Nineteenth-Century Medievalism

Course Description

This course was taught Spring 1999 and was aided throughout by Prof. Ann Astell, who sat in while completing a book on the representation of Joan of Arc through the ages. The class was also linked by listserv to Prof. Barbara Gelpi's class on Victorian medievalism, which she taught simultaneously at Stanford University. An international group of scholars also joined the discussion through the listserv. The course examined the emergence of medievalism from the end of the eighteenth century to the cusp of the twentieth century. Because it was coincident with the very formation of "the academy," the "mass market," and a "popular" readership, the rise of nineteenth-century medievalism allowed us to interrogate both the parameters and the methodology of a cultural studies approach. Economic analysis, political science, ideological critique, and cultural materialism helped us to determine the extensiveness of this phenomenon, as did inter-disciplinary interests—painting, architecture, interior design, political ceremony, as well as various literary genres. Throughout the course, we also kept in mind the continued function of medievalism in our own culture by screening a couple of recent films.

In addition to the course packet, the following books made up the required reading:

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford); ISBN 0-19-283440-1
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford); ISBN 0-19-282523-2
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Oxford); ISBN 0-19-283172-0
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Penguin); ISBN 0-14-042253-6
The Germ (Ashmolean Museum); ISBN 1-85444-024-1
Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford); ISBN 0-19-283386-3

• WEEK ONE: INTRODUCTIONS
  January 13, 1999

  In this first week, I will trace the emergence of medievalism in the second half of the eighteenth century, first as an antiquarian (albeit also profitable) endeavor in Percy's Reliques and Scott's Minstrelsy, then as a pop cultural phenomenon--the Gothic Revival in art, architecture, and literature. Renewal of interest in ruins and historical preservation generally will be examined as an indicator of an intellectual movement from the eighteenth-century Age of Reason to what might be deemed the nineteenth-century Age of History. We will also begin our discussion of the eighteenth-century Gothic revival by analyzing the first in the novelistic genre, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.
  TEXT
  • Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

  
  
  

• WEEK TWO: THE GOTHIC NOVEL
  January 20, 1999

  While cataloguing the basic themes of the gothic world-view (irrationalism, extreme states of emotion, the abject, ghosts, magic), we will discuss the function of the gothic novel in an age purportedly dedicated to the pursuit of reason, science, and philosophy. The gothic revival can be said to grow out of the rational pursuit of antiquarian research, but it somehow goes array. Why?
  TEXT
  • Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
  • Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
  THEORY
  • Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (Reader)
  • Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (Reader)
  HYPOTHESES
  
  
  

• WEEK THREE: THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
  January 27, 1999

  Lecture will concentrate on market dynamics during the latter half of the eighteenth-century and the much-discussed rise of the novel during this period. We will explore who the gothic novel appealed to and why. I will also provide examples of the critical reaction to the gothic tradition, including fears about a growing female readership and the effect reading novels would have on the young mind. We will also begin our discussion of the parameters and possibilities of a New Historicist approach to literature.
  TEXT
  • Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
  THEORY
  • Raymond Williams, Introduction to Culture and Society (Reader)
  • H. Aram Veeser, Introduction" to The New Historicism(Veeser)
  • Stephen Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture" (Veeser)
  • Louis A. Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture" (Veeser)
  
  
  

• WEEK FOUR: THE REIGN OF POETRY
  February 3, 1999

  A lecture will first explain changes in both the market for literature and the technologies of print reproduction in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, particularly how specific political events at this time (the Napoleonic War in particular) fueled a poetry boom in these decades. We will then discuss how these social, political, and technological changes might be affecting Scott's self-conscious representation of (another) time of transition in the Lay.
  TEXT
  • Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Reader)
  THEORY
  • Stephen Bann, "The Sense of the Past: Image, Text, and Object in the Formation of Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Veeser)
  • Marlon Ross, "Scott's Chivalric Pose: The Function of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period" (Reader)
  • Michael Gamer, "Marketing a Masculine Romance: Scott, Antiquarianism, and the Gothic" (Reader)
  HYPOTHESES
  
  
  

• WEEK FIVE: THE ROMANCE IN ROMANTICISM
  February 10, 1999

  The "high" romantic poets are often regarded as above the marketplace, but in fact they all experimented with medieval themes, the popular ballad form, and the romance genre. The lecture will discuss the popular reception of Coleridge, Keats and Byron vis-a`-vis Scott; I will also explain the rise of the Annual and the periodical review and how these mass market phenomena spell the beginning of the end of poetry's reign in the popular imagination. In discussion, we will examine individual poems closely to determine the extent to which these Romantic poets subscribe to or rework the themes and devices we've examined so far. Ann Astell will fill in our knowledge of this tendency in Romantic poetry by discussing Southey's incendiary Joan of Arc. As we discuss Byron, we will also examine the ramifications of speaking about the present through a medieval frame. To what extent can we read Byron's text as responding to and reworking what he terms in the preface "the monstrous mummeries of the middle ages"? How are the nostalgia for a golden age, on the one hand, and the horror of the gothic past, on the other, refashioned when one is speaking about the present? How should one designate Byron's political stance: conservative? radical? democratic? Can we read Byron's text as a reaction to popular disapproval of the aristocracy, the Hanoverian monarchy, and the Regency?
  TEXT
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I and II (Reader)
  • Samuel Coleridge, "The Ancient Mariner" (Reader)
  • John Keats, "Eve of St. Agnes" (Reader)
  THEORY
  • Jon Klancher, "English Romanticism and Cultural Production" (Veeser)
  TALK
  • Ann Astell, "Southey's Joan of Arc: Nationalism, Literature, and History"
  • Check out the Image of Joan of Arc by John Everett Millais (Reader 275)
  
  
  

• WEEK SIX: MEDIEVAL OTHERS
  February 17, 1999

  This week, we will discuss in more detail the gender dynamics of medievalism, particularly the phenomenon of the monster-woman. Why is it that this figure often gets cast in a medieval frame? What purposes are served by this figuration? We will also discuss the phenomenon of Romantic and especially Victorian necrophilia, with the help of Bram Dijkstra and Elisabeth Bronfen.
  TEXT
  • Samuel Coleridge, "Christabel" and "Kubla Kahn" (Reader)
  • John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (Reader)
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The Orchard-Pit"; "The Portrait" (Reader)
  • Christina Rossetti, "One Face" (in Bronfen, p. 168)
  • Edgar Allen Poe, "The Oval Portrait" (Reader)
  THEORY
  • Judith Lowder Newton, "History as Usual? Feminism and the 'New Historicism'" (Veeser)
  • Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity Chapters 2 and 3 (Reader)
  • Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body, pp. 59-75, 110-140, 168-178 (Reader)
  
  
  

• WEEK SEVEN: WHAT IS MEDIEVALISM?
  February 24, 1999

  While analyzing Scott, we will address the question of generic form throughout the week: what happens to the represented world of medievalism in the movement from poetry to the novel? For that matter, how should we designate medievalism per se--theme, mode, political unconscious? Also, how does one deal with a cultural phenomenon that is so pervasive? The lecture will concentrate on the popular phenomenon of Scott--the pirated editions, his reception in North America, and the spin-offs in the theater and the opera.
  TEXT
  • Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
  THEORY
  • Jean Franco, "The Nation as Imagined Community" (Veeser)
  • Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Reader)
  • Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (Reader)
  
  
  

• WEEK EIGHT: CHIVALRY AND THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN A LA MARX
  March 3, 1999

  Lecture will concentrate on the use of Scott by an aristocracy seeking moral sanction from medieval codes of chivalry; lecture will address the Young England Movement's appropriation of Scott and of Kinelm Digby's The Broadstone of Honour in their political opposition to the Utilitarian movement. The Eglinton Tournament will also figure prominently as an example of aristocratic appropriations of medievalism in imitation of Scott. Building on what we've seen to date, class discussion will focus on the ideological function of Scott's text: how does the work relate to questions of empire? What are the class relations represented in the text? How is the aristocracy represented? Finally, we will discuss Marxism's contribution to cultural studies.
  TEXT
  • Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
  THEORY
  • Catherine Gallagher, "Marxism and the New Historicism" (Veeser)
  • Raymond Williams, "Dominant, Residual, and Emergent" (Reader)
  • Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (Reader)
  
  
  

• WEEK NINE: BUILDING THE PAST
  March 10, 1999

  The lecture will give students a sense for just how pervasive the phenomenon of medievalism really was by illustrating its influence on art, architecture, stained glass, and government ceremony. I will also give a sense for how the Arthurian romance begins to take center stage around the 1840s and 50s thanks in large part to government sanction. Dyce's paintings for Westminster Palace and the Barry/Pugin architectural design for the new building will be examined in terms of Prince Albert's efforts to shore up the public image of the monarchy and government efforts to unify an increasingly dispersed world empire. High politics thus turns to popular culture precisely at a time when, thanks to government reform, politicians are being increasingly forced to take into account public opinion.
  TEXT
  • John Ruskin, from The Stones of Venice (Reader)
  • Thomas Carlyle, from Past and Present (Reader)
  SLIDE LECTURE
  • Pugin, Westminster Palace, William Dyce and the Gothic Revival in Architecture and Art.
  THEORY
  • Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces" (Reader)
  • Michel Foucault, "Space, Power and Knowledge" (Reader)
  • Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, Chapter VII (Reader)
  • Debra N. Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art (Reader; plates at back of article)

• WEEK TEN: SPRING VACATION--no classes

  
  

• WEEK ELEVEN: ARTHURIAN REVIVAL
  March 24, 1999

  Following our week on the political and aesthetic ramifications of medievalism, we will examine Tennyson's incredibly successful take on the Arthurian legend. Not only does Tennyson help create the popular taste for Arthurian romance in his early medieval poems, but later (as poet laureate) he also attempts to legitimate the government turn to chivalric medievalism as historical and moral legitimation for imperialism. We will also try to figure out why critical opinion turns away from Scott in the Victorian period and why medievalism, through the Arthurian romance, becomes once again the province of poetry at this time.
  TEXT
  • Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King; Alfred Tennyson, "Lady of Shalott" (Reader; also check out the images of Shalott in Reader 259, 260, 262, 277)
  THEORY
  • Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, pp. 151-57 (Reader)
  • Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "Beauty's Body" (Reader)
  
  
  

• WEEK TWELVE: ARTHURIAN TWILIGHT
  March 31, 1999

  Although Tennyson's poem could be said to be the most closely tied to national concerns and the question of imperial legitimation, it can also be read as one of the most ominous. We will examine the poem for ideological contradictions in the notions of empire and chivalric purity and we will explore the contribution the poem makes to the "Condition of England" debate. Lecture will also concentrate on the precipitous rise and fall of Tennyson's poem in critical estimation between the publication of its first version (1859) and its final installment (1885).
  TEXT
  • Tennyson, Idylls of the King; see images of Idylls and the Arthurian legend (Reader 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 278, 279)
  • William Morris, "Defence of Guenevere"; see image of Guenevere (Reader 274)
  • Robert Browning, "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'" (Reader)
  THEORY
  • Brook Thomas, "The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics" (Veeser)
  • Vincent P. Pecora, "The Limits of Local Knowledge" (Veeser)
  
  
  

• WEEK THIRTEEN: THE GERM
  April 7, 1999

  This week we will spend time analyzing a single cultural document: The Germ. As a result, we will be discussing not only different artists and media (image as well as text) but also the decisions behind and effects of The Germ's particular choices in presentation and design. William Morris' interest in book design will contribute to this discussion, as will the theoretical readings, all of which explore the effect of new technologies of reproduction on the literary artifact. The slide lecture will chart the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and the dissemination of its ideals in both art and literature. In both the poetry and the art, we will examine the ways in which the Pre-Raphaelites complicate both the Arthurian legend (in their responses to Tennyson) and the representation of the medieval period (for example, in their turn to Villon). Two tendencies in Pre-Raphaelite thought will also be explored: the socialist position which believes in culture's transformative power over society and the decadent position of "art for art's sake" which separates culture from both politics and the market.
  TEXT
  • The Germ (1850)
  • John Ruskin, "Pre-Raphaelitism" (1854)--in Reader
  • Walter Pater, "Poems by William Morris" (1868)--in Reader
  • See William Morris' A Book of Verse (1870)--on reserve in the Undergraduate Library
  THEORY
  • Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Reader)
  • J. Hillis Miller, "The Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction" (Reader)
  • Jean Baudrillard, "Precession of Simulacra" (Reader)
  A READING OF ROSSETTI'S "THE SONNET"
  
  
  

• WEEK FOURTEEN: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
  April 14, 1999

  With the showing of Coppola's Dracula, we can turn in these last weeks to cultural studies proper: the analysis of pop culture in our society today. Why are we seeing a medievalism revival today alongside a whole new cultural phenomenon: the Victorianism of Merchant-Ivory-type cinematography.
  TEXT
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula
  SCREENING
  • Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula
  THEORY
  • Garrett Stewart, "Film's Victorian Retrofit" (Reader)
  • Simon During, "Introduction" to The Cultural Studies Reader (Reader)
  • Catherine Belsey, Towards Cultural History (Reader)
  
  
  

• WEEK FIFTEEN: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA AND LATE-VICTORIAN GOTHIC
  April 21, 1999

  This week we turn to the phenomenon of the late-Victorian gothic. Why does the gothic return to prominence at this time period? What differences does the form have from the gothic revival of the eighteenth century?
  TEXT
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula
  THEORY
  • Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader (Reader)
  • Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, Chapter 10 (Reader)
  
  
  

• WEEK SIXTEEN: MEDIEVALISM TODAY
  April 28, 1999

  After viewing Monty Python's take on medievalism, we will spend the rest of the class wrapping up our discussion of the place of medievalism in pop culture today.
  FILM
  • Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail
  
  
  

Other Graduate Syllabi:

• The Technology of the Book
• Seminar in Narrative Theory

E-mail: felluga@omni.cc.purdue.edu

Dragon, flowerpole, wizard and knight images courtesy of D Creelma

Old English background and image of St. Jerome courtesy of
Steven J. Killings and University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies

Last Revised: February 9, 2002