Danahay and Howey, Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism

Danahay, Martin and Ann F. Howey, eds. Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism: Re-Appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts (Lieden: Brill, 2024), ISBN 978004677876 322pp. eBook and HB RRP €105.00

Reviewed by:

Stephen Basdeo, Leeds Trinity University

Martin and Danahay and Ann F. Howey tell us that “Medievalism in culture emerges in the early nineteenth century” (4). One of the book’s central premises is therefore incorrect, for such a statement would surprise the sculptors of the Saxon deities at Stowe Gardens (commissioned in 1727), and Thomas Arne, the composer of England’s great patriotic song “Rule Britannia” (from the masque Alfred, in 1740, relating the life and deeds of one of England’s greatest monarchs). Georg F. Handel, who wrote Rinaldo (1711), would raise an eyebrow, as would John Dryden, who translated some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Fables: Ancient and Modern and wrote King Arthur; or the British Worthy (1691), which was later turned into an opera by Henry Purcell. Readers of “true” crime would likewise be surprised, given that they could read, in any number of criminal biographies, stories of Robin Hood, Thomas Dun, and that very noted thief, Sir John Falstaff.

Medievalism was so popular in the century preceding the nineteenth that even the brilliant Henry Fielding turned to it to produce the Arthurian Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730). This was also the great age of the gothic novel beginning with the Castle of Otranto (1764). Shakespeare, his histories and tragedies, owe their status as classics largely to the labours of David Garrick, while scholars such as Joseph Ritson (of Robin Hood fame), Sir John Hawkins (A History of the Science and Practice of Music), Thomas Warton (History of English Poetry), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (who edited Shakespeare), as well as Thomas Percy (famous for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry) diligently researched and published their enquiries into various aspects of English medieval literature and culture. Finally, nameless ballad sellers and chapmen sold songs and poems of medieval British worthies in broadsides and chapbooks. I appreciate that a dedicated book on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medievalism is yet to be written, but it did not begin with the Victorians and the idea that it did should not be a central premise of the book’s introduction.

Upon such weak foundations and generalisations does Danahay and Howey’s Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism: Re-Appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts (2024) begin, in an introduction titled “Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism—Why together? Why now?” The authors do not provide even a brief answer to this question despite the book’s aims to unite “all the contributions to the fields of neo-Victorianism and medievalism gathered in this volume” and ask “to what end is the recourse to history used, and what does it tell us about contemporary values?” (3). But editors don’t provide an answer to their key question because none of the chapters (with one or two exceptions) really bring neo-Victorianism and neo-medievalism together. What we have in this volume are papers of two different stripes: neo-Victorianism papers and medievalism papers and rarely do the two meet.

The chapters are perfectly good in themselves and might have been more appropriately published as single journal pieces. Karl Fugelso’s first chapter—which does discuss neo-medievalism and neo-Victorianism—provides a journal editor’s perspective on the question of what constitutes neo-medievalism, medievalism, and the medieval period. It was certainly refreshing to see Fugelso pour cold water on the idea of a non-western Middle Ages given the recent tendency to “globalise” the period (50). Indeed, as a Brazilian colleague once quipped: “If we’re going to have a global middle ages, why not a global pre-Aztec period?”[i] I also agree with Fugelso’s remark that it is largely pointless to separate neo-medievalism and medievalism, for, as anyone with even a passing interest in the field would likely know: “medievalism encompasses all responses to the Middle Ages” (53). Still, there’s nothing in Fugelso’s chapter which answers either of the key questions: “to what end is the recourse to history used, and what does it tell us about contemporary values?”

Valerie B. Johnson makes a compelling contribution to Robin Hood studies by examining how, and in what settings, Maid Marian trains to become an outlaw in Robin Hood films. In doing so, this is one of the few chapters which does answer the key question of what medievalism in the present tells us about contemporary values regarding the status of women in medievalism and popular culture generally (190). Another excellent contribution, and which meets the book’s aims, is Howey’s discussion of the Charlotte M. Yonge novel The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), and its manner of making the idea of knighthood relevant in the Victorian age. That being said, Yonge’s novel is hardly neo-Victorian but actually Victorian, published during the reign of that great monarch.

After Fugelso’s chapter there is a piece by Claire Nally which examines a neo-Victorian novel titled the Wonder (2016)—which does not mention medievalism at all but is certainly a chapter which made me want to read The Wonder in full. Then follows “Digital White Supremacy, White Rage, and the Middle Ages: Rebooting the Alt-Right through Medieval Studies” by Dorothy Kim who once again tells the story of her dramatic and seemingly never-ending battles with the Alt-Right in the United States. She begins by describing the Charlottesville far right protest in 2017 and then claims that her chapter will “map” the “alt-medieval ecosystem.” The only problem is that though she uses the verb “to map” with regard to these far right groups, Kim merely lists them and spends so little time on each group’s characteristics with the result that one feels Kim should have aimed for depth rather than breadth, focusing on one or two groups at most, perhaps within one country. Curiously, in Kim’s “alt-medieval eco-system,” she cannot seem to find a single far right medievalist group in the United Kingdom, which perhaps would have been worthy of comment given that, apparently during Brexit, says Kim, the Crusades were invoked to legitimise the far right support of it. Yet Kim offers no supporting citation for this assertion (96). Even if one conclude that Kim indeed mapped these groups, the question remains: What is to be done? Medievalists know that these groups exist in the United States and elsewhere, but what do we do with this information? Kim offers no solution on this score. Is it the implication that we as academics are somehow not doing enough publishing or public engagement? This is left unclear. Finally, it is not clear how any of this relates to neo-Victorianism, thus the chapter does not speak to the book’s aims.

The next chapter to focus only on one of the book’s aims is Hadley’s “Three Phases of a Statue,” examining the recent public debates over, and vandalism of, monuments to Queen Victoria in Montréal. The word medievalism does not appear in this chapter (though if I missed this reference, I am happy to be corrected). Hadley’s aim, however, is to debunk “popular arguments that monuments stand outside history;” (131) I am unconvinced, however, that anyone, either for or against the statues of the Queen-Empress in Canada, actually would argue this and, having served on my home city of Leeds’s statue’s and monuments review, much of the debate usually hinges on a misunderstood notion of “erasing history.”

Marie-Luise Kohlke's examination of “Janus-Faced Neo-Victorianism” in the Penny Dreadful TV series makes a rather overstated case for seeing medievalism in a series set during the nineteenth century on the basis that it features witches and spiritualism and has an overall gothic feel to it. According to Kolhke, “extant criticism on Penny Dreadful evinces a curious lack of explicit concern with the show’s reliance on the Middle Ages” (140). Could the “curious lack of concern” not simply be owing to the fact that there is indeed little or no medievalism in the series and therefore contemporary critics are pursuing more fruitful lines of enquiry? It would also have been nice if the author had at least acknowledged what a penny dreadful actually was in the Victorian era. Penny Dreadful is largely an urban gothic series; the heir of mid-Victorian British penny bloods and nineteenth-century French feuilletons, such as George W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1844–48)—which features spiritualism and a witch-like “Old Hag” but is hardly medieval—Mysteries of the Court of London (1849–56), and Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842–43). As such, the author might have consulted the numerous works on the urban gothic.[ii] This genre, in the British case especially, in a very roundabout way, adapted the conventions of the gothic novel in the previous century and transplanted them on to the social novel.

Amy Montz then offers an examination of the “steampunk novels” of Gail Carriger and those novels’ utlimate failure to denounce the British Empire’s exploitation of subject peoples. The novels are referenced and discussed in full—though Montz also offers quotations in which Carriger does indeed denounce the empire (230)—though there are no primary or secondary sources or even events cited to support the point on exploitation and, taking a look at the bibliography, there is not a single history book on the British Empire cited either. Quite clearly, this is unacceptable in any scholarly work which touches upon the history of the empire, even if that history is then refracted through the fictive lens of modern steampunk novels. The next steampunk chapter by Mike Perschon educates us all on the fact that steampunk is not exclusively Victorian (257), with a focus on the movie Mortal Engines. The film is also examined in the succeeding chapter by Kevin and Brent Moberly—a chapter which, to give due credit, does refreshingly discuss neo-Victorianism and medievalism together (279–285).

For Danahay, President Trump’s tenure and the subsequent age of “epistemological crisis” is an appropriate framing narrative for an exploration of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), for the conditions which led Morris to write his utopian masterpiece have parallels with the Trump’s era of “fake news” (289). The chapter does not adequately situate Morris’s writings in their wider context, apart from a cursory comment that he was “respond[ing] to social change [and] … radical changes in the means of production that created a concomitant upheaval in modes of communication. Steam, the telegraph and eventually electricity restructured Victorian society” (289). Well, yes, innovations did occur in that period, though the traditional dating of the Industrial Revolution, from c.1760–c.1840, only includes three years of Victoria’s reign. On steam power: Newcomen’s steam engine was first installed in a Dudley coal mine in 1712; by 1800, there was at least 2,500 steam engines used in various coal mines, mills, and manufactories. As for the dominance of the steam-powered railways in the Victorian age, little need be said beyond the fact that Morris’s novel came a long time after the “Railway Mania” building and speculation boom of the 1840s, and that by the end of the century Great Britain had a railway network of over 20,000 miles.[iii] And yes, “eventually” electricity did transform Britain, but I’m not sure how relevant the point is to a discussion of a novel published in 1890, when it was only in 1888 that the government granted electricity supply franchises to 64 private companies and 17 local corporations but even this had little immediate effect; by 1919 only 6 per cent of households had electricity. This is because, given the cost and difficulty of its supply, most late-Victorian consumers opted to remain with gas power; even by 1938 only two thirds of houses had electricity.[iv] The specific things which Danahay claims Morris was responding to were simply facts of life by the latter’s time. On the point about fake news, Danahay reprints the first page of the 11 January 1890 issue of Commonweal and argues that, because the first instalment of News from Nowhere is printed on the first page where news would normally be, indicates that Morris wanted his novella to be seen as a news item, and thus it constitutes an early attempt at deliberate fake news (292). And yet, the full title of the story is printed on its first page: News from Nowhere; or, an Epoch of Rest. Being some chapters from a Utopian Romance. I am sure the quite well-educated Commonweal readers would have known, three lines into the story, that they were reading a work of fiction upon seeing the word “romance.” What follows after in the same chapter is a discussion of steampunk and alternative history, and the whole might better have been divided into two chapters—one on Morris and one on steampunk—for the two are an awkward fit together and no firm link is made between the two.

Thus the collection ends, leaving readers with praise for a few chapters, critiques of several others, and still without any firm answer to the volume’s key questions. Medievalism and neo-Victorianism are not “united” in any meaningful way because the chapters, while mostly sound in themselves, do not speak to the book’s overall aims.

Stephen Basdeo

 

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[i] Thanks to Luiz Guerra for this point.

[ii] On the urban gothic see Richard C. Maxwell, ‘G. M. Reynolds, Dickens, and the Mysteries of London’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32: 2 (1977), 188–213 and Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (University Press of Virginia, 1992)

[iii] Michael Freeman, ‘Transport’, in Atlas of Industrialising Britain, 1780–1914, ed. by John Langton and R.J. Morris (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 88.

[iv] Carol Jones, ‘Coal, gas, and electricity’, in Atlas of British Economic and Social History since c.1700, ed. by Rex Pope (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 68–95.

Decameron -- Netflix 2024

"Oh, Giovanni, where are you, Giovanni?” A Review of Netflix’s Eight-part Adaption of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron                                                                                                                Reviewed by:                                                                                      Kevin J. Harty                                                                                      La Salle University                                                              harty@lasalle.edu

One of the masterpieces of Renaissance Italian literature, Boccaccio’s The Decameron is an ars narrativa.  It offers any adapter or screenwriter an overabundance of source materials—a fact that seems to have escaped those responsible for this eight-part Netflix Summer 2024 series. In the series’ fourteenth-century source, ten nobles—seven women and three men—fleeing plague-ridden Florence, seek shelter in a villa in Fiesole where, over the course of two weeks, they tell 100 tales to pass the time and amuse and enlighten themselves.  Both immensely popular and immensely controversial in its own day, the Decameron has had a remarkable afterlife.  From the start, the Catholic Church took a dim view of the work—too many tales with priapic priests, fornicating friars, and nymphomaniac nuns—not to mention lascivious lay people and sexually exploited servants.  The Decameron was supposedly among the titles burned in Savonarola’s (in)famous “bonfire of vanities.”  It ended up on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum several times, even after some judicious ecclesiastical editing that replaced the less-than-chaste clergy with additional lascivious lay people.  

Outside ecclesiastical circles, The Decameron has remained immensely influential.  Chaucer borrowed from it, as did Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Middleton, Martin Luther, Molière, Swift, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson—the list goes on and on. The story of patient Griselda has proven especially intriguing, adapted by Chaucer (perhaps by way of Petrarch), Lope de Vega, Apostolo Zeno in an early eighteenth-century opera with multiple scores, and, most recently, Caryl Churchill in her 1982 play Top Girls. Translations of The Decameron in part or whole into English began in the sixteenth century.  More encompassing adaptations include Marguerite de Navarre's sixteenth-century Heptaméron and, most recently and perhaps not surprisingly, multiple literary anthologies commissioned in response to the shutdowns occasioned by the ongoing COVID pandemic, such as those sponsored by the State Theatre of Australia, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Diego Decameron Project.

With mixed results, filmmakers have embraced The Decameron.  Two Hollywood ventures, (one in 1924 and one in 1953) entitled Decameron Nights, were based on tales by Boccaccio, who in the latter was played by Louis Jourdan.  Pasolini’s 1971 The Decameron, with the director playing Boccaccio, presents nine tales and a rather intriguing complex critical reading of its source.  Two romantic comedies, Virgin Territory (2007) and The Little Hours (2017) nod to Boccaccio’s work, while the 2015 film Wondrous Bocaccio is loosely based on four tales from The Decameron. 

All of which brings us to Netflix’s eight-episode series The Decameron, billed as the “comic sexual romp” of the summer—except that it isn’t very funny, it has too little sex, and it is even more lacking in “romp.”

The basic plot is there.  Nobles, sometimes with servants in tow, flee plague-ridden Florence and other towns in Tuscany for the Villa Santa, each with more of an agenda than simply escaping death.  The villa itself is a prize to be won by marriage or inheritance or force.  None of the characters is at all sympathetic.  They are all caricatures.

Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) is a spoiled harpy intent on marrying her cousin, the always absent Visconte Leonardo, who owns the villa.  The Visconte, it turns out, is absent for a good reason: he has already died from the plague before episode one even begins—a fact not known to any of his guests until much later in the series.  Accompanying Pampinea is her doormat of a servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), who spends the whole series looking for validation and love in all the wrong places. Rivaling Pampinea as the series’ most annoying character—though, truth be told, all the series’ characters are annoying in their own ways—is Filomena (Jessica Plummer), whose servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) at least has a bit more spine than Misia, and who for a while passes herself off as her mistress who finds herself in turn mistaken for her servant.  That the Netflix series is more interested in the dynamics between servants and masters than in Boccaccio is less than subtly signaled when, early in episode one, the soundtrack of appropriately period music abruptly switches to Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.”

Also in residence at Villa Santa is Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a wealthy hypochondriac, who has arrived with his quack of a personal physician Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) in tow.  Rounding out the guest list is Panfilo (Karan Gill), another of the Visconte’s cousins who is down on his luck and, therefore, keen to lay claim to the villa, and his, at least initially, overly pious wife Neifile (Lou Gala).  Presiding over this whole circus is Sirisco (Tony Hale), literally the series’ magister ludi, who is steward of Villa Santa, and who is sometimes assisted, and sometimes thwarted, by the villa’s cook Stratilia (Leila Farzad), who has her own claim to the villa through her son, Jacapo (Aston Wray), who was fathered by the Visconte.

Each episode is basically comprised of internecine scheming among the principals—all of whom want to lay claim to the villa, or attempt to assist others to do so.  Sometimes someone will briefly leave the villa, only to return none the nicer or the wiser than when they left. Sometimes outsiders—including the bandit Ruggerio (Fares Fares), who is, of course, yet another of the Visconte’s cousins, and a Savonarola-like friar and his band of brigands—will show up and join the original guests.  Too often, the safe haven proves anything but safe, as plague also becomes an unwelcome guest and takes its toll on the assemblage. From episode to episode, the plot thickens, but, in doing so, the plot of the series also moves farther and farther away from Boccaccio.  Given all their running around, the characters haven’t a moment to spare to tell a tale. Instead, the series turns Boccaccio’s work into a period costume soap opera.  Only in the last minutes of the final episode do viewers bump into Boccaccio.  The surviving principals flee the plague-infested villa—now under the control of the friar and his brigands—and settle into an unidentified pastoral retreat.  As they sit in a circle on the ground, Sirisco proposes to tell a tale.  Knowing viewers will recognize that the tale, which he only begins to tell before the final credits roll, is that of Griselda, whose legendary patience viewers might more than emulate and still never see much from Boccaccio in this summer’s Netflix (more than very loose) adaptation of The Decameron.

The Decameron, created, adapted and produced by Kathleen Jordan, for Netflix; eight episodes, loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century work, The Decameron; available for streaming on Netflix as of 25 July 2024.

Douglas Gray: From Fingal's Cave to Camelot, ed. J. Bliss

Douglas Gray, From Fingal’s Cave to Camelot, ed. Jane Bliss. Oxford, UK: Independent Publishing Network, 2020. https://cheerful-bb1685.wordpress.com/ £17.

Reviewed by Jane Toswell

University of Western Ontario

mjtoswel@uwo.ca

After his retirement as Tolkien Professor of Middle English in the University of Oxford, Douglas Gray (1930-2017) turned his considerable learning and intelligence to the writing of books about medieval literature, synthesizing his own deep and rich investigations into the readers and writers who prepared those texts, and into those who received and transformed medieval texts and ideas in their own day.  At his death he left two near-complete manuscripts, an anthology and this book, lovingly assembled and with scholarly apparatus added by Jane Bliss, with help offered (as she puts it) by numerous other Oxford medievalists chasing down particularly tricky references.  

The book itself offers a genial study of the reception history of the Middle Ages in English, beginning with the visit in August 1829 of Felix Mendelssohn to Fingal’s Cave on the isle of Staffa west of Scotland.  Gray points to the procession of nineteenth-century figures to this musical cave, traceable to the visit of Joseph Banks (the scientist who traveled with Captain Cook) and his account of that visit in a 1772 publication.  He uses these details to point to his opening themes about the opposed but also interlocking attitudes taken by scholars and antiquarians on the one hand, and poets and creative writers on the other.   His thesis is that these two approaches, the erudite study and the passionate engagement, have co-existed fruitfully in this field, with its rediscoveries and its continuities, as different generations encountered medieval literature and responded to it.  I’ll note in passing that although the book reveals Gray’s comprehensive knowledge of several European languages and literatures, the focus is entirely (and without conscious statement) on the post-medieval reception (almost entirely by men) of what we would today call literary texts written in the English vernacular in the medieval period.  That is to say, the book begins with a significant number of underlying assumptions that remain unquestioned.

Part I discusses the beginnings of this journey, starting in the fifteenth century with the use of medieval authors and their availability in early modern materials.  Gray points to various uses of Gower, Lydgate, and Langland, but notes that “Chaucer is the dominant presence” (11). The focus here tends to be on continuities with the Middle Ages more than rediscovery, although as the opening indicates there are also echoes and new developments.  The argument particularly highlights the continuity of romances, retold in chapbooks and even single sheets, greatly influencing writers such as Edmund Spenser and John Bunyan.  Sir John Mandeville’s Travels had a particularly active afterlife, even being reworked and reprinted until the nineteenth century.  The most fascinating echoes, however, belong to the drama and the corpus of songs, lyrics, and carols, two genres which Gray knows very well.  The chapter points to many medieval motifs, figures, and concerns in Shakespeare, continuing performances of miracle and mystery plays, and even to possible elements drawn from the lost tradition of popular drama.  It analyses several examples of carols and lyrics that are or seem to be medieval in their language and expression, and in their particular approach to Christianity.  The last section of the chapter starts with religious literature, pointing out the similarities between Catholic and Protestant writings, before turning to the early antiquaries for their role in keeping medieval materials safe, and to some extent studied.  Gray notes that figures such as John Aubrey, John Leland, and Robert Cotton were not interested in literature, but their activities in the service of language, history and law meant that literary texts survived for their utility on other fronts.

Chapter two begins with a survey of Continental antiquaries and approaches to the medieval from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before turning to England and moving forward to the eighteenth century.  Gray discusses seventeenth-century French scholarship, notably of romances, to offer a more sophisticated parallel to his detailed analysis of English antiquarians and their work collecting and editing medieval texts.  He offers a detailed analysis of the reception history of King Alfred, and pauses also on George Hickes and Thomas Hearne.  Gray then turns back the clock to look at the historiography of specific medieval writers, again focusing on Chaucer with his most estimable editor, Thomas Tyrwhitt, and critic, John Dryden.  He next spends substantial time considering the revival of ballads in the eighteenth century, pointing to the continuities these texts and their editions or manuscripts imply, and focusing on Percy’s Reliques both in terms of Percy’s decisions to polish and update his texts and in terms of the language used by imitators (Johnson, as Gray explains, famously derided this style).  The chapter finishes with the shift towards literary history promulgated by Percy, his predecessor Richard Hurd, and the humane and comprehensive scholarship of “the first great historical critic of English literature, Thomas Warton” (83).

The next section of the book addresses various trends in the eighteenth century, beginning with primitivism.  Gray points out that this impulse is not simply about nostalgia for a better past, but a belief in previous innocence, honesty, and justice.  Here he takes for his examples the native peoples of the Pacific and their interactions with explorers, and points to the two contradictory approaches of primitivism: the urge to see the primitivist peoples as children or ignorant, and the urge to see them as noble and glorious.  Gray uses these observations to investigate more deeply the complex question of Ossian as ‘presented’ by James Macpherson, and the ‘Rowley’ poems of Thomas Chatterton; the former engages in “a largely uninformed enthusiastic romanticism” (96) though pecuniary advances were probably also on his mind, while the latter evades a clear understanding of his pseudo-fifteenth-century poetry, written (as Gray kindly suggests) when there was not yet a firm understanding of the notion of ‘the truth of fiction’ (100).  To these two experimental medievalists, Gray adds the “runic poetry” of the time and, by extension, the “Celtic poetry” lauding bloodthirsty chiefs and warriors.  In this vein also belong the many translations over several centuries of “The Battle of Brunanburh,” the last of which was that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  Gray identifies Thomas Gray as the most successful of these poets, and quotes especially from “The Bard,” which ends with the Poet plunging from “the mountain’s height...to endless night.”  Clearly this kind of material presages Romanticism, and the second half of this section reviews the eighteenth century as a whole, pausing for extended discussion of Samuel Johnson’s interest in romance and his travels in Scotland, and following the train of thought forward by way of antiquarians (Joseph Ritson, George Ellis) almost to the end of the nineteenth century with Sir Walter Scott. With Scott, Gray suggests, “we first detect a genuine sense of period” (121).  

The next chapter, “Part 4,” turns to the nineteenth century, beginning with a survey of how medievalisms in religion, then chivalry, and lastly thought are perceived, mostly in England but with some comparison, especially to France.  Referring, for example to the Gothic tales of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and R.L. Stevenson, Gray characteristically offers a passive sentence, with which he seems to agree: “It has been argued that this was not simply escapism, but provided a rich, powerful language of images and styles appropriate for the expression of deep-seated anxieties, social and psychological fears” (132).  Gray then turns to a broader European survey noting that medievalism is a hugely influential presence, and one often touching upon the major thinkers of the late nineteenth century.  Gray focuses on Germany and France, but notes other influences and accomplishments in passing, such as Donizetti’s opera Alfredo il Grande (for Alfred the Great, here fighting off a Danish adversary named Atkins). Gray touches upon Matthew Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and then upon the growth of study and imitation of Northern tales, including Thiodolf the Icelander, by “A Mr. Gordon,” which contrasts the scenery and customs of the Mediterranean against Iceland.  Gray then briefly summarizes German medievalism, with special focus on music and scholarship, and ends the chapter with French medievalism, notably Victor Hugo, Viollet-le-Duc, and the cathedral.

The next chapter explicitly returns to England in the nineteenth century, with the opening thesis that “medievalism of one kind or another seems to have had some influence on almost every writer in England” (149) in the period.  Gray begins with Thomas Carlyle’s “gift of breathing life into the past” (150) before turning to the pre-Raphaelites and the discovery by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones of a copy of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in an Oxford bookshop in 1855.  Malory is, of course, the focus of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Gray offers an extended defence of these poems for their treatment of character, their appeal to the ear, and their search for political order and good government. The chapter then turns to the poetry of William Morris, first his early works, then his version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and then his verse epic Sigurd the Volsung.  News from Nowhere perhaps receives the most attention, and Gray is most intrigued by Morris’s ideas about language, and his experimentation with dialect, with medieval usage, with simplicity of expression.  To complete his review of the nineteenth century, Gray briefly discusses the language experimentation of George Borrow and, in particular, the linguistic purism and Dorset language of William Barnes.

Borrow and Barnes open the door to Gray’s last section, on “the philologists,” a group very great in number in the nineteenth century.  He begins with the rise of institutions, including universities, focusing on the teaching of English and the founding of libraries.  He finds a new line of argument through Max Müller, describing his lectures on the importance of the English language: “it stands in the system of the intellectual world as light stands in the system of the physical world, comprising all, penetrating all, and revealing all” (174).  Scholars in the English and European tradition are joined by an American tradition.  Gray specifically considers Francis Douce, Andrew Lang, and G.K. Chesterton.  The main part of his argument, however, concerns the rise of scholarly study of Old English and Middle English and runs through F.J. Furnivall, James Murray, Henry Sweet, W.W. Skeat, H.C. Chadwick, Joseph Wright, and A.S. Napier, all described by Gray as being from Oxford.  He finishes the survey with W.P. Ker, quoting W.H. Auden’s opinion of his excellent writing, before turning to discussion of two major figures in America: Mark Twain and Henry Adams.  As throughout the book, his idea is to address both the creative reconstruction of medieval materials and the scholarly analysis taking place in the United States.  He thus addresses Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court at some length, especially on its double narrator, the practical Yankee and the more sensitive author, and on the grim ending.  Following the lead of Alice Chandler, who analysed Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres in her 1970 book A Dream of Order, Gray describes Adams as celebrating a lost civilization, “with some hints of nostalgia, but an overwhelming sense of joy and potential liberation in a new situation” (197). Gray is particularly struck by Adams’s “full and powerful account” of the role of women, by his analysis of how Chartres Cathedral was built for its apse, for the Virgin.  Mostly, Adams points to the expressive nature of the cathedrals, to how the Gothic architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries show what those centuries had to say.

With these works Gray is already well into the twentieth century; his short final section, “Part 7,” points to its varied medievalisms.  He gestures in various directions, to folktales, songs, the research and publications of W.B. Yeats, the new genre of fantasy literature, and notably James Joyce with a very long quotation from his paean of medievalizing praise to the Boulevard Saint-Michel which turns into a statement that Ireland is fundamentally medieval and the modern world is similarly becoming a world of extremes–an unexpected turn of events in the epilogue.  Gray does not analyse the Joycean monologue at all.  Instead, he offers a brief envoi, noting that his book has run from Fingal’s Cave to Camelot, but the latter remains mysterious and uncertain, a resting place for us now to think “of the dreams, enthusiasm...affection and love which the rediscovering of medieval literature brought” (207).  

Gray offers an astonishing number of fascinating details: that Spenser’s depiction of battle with a dragon in The Faerie Queene depends on the medieval romance Bevis of Hampton for some of its details (17); that Coleridge’s father burned his copy of a favourite medieval romance (18); that Samuel Johnson was interested in feudalism, that Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward often quotes from and alludes to the medieval romance The Squyr of Lowe Degre, and much more. None of these points has a footnote, presumably because for Gray these matters are common knowledge.  Every sentence, however, is dense with thoughtful argument and with new ways to think about the reception and recreation of the medieval in ensuing centuries–up to the end of the nineteenth century.  In fact, nearly every page opens a new field of possible thesis topics or studies in medievalism, partly because Gray is less interested in medievalism as a field of study than he is in looking at medieval literary elements continuing in ensuing centuries (some might say this is a distinction without a difference).  However, Gray does not delve much into how ideas and motifs are changed and redeployed, or how a particular carol retains its medieval wording but medieval popular drama survives only in hints.  His interest lies in the fact of that survival, and its cultural and historical context.

Leit-motifs run through the book, notably the French literary historian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye on questions of chivalry, but also Captain Cook, notions of orientalism and the exotic, nifty anecdotes about practice in New Zealand, the strong opinions of Dr. Johnson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and always Gray’s underlying motif of Mercury and Philology, those passionate and empowered by the Middle Ages to create new works of art, and those studying and editing its works.  

It is difficult to assess this book.  On the one hand, it is a true pleasure to read the thoughtful writings of Douglas Gray on a newish topic for him, though it is one that flows from both his anthologies and edited texts and his own considerations of themes and ideas and genres of later medieval literature.  His learning was vast but also kind, and the kindness shines through here; he is loath to condemn James Macpherson and Thomas Rowley for their flights of medievalizing imagination.  Basically, he wants to find opportunities and new ways of engaging with the afterlife of medieval texts, never to close down options for study.  At times here the work is old-fashioned and sometimes it seems that Gray would have read and included the work of modern scholars of medievalism such as Rebecca Brackman (on the Renaissance response to early medieval England), Clare Simmons on ballads and lyrics, Dustin Frazier Wood on antiquarianism in the eighteenth century, and Tom Shippey on Norse attitudes to death, to name but a few.  Some of the references here are pretty outdated and seem a bit blinkered–but, this was a last work by a scholar whose humane and generous soul wanted to point out some ways forward for thinking about the afterlife of medieval texts.  In this book, Douglas Gray has most certainly accomplished that goal.  Jane Bliss has done us all a favour in making it available to us–particularly to researchers looking (but with an eye to more recent scholarship) for possible projects.