon became the standard pictorial conjuring of the time. The Romantic interest in the medieval can particularly be seen in the illustrations of English poet William Blake and the Ossian cycle published by Scottish poet James Macpherson in 1762, which inspired both Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen in 1773 and the young Walter Scott. The latter's Waverley Novels, including Ivanhoe in 1819 and Quentin Durward in 1823, helped popularise and shape views of the medieval era. The same impulse manifested itself in the translation of medieval national epics into modern vernacular languages, including the Nibelungenlied in 1782 in Germany, the Lay of the Cid in 1799 in Spain, Beowulf in 1833 in England, and the Song of Roland in 1837 in France. The Nazarenes, a group of early nineteenth-century German Romantic painters, reacted against Neoclassicism and hoped to return to art which embodied spiritual values. They sought inspiration in artists of the Late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, rejecting what they saw as the superficial virtuosity of later art. The movement was originally formed in 1809 by six students at the Vienna Academy and called the Brotherhood of St. Luke or Lukasbund, after the patron saint of medieval artists. In 1810 four of them, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Ludwig Vogel and Johann Konrad Hottinger moved to Rome, where they occupied the abandoned monastery of San Isidoro and were joined by Philipp Veit, Peter von Cornelius, Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld, Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow and a loose grouping of other German artists. They met up with Austrian romantic landscape artist Joseph Anton Koch, who became an unofficial tutor to the group, and in 1827 they were joined by Joseph von Führich. In Rome the group lived a semi-monastic existence, as a way of re-creating the nature of the medieval artist's workshop. Religious subjects dominated their output and two major commissions for the Casa Bartholdy in 1816 and the Casino Massimo in 1817 allowed them to attempt a revival of the medieval art of fresco painting and gained then international attention. However, by 1830 all except Overbeck had returned to Germany and the group had disbanded, though many Nazareners became influential teachers in German art academies and were a major influence on the later English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Social Commentary And Labor
Medievalism eventually moved from the confines of fiction into the immediate realm of social commentary as a means of critiquing life in the Industrial Era. An early work of this kind was William Cobbett's History of the Protestant Reformation from 1824 to 1826, which was influenced by his reading of John Lingard's History of England from 1819 to 1830. Cobbett attacked the Reformation as having divided a once-unified and wealthy England into masters and slaves, a very few enjoying the extreme of luxury, and millions doomed to the extreme of misery, while decrying how this land of meat and beef was changed, all of a sudden into a land of dry bread and oatmeal porridge. In the Victorian era, the principal representatives of this school were Thomas Carlyle and his disciple John Ruskin. In Carlyle's Past and Present in 1843, which Oliver Elton called the most remarkable fruit in English literature of the medieval revival, the modern workhouse is contrasted with the medieval monastery. He draws on Jocelyn de Brakelond's twelfth-century account of Samson of Tottington's abbotcy of Bury St Edmunds Abbey to answer the Condition-of-England Question, calling for a Chivalry of Labour based on cooperation and fraternity rather than competition and Cash-payment for the sole nexus, and for the leadership of paternalistic Captains of Industry. Along with medievalist writers Walter Scott, Robert Southey, and Kenelm Henry Digby, Carlyle was among the important literary influences on Young England, a parliamentary experiment in romanticism which created considerable stir during the eighteen-forties, led by Lord John Manners and Benjamin Disraeli. Young England developed contemporaneously with the Oxford Movement, which has been defined as medievalism in religion. Ruskin connected the quality of a nation's architecture with its spiritual health, comparing the originality and freedom of medieval art with the mechanistic sterility of modernism in such works as Modern Painters, Volume II in 1846, The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 and The Stones of Venice from 1851 to 1853. At the urging of Carlyle, Ruskin, who identified as both a violent Tory of the old school and a Communist of the old school, adapted this thesis to his theory of political economy in Unto This Last in 1860, and to his Ideal Commonwealth in Time and Tide in 1867, the characteristics of which were derived from the Middle Ages: the guild system, the feudal system, chivalry, and the church.
Pre-Raphaelites And Arts And Crafts
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three founders were soon joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form a seven-member brotherhood. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art. Hence the name Pre-Raphaelite. In particular, they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, believing that his broad technique was a sloppy and formulaic form of academic Mannerism. In contrast, they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. The Arts and Crafts movement was an aesthetic movement, directly influenced by the Gothic Revival and the Pre-Raphaelites, but moving away from aristocratic, nationalist and high Gothic influences to an emphasis on the idealised peasantry and medieval community, particularly of the fourteenth century, often with socialist political tendencies and reaching its height between about 1880 and 1910. The movement was inspired by the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin and was spearheaded by the work of William Morris, a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and a former apprentice to Gothic-revival architect G. E. Street. He focused on the fine arts of textiles, wood and metal work and interior design. Morris also produced medieval and ancient themed poetry, beside socialist tracts and the medieval Utopia News From Nowhere in 1890. Morris formed Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861, which produced and sold furnishings and furniture, often with medieval themes, to the emerging middle classes. The first Arts and Crafts exhibition in the United States was held in Boston in 1897 and local societies spread across the country, dedicated to preserving and perfecting disappearing craft and beautifying house interiors. Whereas the Gothic revival had tended to emulate ecclesiastical and military architecture, the arts and crafts movement looked to rustic and vernacular medieval housing. The creation of aesthetically pleasing and affordable furnishings proved highly influential on subsequent artistic and architectural developments.
Romantic Nationalism And Politics
By the nineteenth century real and pseudo-medieval symbols were a currency of European monarchical state propaganda. German emperors dressed up in and proudly displayed medieval costumes in public, and they rebuilt the great medieval castle and spiritual home of the Teutonic Order at Marienburg. Ludwig II of Bavaria built a fairy-tale castle at Neuschwanstein in 1868 and decorated it with scenes from Wagner's operas, another major Romantic image maker of the Middle Ages. The same imagery would be used in Nazi Germany in the mid-twentieth century to promote German national identity with plans for extensive building in the medieval style and attempts to revive the virtues of the Teutonic knights, Charlemagne and the Round Table. In England, the Middle Ages were trumpeted as the birthplace of democracy because of the Magna Carta of 1215. In the reign of Queen Victoria there was considerable interest in things medieval, particularly among the ruling classes. The notorious Eglinton Tournament of 1839 attempted to revive the medieval grandeur of the monarchy and aristocracy. Medieval fancy dress became common in this period at royal and aristocratic masquerades and balls, and individuals and families were painted in medieval costume. These trends inspired a nineteenth-century genre of medieval poetry that included Idylls of the King in 1842 by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson and The Sword of Kingship in 1866 by Thomas Westwood, which recast specifically modern themes in the medieval settings of Arthurian romance. This political use of the medieval period demonstrated how easily historical narratives could be manipulated to serve contemporary nationalistic agendas, transforming the Middle Ages into a tool for state-building and social cohesion.
Neo-Medievalism And Popular Culture
Neo-medievalism is a neologism that was first popularized by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1973 essay Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Eco wrote, Thus we are at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination. The term has no clear definition but has since been used to describe the intersection between popular fantasy and medieval history as can be seen in computer games such as MMORPGs, films and television, neo-medieval music, and popular literature. Film has been one of the most significant creators of images of the Middle Ages since the early twentieth century. The first medieval film was also one of the earliest films ever made, about Jeanne d'Arc in 1900, while the first to deal with Robin Hood dates to as early as 1908. Influential European films, often with a nationalist agenda, included the German Nibelungenlied in 1924, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky in 1938 and Bergman's The Seventh Seal in 1957, while in France there were many Joan of Arc sequels. Hollywood adopted the medieval as a major genre, issuing periodic remakes of the King Arthur, William Wallace and Robin Hood stories, adapting to the screen such historical romantic novels as Ivanhoe in 1952 by MGM, and producing epics in the vein of El Cid in 1961. More recent revivals of these genres include Robin Hood Prince of Thieves in 1991, The 13th Warrior in 1999 and The Kingdom of Heaven in 2005. While the folklore that fantasy drew on for its magic and monsters was not exclusively medieval, elves, dragons, and unicorns, among many other creatures, were drawn from medieval folklore and romance. Earlier writers in the genre, such as George MacDonald in The Princess and the Goblin in 1872, William Morris in The Well at the World's End in 1896 and Lord Dunsany in The King of Elfland's Daughter in 1924, set their tales in fantasy worlds clearly derived from medieval sources, though often filtered through later views. In the first half of the twentieth century pulp fiction writers like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith helped popularise the sword and sorcery branch of fantasy, which often utilised prehistoric and non-European settings beside elements of the medieval. In contrast, authors such as E. R. Eddison and particularly J. R. R. Tolkien, set the type for high fantasy, normally based in a pseudo-medieval setting, mixed with elements of medieval folklore. Other fantasy writers have emulated such elements, and films, role-playing and computer games also took up this tradition. Modern fantasy writers have taken elements of the medieval from these works to produce some of the most commercially successful works of fiction of recent years, sometimes pointing to the absurdities of the genre, as in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, or mixing it with the modern world as in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.
Living History And Academic Study
In the second half of the twentieth century interest in the medieval was increasingly expressed through form of re-enactment, including combat reenactment, re-creating historical conflict, armour, arms and skill, as well as living history which re-creates the social and cultural life of the past, in areas such as clothing, food and crafts. The movement has led to the creation of medieval markets and Renaissance fairs, from the late 1980s, particularly in Germany and the United States of America. The study of medievalism emerged as a distinct academic field when Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin and David Metzger noted in their introduction to Studies in Medievalism IX in 1997 their sense that medievalism had been perceived by some medievalists as a poor and somewhat whimsical relation of more serious medieval studies. In The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism in 2016, editor Louise D'Arcens noted that some of the earliest medievalism scholarship was by Victorian specialists including Alice Chandler with her monograph A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth Century England in 1971, and Florence Boos, with her edited volume History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism in 1992. D'Arcens proposed that the 1970s saw the discipline of medievalism become an academic area of research in its own right, with the International Society for the Study of Medievalism formalised in 1979 with the publication of its Studies In Medievalism journal, organised by Leslie J. Workman. D'Arcens notes that by 2016 medievalism was taught as a subject on hundreds of university courses around the world, and there were at least two scholarly journals dedicated to medievalism studies: Studies in Medievalism and postmedieval. Clare Monagle has argued that political medievalism has caused medieval scholars to repeatedly reconsider whether medievalism is a part of the study of the Middle Ages as a historical period. Monagle explains how in 1977 the International Relations scholar Hedley Bull coined the term New Medievalism to describe the world as a result of the rising powers of non-state actors in society such as terrorist groups, corporations, or supra-state organizations such as the European Economic Community which, due to new technologies, boundaries of jurisdiction that cross national borders, and shifts in private wealth challenged the exclusive authority of the state. Monagle documents how in 2007, medieval scholar Bruce Holsinger published Neomedievalism, Conservativism and the War on Terror, which identified how George W. Bush's administration relied on medievalising rhetoric to identify al-Qaeda as dangerously fluid, elusive, and stateless. Monagle documents how Gabrielle Spiegel, then president of the American Historical Society expressed concern at the idea that scholars of the historical medieval period might consider themselves licensed to in some way to intervene in contemporary medievalism, as to do so conflates two very different historical periods. Eileen Joy, co-founder and co-editor of the postmedieval journal, responded to Spiegel that the idea of a medieval past itself, as something that can be demarcated and cordoned off from other historical time periods, was and is of itself a form of medievalism. Therefore, practising medievalists should absolutely pay heed to the use and abuse of the Middle Ages in contemporary discourse. Medievalism topics are now annual features at the major medieval conferences the International Medieval Congress hosted at the University of Leeds, UK, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. Exhibitions about medievalism have included New Medievalist Visions at King's College London from the 30th of January to the 22nd of May 2013 and Juggling the Middle Ages at Dumbarton Oaks from the 16th of October 2018 to the 3rd of March 2019.