Seki: The Rhetoric of Retelling Old Romances

Yoshiko Seki. The Rhetoric of Retelling Old Romances: Medievalist Poetry by Alfred Tennyson and William Morris.  Japan: EIHŌSHA, 2015.

Reviewed by Nicole Lobdell (nicole.lobdell@lmc.gatech.edu)

Yoshiko Seki’s The Rhetoric of Retelling Old Romances: Medievalist Poetry by Alfred Tennyson and William Morris offers readers a focused consideration of the rhetoric that canonical Victorian poets Tennyson and Morris developed in their later medievalist poetry. In her introduction, Seki introduces two concepts, medievalism and Victorianism, that underpin her study, and argues that Victorianists cannot “simply [assume] that the mid-nineteenth century was congenial for the medievalists even if it is also true that medievalism and the Arthurian revival were a genuine cultural phenomenon” (10). To complicate her initial premise further, Seki also points to Victorian complaints that the age was “unpoetical,” implicating the Victorian age’s perceived affinity for prose over poetry. So, why in an age that is both anti-medievalist and unpoetical would two major poets such as Tennyson and Morris turn to medievalist themes and Arthurian legends for inspiration, and how did these poets retell such legends in the nineteenth century? These questions drive Seki’s work, and at the initial outset of her study, they are compelling questions to ask.

The structure of Seki’s monograph retains markers of a dissertation project completed before 2010, namely the choice of authors, division of chapters, and the lack of recent research criticism and secondary sources from the last five years. In the acknowledgements, Seki owns that the project has taken eight years to complete; in reading the study, however, it becomes apparent that most of her critical research ends in approximately 2008, with little to no discussion of research published after 2010. There were surges of scholarly interest in Victorian medievalism in the 1960s-70s and again in the 1990s, and it is from these decades that Seki draws the bulk of her secondary sources. Although the premise of her study is compelling, its lack of engagement with current research is disappointing, and one senses there are missed opportunities to expand the argument in new and interesting directions. Her study would make a useful overview of secondary materials and how medievalism and Victorianism came together at two different periods of the twentieth century, and perhaps her work indicates that we are fast approaching a renewal of such interests.

Four of the chapters were published previously in 2005, 2007, and 2008, respectively, as articles in journals such as the Osaka Literary Review. Three of the Morris chapters are comprised of these articles, and, incidentally, it is these chapters that are the more tightly constructed, more tenacious, and more daring in their assertions. The chapters devoted to Tennyson are less evolved and less exacting; the writing is less demanding and less precise than that of the Morris chapters. Perhaps this stems from the sheer volume of Tennyson materials that Seki endeavors to cover in those devoted chapters.

The Tennyson portion of the study is divided into three compositional moments of the idylls: 1859, 1869, and 1885. The author’s purpose is to examine how the idylls “took on different ‘glancing colours’ in every iteration through successive publication” and in what ways the poet changed his plans for composition as the result of outside influences including reviewers’ and readers’ responses and his nomination as Poet Laureate (46-8). This observation, however, is not new. In 1872, Swinburne sneeringly, and famously, renamed “The Morte d’Arthur” (1833), Tennyson’s poem on the death of Arthur, as “The Morte d’Albert, or Idylls of the Prince Consort,” a comment on Tennyson’s position as Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria. Seki further divides the chapters devoted to Tennyson into three smaller sections: “the cultural climate in which Victorian poets wrote their works … their process of composition, and the reception of their works by contemporary critics and the reading public” (13).

Seki’s plan is ambitious, and her choice of Tennyson’s Idylls is a compelling one. Generally, the Idylls are not the preferred choice of scholars interested in Tennyson’s medievalist poetry; they are frequently passed over for the more popular poems such as “The Lady of Shalott.” Additionally, the complicated composition and publication history of the Idylls contributes to their overall incoherence as a unified set of poems. In 1855-56, for example, Tennyson composed “Enid,” which he published privately in 1857 and then published publicly in 1859 as “Enid.” In 1869, he expanded it and retitled it “Geraint and Enid”; in 1873, he divided it into two poems, which received their final titles as “The Marriage of Geraint” and “Geraint and Enid” in 1888. To help readers maneuver this history, Seki includes a detailed set of date charts in the appendix, which demonstrate Tennyson returning and revising works he composed decades earlier. The chronological, linear argument, which Seki relies upon, is enticing but ultimately a false one that goes against the point she attempts to argue – namely, Tennyson’s construction of a plural present. Not interested in the past or the future of Camelot, Tennyson is concerned solely with iterating it in the present moment. Unlike Malory, Tennyson returns to the Arthurian romances in order to project moments of great social and cultural change in Victorian England. In effect, Tennyson produces a world of Camelots that exist simultaneously together in the present moment – a plural present.

For Seki, these moments of great change included the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the changing roles of women in society. “In the first four Idylls [1859],” she writes, “[Tennyson] focused on the heroines of the romance so as to deal with the question of women’s roles in society. He handled the conflict between science and religion in the next Holy Grail and Other Poems” (91). Seki contrasts the female characters in Tennyson’s earlier poems with those of the later Idylls: “While the ladies in the early poems are isolated from their society and are found in a melancholic condition, the four heroines in the Idylls are actively involved in the world around them by the use of their own voice” (61). Seki bases some of her reasoning on the fact that in 1850, Tennyson had succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, and that perhaps this shift in portrayals of women was due to his new role. This interpretation is certainly a possibility, and Seki suggests that Tennyson, compelled by his reviewers, was attempting to respond to the cultural moment regarding women’s rights. She argues that Guenevere’s “self-defensive monologue shows us her mentality, where she struggles to build a medieval world by recounting an allegorical story and by recalling her cherished memories of earlier days” (119). So, even though Guenevere’s dramatic monologue does not follow the traditional rules of Victorian dramatic monologues, it creates an alternate, independent world within the Arthurian legend for Guenevere.

The argument over gender and poetic form is one of the strengths of Seki’s volume. One wishes, however, that Seki had engaged more fully the feminist reading at which she hints. A fuller discussion of Tennyson’s female-centric medievalist poetry alongside other Victorian poets, namely female Victorian poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning who composed at the same cultural moments as Tennyson and Morris and incorporated similar medieval and Arthurian imagery, themes, and characters into her poetry, would be a welcome addition to the study. The choice to focus on Tennyson and Morris, two prolific and canonical Victorian poets, is never justified beyond the facts that they both wrote long narrative poems, had widespread readerships, were interested in the Arthurian romances, attempted grand epics, and had similar dates for composition. One feels that Seki is constantly scratching at the surface, attempting to cover an expansive argument rather than delving into specific depths, a fact reflected in the brevity of the volume.

In the second half of the volume, Seki turns to William Morris’s poetry and aesthetics. She argues that Morris’s early poems on Arthurian motifs, ranging from lyric, narrative, soliloquy, and verse drama, are his etude pieces that reflect the influences of Tennyson and Browning on Morris’s evolution as a poet. To support her claim, she offers a comparative reading of Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad” (1842), Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855), and Morris’s Galahad poems from The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), arguing that Morris blends the secular version of Galahad from Browning’s poem with the “iconographical figure” from Tennyson’s portrayal (125). Her research demonstrates that Morris “created a new Galahad … by blending medieval romance with the medieval drama cycle” (125).

The final two chapters examine Morris’s poetics as laid out in his epic poem The Earthly Paradise, which appeared a decade following The Defence of Guenevere and offered retellings of popular myths and legends. Modern critics including F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot criticized Morris’s romanticism and influenced Morris scholarship for decades, downplaying Morris’s poetry as escapism. Following Jerome McGann’s lead, Seki argues for a reevaluation of Morris’s poetics within the “original context of Victorian poetics” (139). Seki reconstructs that context by considering Morris’s original plans for an illustrated edition of The Earthly Paradise, with the physical housing of the poem mirroring its poetic scaffolding. Although such an edition never came to fruition, Morris’s aesthetics influenced other writers including Walter Pater.

The concluding chapters of The Rhetoric of Retelling Old Romances position William Morris as a lynch pin connecting Tennyson’s medievalist poetry to Pater’s aesthetics. One of Seki’s strengths is her ability to generate promising, new connections through big claims, such as those proposed in the chapters devoted to Morris’s poetry. One of the weaknesses, however, is the lack of specific and thorough follow through that takes the established criticism in new and unexpected directions. At times, the author’s heavy reliance on summaries of earlier criticisms can make her distinct, original contributions to the field difficult to discern. The volume has problems with organization and cohesion of the different critical threads, but these may stem from the fragmented nature of the material (as Seki demonstrates in her discussion of composition and publication histories) compounded by the critical disagreements between scholars over the past century. Readers of this volume will find it a useful distillation of the complex and nuanced critical arguments that surround Tennyson’s and Morris’s medievalist poetry.

Nicole Lobdell

Georgia Institute of Technology

Ashton, ed., Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture

Gail Ashton, ed.  Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture.  London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Reviewed by Teresa Rupp (rupp@msmary.edu)

The formulation of the Middle Ages as the medium aevum, “the time in the middle,” presupposes that its time is past and the era is dead.  The discipline of Medievalism Studies challenges this notion by taking modern uses of the Middle Ages as its (seemingly paradoxical) subject.  The title of this collection, Medieval Afterlives, takes this re-conceptualization one step further by stressing, as editor Gail Ashton puts it, “living medievalisms” (4; emphasis in original).   The idea is thought-provoking and the title is apt.  So apt, in fact, that Ashton already used it for an earlier essay collection, Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, co-edited with Daniel T. Kline and published by Palgrave MacMillan in its New Middle Ages series in 2012 (and reviewed by Medievally Speaking in 2013: http://medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/07/ashton-and-kline-eds-medieval.html).  

The new Medieval Afterlives is a collection of 29 essays written by 33 contributors (a few were co-authored) divided into 5 sections.  Ashton informs us in her introduction that she took the section headings from the song titles on the album Avalon, by the British band Roxy Music (2).  So Part 1 is headed “True to Life: In the Performance,” and includes essays on present-day live performances, whether theatrical (the musical Spamalot, modern-day revivals of medieval religious drama, or the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of the Canterbury Tales), operatic (contemporary operas with medieval themes or plots), pedagogical (using medievalism in the classroom) or athletic (jousting at Medieval Times restaurants).  Part 2, titled, “To Turn You On: The Pleasures of Texts—Film, TV, Gaming,” would also seem to concern performances, but these are viewed through the medium of a screen—something that has to be “turned on.”  This section includes articles on medieval film, one specifically on film adaptations of Beowulf, on the BBC TV show Merlin and on the BBC adaptation of Canterbury Tales, on Tolkien’s afterlife both on film and in video games, and on medieval video games in general.  The song “More Than This” titles part 3, with the subtitle “Reimaginings and Reappropriations.” This section includes essays on new artistic creations with medieval inspiration, such as translations and retellings of Chaucer into various modern languages,  contemporary poetry, Young Adult novels set in the Middle Ages, and medievalist Australian literature.   Also included here are essays on the modern cult of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and on Arthurian tourism.  Iconic medieval figures and texts are the subject of part 4, “Avalon: Icons and Artefacts.”  Here we find essays on Arthurian Young Adult novels, on New Age and Neopagan religions, and on the afterlives of the medieval Templar, of Malory, and of Robin Hood.  Apparently Harry Potter has become an icon like Arthur or Robin Hood also, because this section also includes an essay on medievalism and Harry Potter.  The final section, “The Space Between:  New Media and Fandom,” explores medievalist involvement in digital media, such as the world of Harry Potter fandom, digitized manuscripts, and the creation of medieval memes; this is also the place for essays on Dantean and Arthurian comics.

One could certainly quibble with some of these organizational choices.  For example, why are the comics essays in part 5? Comics are not “new media”; they’re over a century old. Why weren’t these placed in part 3, with the other “Reimaginings and Reappropriations,” or, since the comics discussed are based on Dante and the Arthurian tradition, why not in part 4, with the other “Icons and Artefacts”?  Couldn’t Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe be better considered “Icons and Artefacts” rather  than “reimaginings and reappropriations”?  Isn’t traveling to Tintagel in search of Arthurian legends a form of performance?  Ashton admits that “the section headings are neither defining nor circumscribing” (5), which may be making a virtue out of necessity (or, to use a more contemporary image, making a bug into a feature).  But organizing a diverse collection such as this is notoriously difficult, and for the most part the categories work.

I wish to do more than quibble, however, with the documentation in the essays.  Ashton explains that she directed the contributors to write “in a clear lively style as free of academic apparatus as they could make it” (5).  I applaud the requirement of “clear lively style”; I cannot fathom why academic prose traditionally prefers the reverse (unclear and deadly).  I approve of writing with a distinctive authorial voice that reveals the writer’s personality.  But if by “free of academic apparatus” Ashton meant “lacking clear, complete, consistent documentation,” then we part ways.  Ashton continues, “mindful of the need to streamline a large and potentially unwieldy volume, we offer a Select Bibliography rather than the traditional catch-all to be read in conjunction with chapter endnotes and Keynote Works (see accompanying website)” (5).  This says to me that any sources used in an individual article should be cited in that article’s endnotes; the “Select Bibliography” presumably includes only significant works, perhaps those cited in multiple articles that might be seen as essential to the field.  It’s unclear to me what the difference between a “Select Bibliography” and “Keynote Works” might be.

Missing from Ashton’s description of the approach to documentation taken in this volume is any mention of parenthetical citations.  Yet several of the articles employ them along with the endnotes.  When I see a parenthetical citation, I expect it to refer to a list of Works Cited or a Reference List.  In this collection, the Select Bibliography would appear to fulfill this function—except that it doesn’t, at least not consistently.  The essays that use parenthetical citation take a variety of approaches.  Several essays use endnotes for the first reference to a source, then parenthetical citations for subsequent references, a practice mandated by no citation system that I am aware of.  Others employ other strategies. For example, some, but not all, of the works referred to parenthetically in Rogerson’s essay on the afterlives of medieval religious drama in England are listed in the Select Bibliography. It turns out that most of them are listed in a separate list of works for “Further Reading” found after the endnotes to this essay—but one, a reference to Davis 1970 (41), is in neither location.  Barrington and Hsy’s essay on “Global Chaucers” includes no endnotes; the reader is referred to the authors’ own website, https://globalchaucers.wordpress.com.  There are some parenthetical citations that do refer to works in the Select Bibliography; this, however, is divided into Primary and Secondary Sources, so the reader must first determine to which category the cited work belongs (not always easy in a work like this).  The cumulative effect of these varied approaches is confusion.  When I encounter a parenthetical reference, where should I look for its full citation—should I scan up the endnotes until I find the first reference?  Is there a list of works at the end of the essay?  Should I look in the Bibliography at the back of the book?  Perhaps it’s a “Keynote Work” and I can find it on the web, or maybe the author has her own website.  A reader might well give up long before exhausting all these possibilities.

A reader seeking to trace sources used in two of these essays would become even more frustrated. Louise D’Arcens’ “Australian Medievalism” reverses the order some of her colleagues use; she gives a parenthetical reference to a book by Brian Andrew first (178); only two pages later does she have an endnote with the full reference to Andrew’s book (180).  D’Arcens discusses two Australian novels in consecutive paragraphs (179-80).  The first one, An Australian Girl by Catherine Martin, is found in the Select Bibliography; the second, Romance of a Station by Rosa Praed, is not—but she gets an endnote.  Furthermore, D’Arcens’ endnotes are arranged last name first, which is contrary both to all style guides and to common sense—the only reason to put the last name first is when a list is alphabetical (as in a Bibliography), which footnotes and endnotes are not.  (She’s not alone in this practice—seven others in this collection also do it.)  D’Arcens uses a few websites, which she parenthetically references using this nonsensical phrase:  “(website:  see reading)” (examples on 177, 178, 179).

The worst offender, however, is Renee Ward’s essay “Harry Potter and Medievalism” (263-74).  I read this article with great anticipation, since I teach a course called “Harry Potter and the Middle Ages” and was interested not only in what she had to say but also in her sources, which might be useful for my class.  So I was extra disappointed to discover that Ward parenthetically cites works with no full reference anywhere—not in the endnotes, not in a reference list at the end of the article, not in the Select Bibliography, not on a website.  Her references to Rowling’s works, however, are a hybrid—a parenthetical reference with an endnote attached to it, like this:  (Rowling 1997, p. 77).²  I would not let one of my students get away with this kind of carelessness.

These criticisms may seen nitpicky, but proper documentation is a sine qua non of careful scholarship—no matter how “clear and lively” the style.  It is part of an editor’s job to be nitpicky; this editor needed to edit with a heavier hand.  From a book that costs 100 euros, I expect better.

I also expected better of the book’s accompanying website.  Ashton claims that “the print volume and accompanying integral website are conceived together, as part of a consciously more associative, less authoritative, dialogue” (5; emphasis in original).  It might be associative and less authoritative, but it’s not very well done.  The URL provided in the introduction, http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/medieval-afterlives, takes you to the publisher’s page to purchase the book.  On that page, under the heading “Online Resources,” are six links: “Introduction and Medievalist Poem”; “Medieval Mystery Plays”; “Favourite Medievalisms”; “Blogs, Interviews, Reviews”; “Keynote Works, Libraries and Manuscripts”; and “Medieval Heritage and Pilgrimage Walks.”   All turn out to be PDFs—essentially, text files (well, all except “Medieval Mystery Plays,” which yielded a “not found” error).  None of the PDFs has menus at the top or any internal links, so the user has no idea of what’s contained in the file without laboriously paging down.  And I do mean “laboriously”—these files range from 20 pages to 58 pages long.  Moreover, web references found in the PDFs are not formatted as links, so what’s the point of putting this material on the web?  Although there is some interesting and valuable material buried in these files, it is poorly formatted and poorly organized.  The companion website is, to say the least, a missed opportunity.

Despite the weaknesses of the documentation and the website, I found the essays themselves to be stimulating and informative.  The strength of Medieval Afterlives is its variety and breadth.  The contributors find medieval afterlives in traditional media, like literature, theatre, and film, as well as new media, such as comic books and video games.  Literary examples include Young Adult fiction (Angela Jane Weisl, “Coming of Age in the Middle Ages:  The Quest for Identify in Medieval Novels for Young Adults,” 167-76; Ann F. Howey, “Medievalism and Heriodism in Arthurian Literature for Young People,” 213-222).  Performance is broadly defined to encompass not only plays and operas but also classroom teaching and jousting.  European and American medievalisms are well represented, but geographical diversity is provided by essays on medievalism in Australia (by Louise D’Arcens, 177-86) and on translations of Chaucer into Danish, Afrikaans, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese (Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy, “Global Chaucers,” 147-156). Other essays demonstrate that medievalism can be found in unexpected spaces, such as tourism (Fiona Tolhurst, “Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as Contemporary Cult Figures,” 187-99; Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein, “Conjuring the Ghosts of Camelot:  Tintagel and the Medievalism of Heritage Tourism,” 200-210) and religion (Karolyn Kinane, “New Age and Neopagan Medievalisms,” 223-33).

The essays also take a variety of approaches to these various media and genres.  Some are descriptive, such as Lesley Coote’s “Survey of Twenty-First Century ‘Medieval’ Film” (103-113).  Others are explanatory, such as Daniel T. Kline’s “Contemporary Neo-Medieval Digital Gaming:  An Overview of Genre” (93-102).  I now know the differences between Role-Playing games (RPG), Real-Time Strategy (RTS) and Turn-Based Strategy  (TBS) games, Action-Adventure games, and Simulation games (sims),  and how medieval games fit into the categories.  Similarly, Amanda K. Allen’s “Social Networking, Participatory Culture and the Fandom World of Harry Potter” (277-290) serves as an introduction to the types of texts created by fans, including fanfiction, Wizard Wrock (fan-created music), fanvids (fan-created music), fan-created images and GIFs, and role-playing, both LARP (live-action role-playing) and internet-based.  A Star Trek fan in my youth, I was aware of the existence of fan fiction, but my vocabulary has now been enriched by the terms “fanon” (fans’ additions to the authorial canon), “ship” (short for relationship), OTP (one true pairing), AU (alternate universe), and OOC (out of character).  Still other essays are interpretive. Rogerson, for example, argues in “Medieval Religious Plays in England” (32-47) that present-day performances of the York and Chester mystery plays can answer questions about their original performance.  In “Medieval Times: Tournaments and Jousting in Twenty-First-Century North America” (67-77), Elizabeth Emery argues that these practices “reveal a particularly North American fascination with the Middle Ages, marked by anxieties about class, gender and economics” (68).

Anyone who loves studying and teaching the Middle Ages and medievalism will find something of value in this collection.  I expect that even readers considerably more in tune with contemporary popular culture than I will be exposed to new varieties of medievalism.  Maybe someone knows a lot about movies but is unfamiliar with video games; someone else might be a serious Harry Potter fan but never picked up a graphic novel.  Although only one essay is explicitly pedagogical—Meriem Pagès’ “You Can’t Do This to Disney!  Popular Medievalisms in the Classroom” (58-66), anyone who uses medievalism in their classes will find a wealth of potential material in this collection.   Whenever I came across something useful for my own teaching or research, or just a striking sentence, I marked the page with a post-it flag; by the time I’d finished, the top edge of my book was bristling with flags.

Ashton celebrates the “open access” to knowledge of the “democratic electronic dialogues that proliferate all over the web” (4).  This attitude informs the approach taken by the scope of this volume and by its willingness to challenge some of the stuffier customs of  academic culture.  I am very sympathetic to this attitude.  I think scholarship should be inclusive, not exclusionary; welcoming, not offputting.  But that does not preclude providing careful, proper documentation or producing a well-designed and well-executed website.  Ashton notes that the hallmarks of the virtual world are “collaboration, interdisciplinary, popular” (4).  Medieval Afterlives achieves two out of three—but then why do the educational backgrounds of the contributors show such disciplinary homogeneity?  Perusal of the contributor biographies (333-38), supplemented with a little google searching, reveals that of the 33 authors in the collection, 30 either work in or were trained the field of literature.  Ashton hints at a volume two (7); perhaps next time she could invite a historian or two to participate.  She ends her introduction by hoping the reader has an “open heart and creative mind” (7), which I think is a good recipe for any student, teacher, or scholar.

Teresa Rupp

Mount St. Mary’s University

Matthews: Medievalism: A Critical History

David Matthews. Medievalism: A Critical History. D.S. Brewer: Cambridge, 2015.

Reviewed by Julia M. Smith (julia482@gatech.edu)

In his well-researched book, Medievalism: A Critical History, David Matthews provides a foundational study for the multidisciplinary field of medievalism studies. As a foundational study, Matthews focuses on explaining the similarities and differences between medievalism and medieval studies.  Should the two forms of scholarship be severed into two separate disciplines or treated equally within one comprehensive discipline? Medievalism is defined as “the  ‘process of creating the Middle Ages’ and ‘the study not of the Middle Ages themselves but of the scholars, artists, and writers who…constructed the idea of the Middle Ages that we inherited’” (7), a definition provided by Leslie J. Workman. In contrast, medieval studies concerns just “the period’s literatures, languages, history, architecture, wars, religions and people, from peasants to popes” (1). As recent conference presentations and journals such as Studies in Medievalism can attest, the study of the medieval era is routinely juxtaposed with studies of the uptake of the Middle Ages after the era ended.  The teaching of medieval studies has likewise been affected. Rather than have students read chivalric texts alone, professors and scholars often provide students with an opportunity to see how these stories, themes, and ideals manifest in current remediated works based on Robin Hood, White Queen, and Game of Thrones (film, television shows, graphic novels and books).

While his work is not exhaustive (and it can’t be), Matthews chooses to explore the field at points where strong interest and movement in medievalism erupted rather than a linear progression through a history of the field. As Matthews puts it, he offers “a meta-commentary on the study of medievalism of a kind which up until now has been lacking” (ix). To discuss the multi-disciplinary nature of the medievalism, his book is arranged around specific cultural themes such as time, space, self, and scholarship. The book also focuses on several main historical eras—1600s acquisition of antiquities, 1840s rise of interest in the medieval during the Victorian era, WWI, and decline of medieval studies in late 20^th century concurrent to a rise in interest in medievalism.  These classifications point to moments where medievalism gained traction in the public sphere--art, architecture, film, literature.  In other words, audiences less familiar with the material may be initially confused by the sheer number of ways medievalism can be arranged, but that is the point: “one major problem that confronts medievalism studies is the sheer diversity of material” (35).

For scholars uncertain of the parameters, which make up medievalism as a discipline, Matthews has advice.  He argues that thus far, medievalism as a discipline and its specific methods of inquiry have not been defined. Rather medievalism typically operates more as a study of a subject such as medievalist art or medievalist architecture.  Some effort has been made to describe medievalism as a discipline by Umberto Eco; however Eco’s classifications are not clearly defined and blur into one another.  In addition, Eco appears to be taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to the concept.  In response to the need to classify the possibilities and limitations of medievalism, Matthews treats the subject as a “discourse, which can appear to greater or lesser degrees in cultural works” (37).  He proposes that scholarship might view studies of the Middle Ages “as it was,” “as it might have been,” “as it never was,” and “a cultural production, essentially of its own time, looks back to the Middle Ages with greater or lesser explicitness”  (37-8). These categories help to show how the Middle Ages have been constructed, taken up and used throughout history and explains how medievalism and medieval studies might be regarded as a blend of scholarship rather than two fully distinct entities. 

Matthews further proposes two specific types or themes to clarify how the medieval gets viewed and taken up: the grotesque/gothic medieval and the romantic medieval. According to Matthews, the grotesque/gothic medieval emerged starting in the 16^th century. In the 16^th century, scholars divided historical eras into Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modernity.  Since the Middle Ages came before the religious reformations, this middle ground in history was viewed as a dark, barbaric, and violent time.  The perception of the Middles Ages as dark and violent continues into modern usage; Matthews gives the example of a British court case in which the judge declared sadomasochistic sex as ‘medieval’ torture and thus the woman who resisted it was a victim in need of saving.  The second category, romantic medieval,  “is the Middle Ages of romance, of chivalric deeds, but also of simple communitarian living and humanly organized labour, a pastoral time when the cash nexus was unknown, a time of intense romantic love” (25). A romantic Middle Ages appeals especially to groups (especially during the Victorian era and the 60s and 70s) who are seeking answers to civic issues such as industrialization by looking back to the earlier social and political infrastructures of the Middle Ages.

The rest of the book treats medievalism as a method of cultural studies, which allows the work to break from the disciple/not a discipline question, since cultural studies is consider an anti-discipline (178). Each remaining chapter 2-5 takes on different aspects of cultural studies that has been affected by interest in the medieval: time, space, self, the canon. 

In particular, time poses some interesting issues.  In the 16^th century, “the Middle Ages is not entirely a period, a chronological era with fixed boundaries, but rather something that might come back, something that continues to exist in some places though it has been eradicated in others” (46).  The ‘middleness’ of the era between antiquity and modernity increased the fear of the Middle Ages as dark, dangerous, and barbaric, as mentioned earlier. By the 1800s, the fear that the Middle Ages will come back had faded and instead, a nostalgia for era increased. This change can be signified by the change in terminology. The period was originally called gothic, but later in the Victorian age, the term the Latin term, “medium aevum.” The nostalgia can be seen especially in time travel narratives of the 1880s and 1890s, where characters either went back in time to the Middle Ages or went forward in time to find a new medieval-esque life.

 A study of medieval spaces demonstrates the extent to which the Middle Ages has been constructed throughout history.  As Matthews puts it, “What we actually visit, I suggest, when we go to medieval places, is the contemporary version of a historical site which we can only experience in its modernity” (68).  Essentially medieval spaces are not authentically medieval. Many have had to be reconstructed or renovated extensively due to destruction or wear, such as Notre Dame and Warsaw’s Old Town. Other spaces were never genuinely medieval to begin with, since they were built by modern or contemporary agents like Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney.  Still other spaces must be rescued from being ‘medieval’ such as Katine, an improvised  village in Africa.

Matthews turns to questions of the medieval self. He studies historical re-enactments of the Middle Ages beginning in the 1800s. These re-enactments encourage a perception that medievalising the self can be potentially liberating. In contrast, medievalism has also been studied as sites of repressions: colonizing by the rich.  Ultimately medievalising the self demonstrates preferences of style and solutions for dilemmas faced in modern world. While re-enactors enjoy their activities, none of those interviewed by Matthews would want to actually travel back in time, since hygiene and health are much better now.

The last couple of chapters discuss the boundaries or limitations that might be imposed on medievalism: canon and history (118). Matthews states, “if medievalism really is an endemic theme or set of themes in European culture, then it can never be made concrete as a single discipline (as the study of romanticism can be)” (120).  According to Matthews historical and cultural accounting, medievalism has never really entered into the canon. While medievalist works have gained enormous popularity, they have not been seen as influential on canonical writers or regarded as high art themselves. The enduring legacy of medievalism is one of childhood to modernity as seen in works by Tolkien and Lewis rather than enduring works of art for adults.

Throughout this study, Matthews seeks to offer a starting place for those who wish to study and define medievalism. He does so by ultimately addressing the question of discipline and boundaries. Where does medievalism start? How do we know what we are doing is medievalism and not something else? To address these concerns, Matthews puts forth the idea that without medievalism, the study of the Middle Ages would not be possible. The two fields co-exist, since medievalism is the “process of creating the Middle Ages…all such study of the Middle Ages (by definition) has gone on after the Middle Ages” (172).  To make medievalism a coherent study, Matthews further advocates for medievalism to embrace cultural studies in order allay anxieties rather than to fight for a separate discipline; medievalism and medieval studies need to acknowledge their dual existence.

Julia M. Smith

Georgia Institute of Technology