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
[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.
