Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism "From Below" in Nineteenth-Century Britain

✍ Scribed by David Matthews, Mike Sanders (eds.)

• Publisher: D. S. Brewer
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 232
• Series: Medievalism, 19
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A fresh new approach to Victorian medievalism, showing it to be far from the preserve of the elite. This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring, or forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by appealing to a green and ordered Merrie England, there has been remarkably little exploration of liberal or radical medievalisms, still less of working-class medievalisms. Essays in this book question a number of orthodoxies. Can it be imagined that in the world of 'Ivanhoe', the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to, or at best uninterested in, medievalism? What, if any, was the working-class medievalist counter-blast to conservatism? How did feminism and socialism deploy the medieval past? The contributions here range beyond the usual canonical cultural sources to investigate the ephemera: the occasional poetry, the forgotten novels, the newspapers, short-lived cultural journals, fugitive Chartist publications. A picture is created of a richly varied and subtle understanding of the medieval past on the part of socialists, radicals, feminists and working-class thinkers of all kinds, a set of dreams of the Middle Ages to counter what many saw as the disorder of the times.

✦ Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
List of Contributors xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious? / David Matthews and Mike Sanders 1
Part I. Radicalism and Medievalism
1. Catholicism and Constitutionalism in William Cobbett’s English and Irish Medievalism / Matthew Roberts 19
2. Resisting Medievalism: The ‘Mediaeval Mania’ and the Working-Class Press / David Matthews 39
3. How Radical was Rienzi? The Nineteenth-Century Representation of the Roman Revolutionary Republican in the British Cultural Imagination / Rosemary Mitchell 55
Part II. Chartism and Medievalism
4. Chartism and Medievalism: Retrospective Radicalism in the English Nineteenth Century / Stephen Knight 77
5. Making Sense of Chartism’s Multiple Medievalisms / Mike Sanders 91
6. Rousing ‘the Spirit of Wat Tyler’: Chartist Newspaper Portrayals of the Rebel Leader / Stephen Basdeo 110
Part III. Socialism, Feminism and Medievalism
7. The Cause of Liberty: Ford Madox Brown, Augustus Welby Pugin and Victorian Medievalism / Colin Trodd 127
8. Serfs, Saints and Comrades: Working-Class Medievalism and the Narratives of Victorian Socialism / Ingrid Hanson 143
9. Morbid Solidarity: Remains, Afterlives and the Commune of Saints / Stuart McWilliams 160
10. Finding the Present in the Past: Suffrage Medievalism in the Pages of 'Votes for Women' / Carolyn P. Collette 175
Bibliography 193
Index 205