Studies in Medievalism XXV: Medievalism and Modernity [25] 1843844370, 9781843844372

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FUGELSO (ed.)

Medievalism and Modernity

Studies in Medievalism XXV

The question of how modernity has influenced medievalism and how medievalism has influenced modernity is the theme of this volume. The opening essays examine the 2001 film Just Visiting’s comments on modern anxieties via medievalism; conflations of modernity with both medievalism and the Middle Ages in rewriting sources; the emergence of modernity amid the post-World War I movement The Most Noble Order of Crusaders; António Sardinha’s promotion of medievalism as an antidote to modernity; and Mercedes Rubio’s medievalism in her feminist commentary on modernity. The eight subsequent articles build on this foundation while discussing remnants of medieval London amid its modern descendant; Michel Houellebecq's critique of medievalism through his 2011 novel La Carte et le territoire; historical authenticity in Michael Morrow's approach to performing medieval music; contemporary concerns in Ford Madox Brown and David Gentleman’s murals; medieval Chester in Catherine A.M. Clarke and Nayan Kulkarni’s Hryre (2012); medieval influences on the formation of and debate about modern moral panics; medievalist considerations in modern repurposings of medieval anchorholds; and medieval sources for Paddy Molloy’s Here Be Dragons (2013). The articles thus test the essays’ methods and conclusions, even as the essays offer fresh perspectives on the articles.

Editor: KARL FUGELSO with Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih

KARL FUGELSO is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: EDWARD BREEN, KATHERINE A. BROWN, CATHERINE A.M. CLARKE, LOUISE D’ARCENS, JOSHUA DAVIES, JOHN LANCE GRIFFITH, MIKE HORSWELL, PEDRO MARTINS, PADDY MOLLOY, LISA NALBONE, SARAH SALIH, MICHELLE M. SAUER, JAMES L. SMITH

Studies in Medievalism XXV an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Medievalism and Modernity

Medievalism and Modernity

Studies in Medievalism XXV 2016

Studies in Medievalism Founded by Leslie J. Workman Recently published volumes are listed at the back of this book

Medievalism and Modernity

Edited by Karl Fugelso with Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih

Studies in Medievalism XXV 2016 Cambridge D. S. Brewer

©  Studies in Medievalism 2016 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2016 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978–1–84384–437–2 ISSN 0738–7164

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc, 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by www.thewordservice.com

Studies in Medievalism Founding Editor Editor Advisory Board

Leslie J. Workman Karl Fugelso Martin Arnold (Hull) Geraldine Barnes (Sydney) Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Leiden) William Calin (Florida) A. E. Christa Canitz (New Brunswick, Canada) Philip Cardew (Leeds Beckett) Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State) David Matthews (Manchester) Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State) Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen) Tom Shippey (Saint Louis) Clare A. Simmons (Ohio State) Paul Szarmach (Western Michigan) Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio) Jane Toswell (Western Ontario) Richard Utz (Georgia Institute of Technology) Kathleen Verduin (Hope College, Michigan) Andrew Wawn (Leeds)

Studies in Medievalism provides an interdisciplinary medium of exchange for scholars in all fields, including the visual and other arts, concerned with any aspect of the post-medieval idea and study of the Middle Ages and the influence, both scholarly and popular, of this study on Western society after 1500. Studies in Medievalism is published by Boydell & Brewer, Ltd., P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK; Boydell & Brewer, Inc., 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA. Orders and inquiries about back issues should be addressed to Boydell & Brewer at the appropriate office. For a copy of the style sheet and for inquiries about Studies in Medievalism, please contact the editor, Karl Fugelso, at the Dept. of Art+Design, Art History, and Art Education, Towson University, 3103 Center for the Arts, 8000 York Rd, Towson, MD 21252–0001, USA, tel. 410–704–2805, fax 410–704–2810 ATTN: Fugelso, e-mail . All submissions should be sent to him as e-mail attachments in Word.

Acknowledgments The device on the title page comes from the title page of Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, edited by L. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Heidelberg and Frankfurt, 1806). The epigraph is from an unpublished paper by Lord Acton, written about 1859 and printed in Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 212.

Studies in Medievalism List of Illustrations

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Editorial Note

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Karl Fugelso

I: Medievalism and Modernity: Some Perspective(s) Medievalism at the End of History: Pessimism and Renewal in Just Visiting

John Lance Griffith

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Medieval Restoration and Modern Creativity

Katherine A. Brown

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Crusader Medievalism and Modernity in Britain: The Most Noble Order of Crusaders and the Rupture of the First World War, 1921–49

Mike Horswell

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From the Republica Christiana to the “Great Revolution”: Middle Ages and Modernity in António Sardinha’s Writings (1914–25)

Pedro Martins

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Lisa Nalbone

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Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih

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Sarah Salih

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Louise D’Arcens

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Moving through Time and Space in Mercedes Rubio’s Las siete muchachas del Liceo (1957) via Wagner’s Parsifal in Barcelona, Spain (1914) II: Medievalist Visions Introduction In/visible Medieval/isms Art, Heritage Industries, and the Legacy of William Morris in Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory

Travel in Space, Travel in Time: Michael Morrow’s Edward Breen Approach to Performing Medieval Music in the 1960s

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Imagining Medieval Chester: Practice-based Catherine A. M. Clarke 115 Medievalism, Scholarship, and Creativity The Anachronic Middle Ages: Public Art, Cultural Memory, and the Medievalist Imagination Medievalisms of Moral Panic: Borrowing the Past to Frame Fear in the Present Extra-Temporal Place Attachment and Adaptive Reuse: The Afterlives of Medieval English Anchorholds Here Be Dragons: Mapping Space and Time, Medieval and Modern

Joshua Davies 135 James L. Smith 157

Michelle M. Sauer 173

Paddy Molloy 197

Contributors 215

Illustrations Imagining Medieval Chester 1. Hryre, Nayan Kulkani (2012), St. John’s Ruins, Chester (photo: Nayan Kulkani)

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Extra-Temporal Place Attachment and Adaptive Reuse 1. Brass plate commemorating William Thornbury, St. Mary of Charity, Faversham, Kent (photo: author)

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2. Sunday-school room, St. Andrew’s, Saxthorpe, Norfolk (photo: author)

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3. Choir dressing room, St. Michael and All Angels, Hartlip, Kent 190 (photo: author) 4. Painting of an anchoress, St. Anne’s (St Mary Westout), Lewes, East Sussex (photo: author)

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Here Be Dragons 1. Here Be Dragons, Paddy Molloy (2013), glass, ink, and gold leaf (photo: author)

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Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the master, antiquity and the middle ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society. Lord Acton

Editorial Note In a 2014 review of Studies in Medievalism XXI: Corporate Medievalism (2012), William Kuskin noted that there had yet to be a sustained effort by medievalists to “unplug from modern historicity” and to “sever [the] trunk line of modernity’s master narrative.”1 Such an effect may have been a byproduct of work dating back to at least Studies in Medievalism XIII: Postmodern Medievalisms (2003), and Kuskin acknowledges that some of the essays in the volume he was reviewing “recognize that medieval primary sources potentially trouble the narrative of modernity,” but he is correct that the field would benefit from a direct, extended conversation on the matter. Hence the following call for papers, issued in the fall of 2014: Studies in Medievalism, a peer-reviewed print and on-line publication, seeks 3,000-word essays on how medievalism supports, parallels, resists, complicates, disrupts, denies, or otherwise relates to modernity. How, if at all, do postmedieval responses to a middle ages intersect with the respondent’s and/or our assumptions about absolute and/or relative modernity? How have the terms “medievalism” and “modernity” come to be defined in relationship to each other? Authors are encouraged to structure their essays around one or more examples and to consider not only whether medievalism could exist without modernity but also whether modernity could exist without medievalism. Though purists might argue that such a call, and in fact any contemporary communication, is itself a product of modernity and traps the responses within it, I intended that the ambiguity of my terms, the wide range of reactions welcomed, and the related self-consciousness of my invitation would prevent both it and the responses from being completely beguiled by that particular construct. And, indeed, whether directly or indirectly addressing the possible relationships between medievalism and modernity, the distance from which the respondents characterize those intersections suggests at least an attempt to position themselves outside of modernity. In discussing how twentieth- and twenty-first-century medievalists have condemned, 1

William Kuskin, Review of Studies in Medievalism XXI: Corporate Medievalism, The Medieval Review 14.05.08, , last accessed 26 October 2015.

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lampooned, celebrated, or enshrined the Middle Ages, they have framed the latter as one or more constructs deployed to define, critique, promote, or dismiss modernity as its own construct(s). In characterizing medievalisms that are themselves sometimes postmodern, they tend towards postmodern positions that, as much as may be possible at this point in time, do indeed sever the trunk line of modernity’s master narrative. Perhaps the most explicit to do so is John Lance Griffith in “Medievalism at the End of History: Pessimism and Renewal in Just Visiting,” for as he examines how modernity is framed by medievalism in this case, he joins Francis Fukuyama and Arthur Danto in characterizing modernity as the discovery of the illusion of progress, or at least as the pessimism that attends that discovery. Griffith argues that, thanks to postmodernism’s leveling of the past into morally relative equivalents, this film of a medieval knight and his squire popping up in twenty-first-century Chicago is able to use medievalism as a sounding board for modern concerns. Through practical and material differences that are greater than those perceived by many earlier medievalists, the filmmakers draw instructive and humorous contrasts with the modern condition, while at the same time underscoring parallels that facilitate modernity’s ability to reflect on and dream of itself, to “voice the anxieties that drive and shape that dream,” as Griffith puts it. Katherine A. Brown, on the other hand, discusses parallels between modernity and the Middle Ages as conflations between not only those constructs, but also medievalism and the Middle Ages. In “Medieval Restoration and Modern Creativity,” she first tracks medieval examples of what she means by “the reuse or rewriting of previous sources […] taken in whole or in part by a new composer in a way that both renews and transforms the source,” then compares them to such modern practices as remaking television shows. Building on these parallels, she goes on to argue that medievalism itself enacts this process of restoration. To her, medievalism does not begin “immediately in the Middle Ages with intertextual and self-referential responses to earlier medieval texts and cultural products,” as Erin Felicia Labbie contends, for its processes of “restoration,” as Brown describes them, are medieval and, especially when they take place in the Middle Ages, should be considered as such.2 Thus, medievalism is, in her words, “a modern construct that renews aspect of the medieval” and “what has been lost in the common perception of medieval culture […] may be most similar and most telling for understanding the modern.” Along those lines, Mike Horswell argues in “Crusader Medievalism and Modernity in Britain: The Most Noble Order of Crusaders and the Rupture 2

Erin Felicia Labbie, “Pop Medievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, ed. Karl Fugelso with Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 21–29 (22–23).



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of the First World War, 1921–49” that a shift in response to one particular example of medievalism may in fact signal the emergence of modernity. After framing past disputes over whether the First World War was a historical disrupture that represents the birth of modernity, he describes the rise amid post-war British chaos of a secret society that sought to tackle social problems, or, as they themselves put it, “to appeal yet again to the […] ‘Spirit of 1914,’ and make once more a Crusade, but this time against all the powers of evil which are threatening England.” Of course, the very fact that they felt a need to restore pre-war chivalry suggests that times had changed and that this chivalry, or at least their perception of it, had been unhorsed. But after an initial surge of popularity that crested with their 1923 ceremony in Westminster Abbey, it is the rapid decline of the Order that truly suggests medievalism was changing, that it was adapting to pressures from the emergence and ascendance of what we now characterize as modernity. The timing of that shift is reinforced in “From the Republica Christiana to the ‘Great Revolution’: Middle Ages and Modernity in António Sardinha’s Writings (1914–25),” as Pedro Martins chronicles how a leading doctrinal figure in the Integralismo Lusitano movement decried modernity and called for a return to medieval values. Though Sardinha was far from the first postmedieval thinker to invoke the Middle Ages as a solution to the problems of his or her time, he and many other members of his movement were unusual in the specificity and forcefulness with which they promoted medievalism as modernity’s antidote. Indeed, even while echoing a much broader outlook during and after the war, Martins’ Sardinha specifically foreshadows Just Visiting in problematizing modernity and promoting a remedy to it by refracting it through an idealized Middle Ages. An even stronger, albeit more implicit, return to Griffith is effected by Lisa Nalbone, as she points out medieval parallels to modern conditions that are foregrounded and constructively criticized by those parallels. In “Moving through Time and Space in Mercedes Rubio’s Las siete muchachas del Liceo (1957) via Wagner’s Parsifal in Barcelona, Spain (1914),” she excavates a feminist mid-twentieth-century revision of an early twentieth-century performance of a late-nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval tale. While modernizing the medievalism of Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu as they adapt Wagner adapting Wolfram von Eschenbach adapting the (earlier) Middle Ages, Nalbone’s Rubio reveals many of the travails faced by her and other women of her time, particularly in Spain. Without explicitly referring to modernity, Nalbone demonstrates how it can repurpose the Middle Ages to serve as a corrective for that which precedes it, and, while allowing that the Middle Ages may be alien enough to make an instructive contrast with modernity, she suggests the emergence of the latter is most clearly signaled by a shift from one form

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of medievalism to the next, by a transformation in how the Middle Ages are characterized and applied from one interpretation to the next. Of course, even as she somewhat circles back to Griffith, Nalbone also joins many other scholars in her approach to medievalism. Indeed, her essay serves as a convenient bridge from the preceding, more explicit discussions of medievalism’s relationship with modernity to the many other essays in this volume that often touch on modernity but rarely discuss it, much less its relationship to medievalism, explicitly. As Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih note in their introduction to the second part of this volume, all eight essays in it sprang from an exhibition that set out to explore ideas of historical authenticity, cultural translation, and appropriations in works of creative medievalism. Thus, whether they were written by artists exploring their own medievalism or by scholars exploring that of others, they could hardly help but revolve around the ways in which modernity constructs medievalism, and vice-versa. In “In/visible Medieval/isms,” Sarah Salih studies material and discursive frames that indicate or disguise medieval London amid its modern descendant. Louise D’Arcens’ “Art, Heritage Industries, and the Legacy of William Morris in Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory” examines how a contemporary novelist critiques medievalism (and other re-presentations of the past) through one of the most famous of its practitioners. For “Travel in Space, Travel in Time: Michael Morrow’s Approach to Performing Medieval Music in the 1960s,” Edward Breen interrogates notions of historical truth and authenticity as he contextualizes one of many approaches to performing medieval music. In “Imagining Medieval Chester: Practice-based Medievalism, Scholarship, and Creativity,” Catherine A. M. Clarke discusses a work she created with Nayan Kulkarni as a deliberate exploration of a medieval site’s literature and culture. Joshua Davies’ “The Anachronic Middle Ages: Public Art, Cultural Memory, and the Medievalist Imagination” contrasts a late-nineteenth-century mural cycle with one from the late twentieth century, as he explores the great differences with which medievalism may serve as a vehicle for the concerns of its creators and their times. James L. Smith argues in “Medievalisms of Moral Panic: Borrowing the Past to Frame Fear in the Present” that the process by which medievalism features in the formation of modern moral panics and the manner in which medievalists are drawn into debates about these panics reveal much about the enduring influence of the Middle Ages. Michelle M. Sauer’s “ExtraTemporal Place Attachment and Adaptive Reuse: The Afterlives of Medieval English Anchorholds” examines how at least some medieval-heritage spaces continue to assert themselves through adaptive reuse that takes into consideration their original contributions to parish communities. And in “Here Be Dragons: Mapping Space and Time, Medieval and Modern,” Paddy Molloy



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elucidates his research and thoughts as he created a work of art thoroughly grounded in the Middle Ages, particularly medieval maps and their heirs. Thus, even as the essays on medievalism and modernity introduce fresh perspectives on these already rich articles, the latter test, contest, reinforce, augment, and perhaps constrain the essays’ methods and conclusions. Though this one volume can hardly resolve the deeply contested definitions of medievalism and modernity, much less their possible interrelationship, it explores them in a manner that will, I hope, lay the foundation for much further discussion on these important and timely topics.

I Medievalism and Modernity: Some Perspective(s)

Medievalism at the End of History: Pessimism and Renewal in Just Visiting John Lance Griffith The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us into deep historical pessimists. – Francis Fukuyama1 In the eighties […] painting seemed to show all the signs of internal exhaustion, or at least marked limits beyond which it was not possible to press. – Arthur Danto2 You can only be lost if you have no purpose.

– Thibault Malfete3

When precisely the modern period begins and exactly what it means to be modern depend in part on whether we approach these questions from a historical, philosophical, or aesthetic perspective. For Fukuyama, modernity emerges from the political and philosophical revolutions of the Enlightenment and in the writings of Hegel and Marx on history;4 it is marked by changes in how the West thought about history and the progress of history. For Danto, modern thought begins with Descartes and Kant placing questions about the nature of thought itself at the center of intellectual discourse; but modernism as an artistic movement does not begin until sometime at the end of the nineteenth century, when artists make a similar self-reflexive 1 2 3 4

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006), 3. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4. Just Visiting, directed by Jean-Marie Gaubert (2001), DVD. Fukuyama, The End of History, xii and 59.

Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016

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move that deemphasizes mimetic representation of the world and makes aesthetic form and artistic representation itself the subject of art.5 However, by bringing the discrete intellectual fields of Fukuyama and Danto together, we may perceive a characteristic of modernity that runs through various strains and definitions of modernity. Both Fukuyama and Danto begin with a consideration of the pessimism that marks modern thought in their respective fields. Such pessimism is attached to the idea of modernity itself, where the modern thinker and artist senses that history was never teleological, never about progress toward a higher end, only about the discovery of the illusion of progress. Or where a feeling lingers that, while there may have been real progress once, now the progress of history and art and philosophy have come to an end, sadly divesting the artist and thinker of purpose and of struggle; a feeling of living in a world that, even if it is the end of some progressive plan, is an end that has proven disappointing. It is that pessimism, that quality, rather than any specific philosophical, historical, or aesthetic definition of modernity and modernism, to which many pop-cultural works about the Middle Ages respond. This essay therefore examines how medieval and modern culture intersect and how modernity makes use of medievalism in an American film that contemplates life at the end of history by imagining that life directly touched by the medieval past. Just Visiting (2001) is an American remake of the French Les Visiteurs (1993). The story, of the twelfth-century knight Thibault Malfete and his servant Andre who are magically transported to twenty-first-century Chicago, belongs to a branch of medievalism that deals not with adapted medieval texts or medieval history, but, rather, imagines the medieval and the modern worlds co-existing. The film is a smart, yet neglected and underappreciated, example of this kind of medievalism. 6 Monty Python’s Holy Grail and 5 6

Danto, After the End of Art, 6–7. John Aberth notes in passing only that Just Visiting is an example of time-travel medievalism. A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), 244. Also in passing, Andrew B. R. Eliot suggests that the comedy is designed to “pour scorn upon the unsophisticated medieval world” and that the remake lacks the witty wordplay of the French original. Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema History in Portraying the Medieval World (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 166. By contrast, contemporary Hollywood comedies such as Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale (2001) and Gil Junger’s Black Knight (2001) have been treated more seriously and at greater length. For A Knight’s Tale, see Nickolas Haydock, The Imaginary Middle Ages: Movie Medievalism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 100–10; and Kathleen Forni, “Reinventing Chaucer: Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 37 no. 3 (2003): 253–64. For Black Knight, see Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), 86–88; and Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 353–64.



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David Fincher’s Se7en are cinematically complex and have lent themselves to academic studies in philosophy, linguistics, and cinema.7 Just Visiting, by contrast, is stylistically a fairly standard Hollywood movie. Thematically speaking, however, this deceptively simple romantic comedy concerns itself with modernity and Nietzsche’s pessimistic assessment of the last man at the end of history. Fukuyama and Danto both begin by discussing the pessimism that darkens modern life, but only in order to counter it and to contemplate other more optimistic assessments of modernity. I argue that Just Visiting, like the writings of Danto and Fukuyama, is sensitive to the opposing impulses – at once to celebrate and to denigrate the end of history – that tear at modern culture. The film, a work of art rather than an analytical treatise, is less theoretical and more ambiguous in its conclusion than are either Fukuyama or Danto. Not especially interested in the historical Middle Ages or in mimetic representations of modern American life, the film is a fantasy, a dream. For Umberto Eco, to dream of the Middle Ages is in part to “quest for our roots,” and the viewer of neo-medieval works is akin to a psychoanalyst asking patients about their childhood.8 Just Visiting is more like the therapeutic retelling of a dream in an effort to express, if not necessarily to resolve absolutely, certain questions and anxieties about the present (in this case, questions and anxieties about the culture that produced the dream). Such therapy, such manifestation of fantasy for the purpose of self-questioning at the end of history, is, I suggest, one of the important functions of medievalism in modern culture. In particular, I will discuss two kinds of fantasies – two kinds of what we might call cultural dreams – that, although seemingly contradictory, nonetheless inhabit this film. These fantasies illustrate the schizophrenic nature of life at the end of history and delineate the nature of this kind of medievalism, its function as a therapeutic space in which to release and to reflect upon modern anxieties about what it means to live as Nietzsche’s last men. To say that Thibault is “just visiting” his American descendant Julia emphasizes that his time is limited. His goal is to return home, to visit only. However, the use of “just” can also suggest that his coming is insignificant, undesired and undesirable. In conversational English, Julia’s use of the phrase 7

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For example, see Valerie Allen, “Se7en: Medieval Justice, Modern Justice,” Journal of Popular Culture 43 no. 6 (2010): 1150–72; Daniel T. Kline, “Acephalic History: A Bataillian Reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, ed. Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 71–83; and Brian Levy and Lesley Coote, “The Subversion of Medievalism in Lancelot du Lac and Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” in Studies in Medievalism XIII: Postmodern Medievalisms, ed. Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 99–126. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 65.

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would be an attempt to separate herself from Thibault and Andre when they embarrass her. She could turn to the people looking disapprovingly at them and say, “he’s just visiting,” in order to communicate that, although he is with her (and so for the moment in some way connected to her), he is not really part of her, not like her. Eventually he will go away and she will return to normal and be like everybody else (no longer embarrassed or singled out by the crowd). Similarly, Thibault could say the same, “I’m just visiting,” and imply that he does not have any significant interest in, or bear any responsibility for, what is happening in this place because he does not belong to it and will leave as soon as he can. Yet the title can also suggest this visit has great significance, for the word “visiting” has close connections to the word “visitation,” which has a theological and legal connotation equivalent to “a visit with serious purpose.” We can read the title in the sense of “an appropriate and needful visit,” “a visitation of justice.” Thibault does not want to be part of modern culture because it is strange to him. But maybe that is also to say that it is not worth being a part of, that it is a kind of hell (as Thibault and Andre initially suspect). Maybe it is a culture in need of a visitation of justice, a just visiting. Thibault’s corrective justice falls upon many, including Julia’s boyfriend Hunter, who is the quintessential last man. Not really a hunter, he is sustained by consuming bad-tasting “power drinks” made from various foods ground down in a blender to become an indistinct, uniform, sickly green paste. This paste could be a Nietzschean metaphor for Hunter as a last man. Obsessed with health, but having few other meaningful pursuits beyond obtaining control of Julia’s inheritance, he is a capitalist who seeks financial security and physical safety, content to be a middle manager with just a modicum of power (mostly over women). He has no desire to distinguish himself in a world of equal and equally unimpressive Hegelian slaves with no Nietzschean masters.9 In addition to Andre’s sabotage of the blender containing Hunter’s questionable power drink, another simple, yet profound, moment of comic disruption and destruction illustrates the film’s pessimism about history’s end. Thibault and Andre attack the television set in Julia’s bedroom, claiming 9

“Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave […]. Liberal democracy produced ‘men without chests,’ composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos [self-esteem], clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognized as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.” Fukuyama, The End of History, xxii. For Fukuyama’s extended discussion of Nietzsche’s last man, see part V of the book, 287–340.



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that they want to free the people inside – an especially funny, and poignant, act because the show on the TV is a game show called Family Feud, an often silly and sometimes embarrassing (though popular) show. The film’s use of Family Feud invokes the feud not just within the Malfete family over the family fortune, but also the conflict within Western culture itself, between the Middle Ages of its youth and the modernity of its decrepitude. It is as if the knight and his servant have come from the past to free modern America, that is, the people on that show and all the people watching the show, free them from being trapped in the TV, in its stupidity and in the mediocrity that comes from living in a society obsessed with equality. Although the game show is a competition, the two different families compete against one another by trying to guess the results of popular opinion polls, which means that contestants compete to be the most ordinary, to see who thinks most like the majority. If Thibault’s execution of the television set is symbolic of the freeing both of the people “in” the TV as Andre says and of the people who watch TV, then both these acts of justice are part of the fantasy, the wish-fulfillment, that drives this film. That is, the film fulfills the desire (which I am suggesting is a cultural fantasy, a desire existing within the culture at large) for someone to bring justice to the hell of the modern world. In this case, it is the justice of the Middle Ages that visits the modern world and changes it for the better. Thibault is a reminder of the values of the past: “our creed is honor,” he tells Julia. Not just honor, but courage, chivalry, loyalty, determination. The satire on Julia’s boyfriend Hunter and the corrective justice meted out at the end of the film upon this stereotypical American businessman, a last man, express a desire for a new (or, in the case of Thibault’s, old) set of principles and values to guide modern America. But there is another fantasy in this film. Where the first fantasy imagines that the Middle Ages can visit the modern world and change it for the better (thereby fulfilling a cultural desire for change, for justice), the second fantasy imagines the modern world changing the medieval world or, more specifically, changing the perspective of a medieval mind. This is the fantasy of the servant Andre who, within the space of a few days, experiences the entire whirlwind of Hegelian history: from abused slave running behind his master’s horse, to struggling rebel fighting for recognition of his selfworth, to capitalist everyman in a convertible cruising along the open roads of a world without masters. What desire could this fantasy fulfill? It is the American desire to believe that America can change people; that its ideas can change people; that the very experience of coming to America, of being there, of meeting its people, can change a visitor. Despite the other half of the film, which explores the culture’s awareness of its problems and expresses the opposite desire (for change through recovery of lost values), this part of the film imagines that America is a good place. That, far from being a hell,

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it is a kind of paradise in which someone like Andre can be transformed, able to begin a new life (like Adam and Eve, maybe) with his gardener wife Angelique in a vast country of endless opportunity and choice. Each of these fantasies presents certain problems, and the film raises a number of questions. As for the fantasy of recovering the knightly virtues of the Middle Ages, the film seems ambivalent about whether the modern world can successfully integrate its past into its present culture. Much of this film is devoted to highlighting just how different the medieval and modern worlds are. Thibault and Andre’s experience is funny in part because it is so overwhelming. The behavior, the manners, the customs, and the language of modern life are completely alien to them; even the speed, the sound, the feel of this world terrify them. This experience underscores an essential characteristic of Western history: it is discontinuous, full of revolutions in behavior, thought, philosophy, economy, government. What is striking about this film, however, is that it seems to argue that, despite such a fragmented history, there are certain things that transcend history, such as values that are shared by men in every period, regardless of the customs and behaviors and fashions that change rapidly, regardless even of revolutionary shifts in theories of government and law. Thibault’s knightly virtues can be recovered and integrated into the modern world, at least in this film. That recovery is possible because the film suggests that, while the values Thibault represents may have been forgotten, they can still be understood and appreciated, and, so, recovered. Still, it is worth considering to what extent the film believes this view of history is true, however appealing it may be. If nothing else, the possibility of separating the positive aspects of Thibault (his virtues of courage and honor) from his negative qualities (his arrogance, his violence) seems problematic. Or rather, I see this film’s American fascination with the virtues of chivalry and the simultaneous ambivalence about violence as a revealing comment on the American character, on the troubled, even schizophrenic, nature of that character. On the one hand, Americans love King Arthur, but, on the other hand, they have no king and, indeed, they fought a long and bloody war to rid themselves of one.10 Americans fear their culture is in need of a just visitation, but remain unclear about the nature of justice. We see Thibault in the opening scene as a warrior hero, impressively dispatching (i.e., brutally killing) villains who abduct a woman by the roadside; yet later Julia stops him from meting out punishment to the man who stole her purse, as a crowd looks on horrified at Thibault about 10

On the Arthurian phenomenon in America, see Valerie M. Lagorio, “King Arthur and Camelot, U.S.A. in the Twentieth Century,” in Medievalism in American Culture, ed. Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Text & Studies, 1989), 151–69.



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to cut off the thief’s hand – the same crowd who will later be impressed by his majestic horse ride through the city. The second fantasy, that of America transforming the medieval servant Andre for the better, also seems problematic. When, in a moment of Hegelian struggle, Andre finally confronts his master Thibault and demands recognition of his value and his rights, Julia says: “Thibault, he only wants what we all want.” But what is it that we all want, once the struggle is over and we gain recognition as an equal member of society? Julia’s remark is unspecific because the film resists an absolute answer and offers a number of possibilities, some more than others supporting an optimistic view of America at the end of history. Andre says explicitly, “I want to be free.” He also says that he wants to stay with Angelique, a claim for the value of love and of being able to choose love in the modern world. But what else does he want, what else will he do with his freedom? “I want to eat wheel cakes and doughnuts.11 And I want to have a chariot in iron and exciting men’s fashions direct from Europe at rock-bottom prices. […] And I want to be cool and okay!” There is a sense in which Andre becomes a last man, not much different than Hunter or the other moderns in the film, content with being okay, with clothes and food and cars. The Hegelian desire for recognition is satisfied merely through being cool, recognized as equally remarkable and thus as equally unremarkable as others. Andre’s emergence into a world of slaves (to fashion, to security, to mediocrity) is exactly what the Nietzschean critique of the last man warns against. Andre is now without struggle, but as a result possibly also without purpose. On the road to Las Vegas for his honeymoon with Angelique, he tells her he has “one small worry: Who’s going to protect me from the Devil?” Angelique replies: “You got me, don’t you?” As Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” plays behind them, we are left to contemplate whether this is an appropriate hymn to American ideals of love and freedom or a saccharine reminder of the hellish depths to which modern pop music can sink, to which the modern world without a Devil, without a hell to struggle against, has sunk. The end of the film, though it is in some ways a happy ending, remains ambivalent about its own vision of modernity and medievalism. Julia is happy, having escaped her unfaithful boyfriend. Thibault, too, solves his problem and returns to wed his love. Yet Julia’s initial attraction to the chiv11

“Wheel cake” is Andre’s term for “doughnut.” Here the joke is that he has both remembered and forgotten that Angelique taught him the word “doughnut” in an earlier scene. “I love these wheel cakes,” says Andre. Angelique, laughing, says, “Ha! We call them doughnuts.” Perhaps Andre’s trouble with vocabulary is, too, a reminder that his transformation from medieval servant to modern American remains imperfect or, at least, incomplete.

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alrous (and older) Thibault is never fully resolved. The appearance of the young Frenchman perhaps suggests he may take Thibault’s place in her life, but she can never be with Thibault, that older man from a strange place and time. To the extent that Julia and Thibault, as a modern woman and a medieval man, represent modernity and medievalism, the characters’ ultimate separation suggests the uneasy and unstable relation of the concepts. Thibault’s inability to stay in this time is a reminder of the gap between the past and the present, of the discontinuity of Western history. That might mean the film awards Andre its final scene so that Andre’s ability to stay in the present can be offered as a final, positive, image of that which transcends history, of the liberal values that triumph in America at the end of history. Then again, if Andre is really meant to be living in paradise with his angel Angelina, why is he on the road to Las Vegas, Sin City? Even upon Andre the film is reluctant to bestow the full Hollywood ending. Such ambiguity is not resolved in the film, I suggest, because the purpose here of encountering the medieval world is not to clearly define modernity against medievalism or to celebrate one over the other, but for modernity to reflect on itself, to dream of itself, and to voice the anxieties that drive and shape that dream. Modernity at the beginning of the Enlightenment defined itself in terms of what it was not, and thus against the Dark Ages, looking forward to a progress away from medieval culture. However, modernity at the end of history has no absolute need for the medieval world. Neither the past (which mistakenly believed in progress) nor the future (which will not progress) matter all that much. There are wheel cakes and iron chariots and rock-bottom-priced fashions enough. Yet medievalism thrives at the end of history because it can serve in several ways. At a time that Danto calls the post-historical, when the sum of the culture’s art is no longer defined clearly or marked as distinct from the art of earlier historical periods, when everything can be art and art can be anything,12 medievalism is as equal and legitimate as any other art form. The Middle Ages offer material to post-historical artists in a world where, while there is nothing strictly new in the sense of the not-yet-seen, not-yetthought, there is much that is reshaped and reused in new ways. To the modernists who lament art is dead because there is nothing strictly new after modernism, nothing clearly different, clearly better, Danto offers as a counter to their pessimism this abundance and multiplicity of the post-historical, this equality and legitimacy that it achieves through the leveling of historical and aesthetic categories, through the erasing of values 12

Danto, After the End of Art, 12.



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denoting bad and good, primitive and progressive.13 Within Just Visiting there are a number of examples of this kind of art that Danto might enjoy. When Julia tries to comfort Thibault and suggests he “will be ok” even if he cannot return to the past, the conversation takes place in a cleverly arranged scene at a late-night diner, mimicking Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks. In addition to the reuse of Hopper’s famous image, transformed from painting to cinema by the film itself, Danto might observe Thibault’s rejection of the modern painting’s mood and ethos, of its coldness, stillness, and ennui. A medieval man inserted into Hopper’s tableau, he gets up and walks out of it, into a trash-filled alley where he and Julia, through a vigorous exercise of body and medieval sword, change her mood and create an aesthetic moment out of what modernity would otherwise discard and waste. “I can’t do it. It’s too heavy,” Julia says. At Thibault’s insistence, she persists, until by the end of the scene she has confidently wielded the sword and decimated various pieces of trash that cover her in a shower of old newspaper confetti and, from a discarded mattress, white feathers. Danto notes that one characteristic of post-historical art is that it transforms the everyday into art and lives beyond the museum, in forms museums were not designed to contain.14 Transported from a room in Thibault’s twelfth-century castle, Thibault and Andre first arrive in the twenty-first century inside a Chicago museum because the museum houses the furniture that was in Thibault’s castle. By bursting out of the staid museum diorama, frightening the museum patrons who have a more prosaic expectation of history and of art, Thibault and Andre in post-historical fashion redefine what counts as history and art. The film features multiple examples of this phenomenon whereby the ordinary is transformed: Thibault commandeering a policeman’s horse and riding it onto the elevated train; the umbrella that Andre uses as a spit to roast his chicken; the Chanel No. 5 used first as a drink and then as bathwater; the blue urinal cakes eaten as breath-refreshing mints. In each case, it is the intersection of Thibault and Andre’s medievalism and the objects of the modern world that makes the transformation possible. It is the fusing of medieval and modern perspectives that brings renewed energy and 13

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“I think the ending of modernism did not happen a moment too soon. […] [Now] artists [have] the whole inheritance of art history to work with, including […] all those marvelous possibilities […] modernism did its utmost to repress. In my own view, the major artistic contribution of the [post-historical] was the emergence of the appropriated image – the taking over of images with established meaning and identity and giving them a fresh meaning and identity.” Danto, After the End of Art, 15. Danto, After the End of Art, 16–17.

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purpose to the objects and to the healthy, but otherwise listless, perhaps too comfortable, too ordinary, people nearby. This film suggests, then, that a second function of medievalism at the end of history is to force us to reflect on the nature of life at that end. In so doing, to the pessimistic and to the jaded and listless, for whom the end of history seems not quite enough, not quite what life should be, medievalism imparts a means to fantasize, to dream again, to revitalize an end that cannot otherwise be radically changed. The vibrant old gives energy to the weary young.

Medieval Restoration and Modern Creativity1 Katherine A. Brown Current trends in medievalism tend to privilege the content of objects of investigation over interest in their form and structure or methods and ideology. The attention given to content, however, reveals only one aspect of medievalism. As originally defined by Leslie J. Workman, and at the foundation of Studies in Medievalism, this field involves “the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages.”2 In spite of Workman’s emphasis on process, sustained attempts by scholars to define the terminology – if not the scope – of medievalism do so with a focus on content. Even the trenchant discussion by Elizabeth Emery, in which she defines medievalism as a method, a way of considering modern culture in light of the medieval, still points back to an analysis of more concrete signs of the Middle Ages, such as characters, themes, architecture, and other predominantly visual markers of the medieval.3 This essay will investigate a creative practice that pervades contemporary popular music, film, and television through the lens of medievalism and specifically through a consideration of these media in relation to the concept of “restoration.”4 The application of more abstract 1

2 3 4

In addition to the anonymous reviewers and editor Karl Fugelso, I would like to thank Alison Beringer, Irina Dzero, and Ève Morisi for their helpful suggestions on various stages of this essay. Leslie J. Workman, definition cited from The International Society for the Study of Medievalism, , last accessed 17 July 2015. Elizabeth Emery, “Medievalism and the Middle Ages,” in Studies in Medievalism XVII: Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 77–85 (78). See Karl D. Uitti, “Renewal and Undermining of the Old French Romance: Jehan de Saintré,” in Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College, 1985), 135–54.

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paradigms of medieval thought to contemporary modes of art reveals parallels between the Middle Ages and modernity that challenge views regarding the otherness of the medieval as well as modern views of creativity and intellectual property. Restoration is here understood as the reuse or rewriting of previous sources, or materia, taken in whole or in part by a new composer in a way that both renews and transforms the source. The process of rewriting as a convention of medieval literature has been noted by countless scholars of the Western Middle Ages. One need only consider the expansive rewritings of the Arthurian tradition across the different Western vernaculars to ascertain the ubiquity of this practice. Although medieval writers did not refer to this creative process as restoration, it is outlined in Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria Nova, a treatise on medieval poetics in which writers are advised to use materia from Latin authorities.5 I prefer the word “restoration” to other terms to describe this process because it emphasizes similarities among works as it also implies a temporal or historical dimension of making present again past texts and the events they describe, even as they are transformed. The phrase “making present” is an allusion to the Mass that makes present the real body and blood of Christ; it shows a relationship to time and history that previous ages did not have and that is somewhat altered in the Renaissance when Protestant ideologies tend to make the real presence more  symbolic  than literal. While the framework for the Middle Ages is clearly  Christian, to say that secular works make the past present in the same way is a sacrilege. Thus, the term “restoration” suggests this Christian context and its historical implications, but within the secular context of vernacular literature. My intention here is to focus on the historical aspect rather than the religious, using restoration to describe a process of rewriting secular works composed within a medieval Christian context and framework, which distinguishes it from literary adaptations in other periods. The term “restoration” is indebted to an article by Karl D. Uitti on the fifteenth-century French work Jehan de Saintré. In this article, Uitti illustrates that the medieval vernacular romance in France was a tradition built on “renewal and creativity […] with each century ‘inventing’ [the romance tradition] anew, always, however, […] within a framework of an ideal and constant ‘restoration.’”6 Although Uitti’s discussion of restoration is concentrated on Old and Middle French romance, he understands “the very medieval celebration and practice of restoration [as] quintessential to medieval 5

6

For a discussion of materia in the Poetria Nova and its application to vernacular literature, see Douglas Kelly, “Theory of Composition in Medieval Narrative Poetry and Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria Nova,” Mediaeval Studies 31 (1969): 117–48. Uitti, “Renewal and Undermining,” 135.



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poetic procedures” more generally.7 In his example, he argues that rewritings of romance narratives were always “other” or “disjunctive” in relation to previous texts, but that each successive work functioned as a “replication-intransformation” that restored the historicity of narrative events and codified them in the romance tradition.8 It is precisely because of its relative invisibility that the practice of restoration is not usually offered as a point of comparison between medieval society and modern society, or typically considered a feature of medievalism. Other studies of medievalism that focus on medieval concepts and structures in modern art forms whose content is not explicitly medieval reinforce the idea of medievalism as an approach to understanding culture as they also highlight similarities between the medieval and the modern.9 While restoration underscores medieval conceptions of creativity because works are necessarily dependent on the reuse or renewal of other artists’ materia, artistic creativity in the modern sense, conceived as a novel creation emanating from the mind of the individual artist, is not known until well after the Middle Ages.10 In the medieval tradition, building on previous materia signals the authority of the source and restores it for a new audience, while allowing for new composers to adapt the materia to diverse ends. The creativity lies primarily in the transformation of the materia rather than in the novelty of the content, because much of that is borrowed. An example of restoration from the Middle Ages that crosses medieval genres – inasmuch as genres in the Middle Ages were stable categories – is the Matron of Ephesus topos. The crux of the narrative that is shared by most versions involves a woman, recently widowed and histrionically demonstrating her grief, who allows herself to be seduced by a man shortly after her husband’s death and, in some iterations, at her husband’s gravesite. The materia may be traced back to Aesop, whose famed fables include a 7 8

9

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Uitti, “Renewal and Undermining,” 137, original emphasis. Uitti, “Renewal and Undermining,” 137. Other examples to which Uitti alludes are Chrétien de Troyes’s restoration of Wace and the romances of Antiquity; Guillaume de Lorris’s restoration of Chrétien de Troyes in the Roman de la Rose; Jean de Meun’s restoration (through continuation and amplification) of Guillaume de Lorris’s part of the Roman de la Rose; Froissart’s restoration of Machaut; and ultimately Antoine de la Sale’s restoration of Froissart. An excellent example is the work of William Racicot and the medievalism-oriented film studies he cites in “Anything Different Is Good: Incremental Repetition, Courtly Love, and Purgatory in Groundhog Day,” in Mass Market Medieval, ed. David W. Marshall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007), 186–97. Ernst Robert Curtius notes that the idea of a connection between God the creator and poets as creators of autonomous works can be traced back to Goethe, but not before, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1953; repr. 1963), 397–401.

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similar tale that sought to illustrate the supposed inconstancy of women. Various Latin versions that derive from the Aesopic tradition survive into the twelfth century, when vernacular renditions are recorded. In Old French alone, there are four well-known versions from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. One of these may be found in Marie de France’s collection of fables, known as the Ysopet (c. 1170s) in deference to Aesop.11 Her version is a rather faithful rendition of one of the Latin traditions, emphasizing the inconstancy of the widow who offers to exchange her husband’s corpse for the body of a hanged man (and thief ) in order to win over the new man she admires, a relative of the thief. Whereas some starkly antifeminist analogues in Latin end with the man’s rejection of the widow for her faithlessness and irreverence – she disinters a Christian man to put a criminal in his place – Marie’s fable illustrates the power of life over death, a common theme in her fable collection, even as it censures the widow. A less antifeminist version appears as an episode inserted into Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight with the Lion (Yvain) (c. 1185), after Yvain kills Landuc, leaving Laudine a widow.12 Laudine’s great demonstrations of grief, including crying, wailing, and fainting, soon give way to new love and a new husband, Yvain. Her quick decision to marry her husband’s murderer is bolstered by logical arguments about the need to defend her fountain and her people, as proffered by her crafty maidservant Lunete, but these machinations are ultimately in the service of love. This widow avoids condemnation through appeals to political need, and the text further legitimates the rapport through marriage. Finally, there are two fabliaux of this materia: an anonymous fabliau, probably from the early thirteenth century, and a longer character-portrait titled “La Veuve” (the widow) by Gautier le Leu.13 In the anonymous fabliau, a squire wagers a knight that he can seduce the widow, who is all too willing to be consoled in this manner. The emphasis in this version is on the humor of the plot, of the widow allowing herself to be tricked in order to derive some pleasure in her current situation; blame and censure for her inconstancy are replaced by laughter. Gautier’s text develops the thoughts of the widow as she attempts to satisfy her voracious appetite for men after her husband’s death. 11 12

13

Marie de France, The Fables of Marie de France, trans. Mary Lou Martin (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publication, 1984). The Knight with the Lion (Yvain), trans. William W. Kibler in Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler and Carlton W. Carroll (London: Penguin Books, 1991), esp. 310–22. English translation, “The Mourner Who Got Fucked at the Grave Site,” in The Fabliaux, trans. Nathaniel E. Dubin (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 325–31; and “The Widow” in Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French, trans. Robert Hellmann and Richard O’Gorman (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1965), 145–58.



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The beginning of this text shares many details with Chrétien de Troyes’s text and with the anonymous fabliau, and these latter two share a select sample of lines that describe the widow’s excessive grief, suggesting a direct connection among these texts. Indeed, the anonymous fabliau clearly parodies the courtly text and, through comedy, absolves the widow of blame. Gautier’s work, on the other hand, undoes the implied misogyny with its humorous warning to men to satisfy their wives lest they all suffer. Each of these narratives restores the Matron of Ephesus topos, selecting different parts of it to emphasize and offering a new interpretation of the materia. The evidence of creativity in each lies primarily in the telling, through the particular context, stylistic elements, and adaptations of plot details, but not in the core content of the plot; the story is still recognizable. Furthermore, each telling contributes a novel way of viewing the narrative that becomes part of the tradition. The audience need not recognize allusions to other versions in order to enjoy any rendition of the tale, but they are invited to do so. Though this example involves complete narratives, restoration may also use fragments of narratives that are borrowed and reworked. Indeed, restoration is always fragmentary inasmuch as rewritings always alter the materia by adding or removing content. To speak of the Matron of Ephesus topos, then, is to allude to all versions in some respect, and to the ways in which they interact with and comment on each other.14 It is precisely this type of renewal that pervades popular culture in the form of film and television-series remakes, and especially in music sampling. In television, a remake such as Hawaii Five-0, which began airing in 2010, restores the same geographic setting and concept of a crime-fighting team that was the focus of the original Hawaii Five-O television series of the 1970s, though the crimes, dialogue, and characters are transformed, modernized by becoming more culturally sensitive and politically correct. Thus, the new Hawaii Five-0 does rewrite the past show by making it more acceptable to modern attitudes about diversity, while also codifying it as a classic worthy of imitation within the crime-fighting genre of television. In the cinematic world, numerous remakes of old and not-so-old films abound, from the newly announced remake of Point Break, which alters many of the details of the original film to conform to modern sensibilities, to an updated version of Annie (2014) that tells a version of the story of the famous orphan based on the 1982 film, which in turn was based on a successful Broadway musical, which was itself based on the Little 14

For more detailed analysis and comparison of these tales, see Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 1–35; Roy Pearcy, Logic and Humour in the Fabliaux (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 11–33; and Katherine A. Brown, Boccaccio’s Fabliaux (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 65–74.

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Orphan Annie comic strip. Here the materia is in a direct line of succession, moving through the decades from one genre to another, while all versions – including continued stage productions of the musical – remain available to audiences. Indeed, audiences are invited, but not required, to compare and contrast different renditions of these films and stage productions, always in the process of restoring Annie’s charm for audiences and welcoming new audiences to participate in the tradition. In 1998, the Annie musical soundtrack served as inspiration for Jay Z’s hit song “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which sampled the chorus from the soundtrack’s song “It’s the Hard Knock Life” and combined it with rap lyrics about street life in New York City. The song contrasts the hard-edged lyrics about violence with the squeaky-clean little orphan girls’ voices from the cast recording, thus reappropriating the “hard knock life” for another group of underprivileged and marginalized New Yorkers. As a practice, music sampling allows artists to digitize and borrow any part of a song and repurpose it or insert it in any genre to create from this musical materia a new song. Just as various parts of the Matron of Ephesus topos were renewed or discarded in the different medieval renditions of that tale, so the chorus from a well-known Annie musical number became part of a hip-hop song, with the rest of the song unused by Jay Z. Music sampling, however, constitutes one of the most contentious forms of contemporary restoration because of common attitudes about creativity and laws safeguarding intellectual property and copyrights. The OED offers the following draft addition to the term “sampling”: The action or process of sampling sounds (cf. sample v.) in order to convert an analogue signal into a digital one; spec. the technique of digitally encoding sound for subsequent electronic processing, modification, or reuse, esp. as part of a recording or performance; the incorporation of an excerpt from one musical recording into another.15 More than the other forms discussed here, this would-be restoration of music tends to receive criticism because it signals a lack of creativity on the part of the artist in the popular imagination. There is no way to hide the fact that the musical hook was created by another artist; consequently, songs that use samples are currently ineligible for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year because they are not considered fully original.16 15 16

OED online, , last accessed 21 July 2015. Mark Ronson, TED talk in 2014, “How Sampling Transformed Music,” , last accessed 21 July 2015.



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In a 2014 TED [Technology, Entertainment, and Design] talk on sampling in popular music, DJ Mark Ronson explains that “[s]ampling isn’t about ‘hijacking nostalgia wholesale’ […]. It’s about inserting yourself into the narrative of a song while also pushing that story forward.”17 Whereas the medieval practice of restoration rewrites the past while also making it present to a new audience, sampling constitutes a trans-historical dialogue among artists, where the artist may “insert” himself into the time of another song even as he updates it. Ronson’s demonstration of the many musical reimaginations of “La Di Da Di,” Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s 1984 hit, comes remarkably close to the medieval practice of restoration and suggests that sampling can include the reworking of whole songs as well as parts. Even though Ronson champions the practice, his use of the word “hijacking” already signals a rejection of sampling and a negative view of this model of creativity in favor of the modern mode of novel creations. One notable and recent example of this conceptual rejection of sampling, or perhaps more precisely inspiration, is the lawsuit filed against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke for their hit song “Blurred Lines,” which critics, and more pertinently Marvin Gaye’s estate, claimed was too similar to Gaye’s 1977 song “Got To Give It Up.” The court awarded Gaye’s estate $7.3 million for copyright infringement, but the ramifications arguably go beyond the scope of popular music, as Williams himself stated: The verdict handicaps any creator out there who is making something that might be inspired by something else […]. This applies to fashion, music, design … anything. If we lose our freedom to be inspired we’re going to look up one day and the entertainment industry as we know it will be frozen in litigation. This is about protecting the intellectual rights of people who have ideas.18 For Williams, “ideas” may be built on or inspired by the work, or materia, of other artists; this is precisely what restoration encourages. Indeed, “Blurred Lines” does restore the funk, falsetto, hook-up culture of Marvin Gaye’s song while inserting it into the contemporary music scene. Furthermore, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody of Williams’s and Thicke’s hit, titled “Word Crimes,” constitutes yet another use of Gaye’s materia, this time in the service of proper grammar (and humor). Just as with the medieval texts, these works are not replicas of each other, nor are they intended to be. They are instead 17 18

Ronson, “Sampling.” Pharrell Williams, interview with the Financial Times, quoted from Time Magazine website, last modified 19 March 2015, .

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highlighting various aspects of a song or a story, whatever materia they use, in order to emphasize their own mores and to revise their own history as the artists make themselves part of that same history. The Gaye–Williams/Thicke–Yankovic triad certainly seems analogous to the fable–romance–fabliau Matron of Ephesus topos considered above, except that modern thought and courts do not accept such a relatively fluid and communal construct of intellectual property. Nevertheless, these examples from popular culture demonstrate some similarities, though not continuities, in creative sensibility between the medieval world and the modern. Artistic creativity in both periods, it seems, restores materia in order to rewrite the past, to claim for each generation aspects of the past that artists deem worthy examples of their art and worthy reflections of their culture. By analogy, it also implies that medieval restoration may have allowed writers to insert themselves, so to speak, into their own literary past. Such a parallel suggests that perhaps the Middle Ages are not as different or other as we would like to think, because we can recuperate this period to express modern sensibilities, as opposed to using it exclusively to contrast with modern paradigms. As medievalism is itself predicated on renewing aspects of the Middle Ages, the understanding of creativity sketched above may be beneficial, for medievalism as a discipline enacts this very process of restoration, its materia being any characteristic of the Middle Ages that it seeks to restore and validate. In contrast to assertions that “medievalism begins immediately in the Middle Ages with intertextual and self-referential responses to earlier medieval texts and cultural products,”19 I contend that restoration is precisely medieval and that these practices taking place in the Middle Ages ought to be considered unequivocally medieval, not medievalism, because the latter necessarily implies both temporal and ideological shifts. Medievalism, then, is a modern construct that renews aspects of the medieval. More to the point, it is perhaps what has been lost in the common perception of medieval culture that may be most similar and most telling for understanding the modern. I believe that exploring similarities between the medieval and the modern allows us to consider recurring features of the human condition, in this case the nature of creativity, and to challenge our modern constructs.

19

Erin Felicia Labbie offers this excellent articulation of the concept of repetition as one possible genealogy of medievalism, yet it seems to fit better with her definition of pop medievalism than the alternative she outlines, in “Pop Medievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, ed. Karl Fugelso with Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 21–29 (22–23).

Crusader Medievalism and Modernity in Britain: The Most Noble Order of Crusaders and the Rupture of the First World War, 1921–49 Mike Horswell The Malleability of Modernity Modernity, one dictionary suggests, is “the mythical moment when ‘now’ began.”1 An inherently “epochal concept,” modernity carries within it temporal disjuncture: “The idea of modernity rests on rupture.”2 Both modernity and medievalism carry inherently a sense of chronological distance and difference – now and then. While opinions have varied as to what defined the premodern, the modern, and the nature and duration of the processes of historical change, modernity has served as an umbrella term for now in a comparable manner to the way in which medieval has served as a label for then. The onset of modernity has proved a durable narrative that has framed an assortment of historical work, whether examining processes of change or providing start or endpoints. This study will examine the Most Noble Order of Crusaders (founded in 1921), in order to evaluate the interaction of a reputed moment of modernity with one particular postmedieval response to the Middle Ages. 1

2

Ian Buchanan, “Modernity,” A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), , accessed 17 July 2015. Saurabh Dube, “Modernity and Its Enchantments: An Introduction,” in Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, ed. Saurabh Dube (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 5, 1.

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Modernity, Memory, and the Great War The First World War has been regarded as just such a moment of modernity: a rupture with the past in which the world emerged irrevocably changed. This view was famously taken by Paul Fussell in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, first published in 1975.3 Fussell argued that the traditional ways of understanding war and expressing grief were made redundant by the scale of the horror of the Great War: mechanization and national mobilization created a total war, the war to end all wars, which required new methods of representation to convey meaning adequately. Fussell saw these as being essentially ironic and fragmentary, and they heralded a fundamental shift of mentalité in which the war was central: “I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”4 Fussell’s argument has been criticized for its dependence on a small cadre of British elite literary sources, an unproblematic understanding of memory, and privileging of individual experience (including his own), yet the narrative of the war as futile, tragic, and presenting an essential break with the past has gained traction.5 In this vein, Samuel Hynes wrote: Even as it was being fought the war was perceived as a force of radical change in society and in consciousness. It brought to an end the life and values of Victorian and Edwardian England; but it did something more fundamental than that: it added a new scale of violence and destruction to what was possible – it changed reality. That change was so vast and so abrupt as to make the years after the war seem discontinuous from the years before, and that discontinuity became a part of English imaginations. Men and women after the war looked back at their own pasts as one might look across a great chasm to a remote, peaceable place on the other side.6 This argument for the “radical discontinuity” of the First World War has been challenged. Alexander Watson and Patrick Porter have claimed 3 4 5

6

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 25th Anniversary Edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Fussell, Great War, 35. Leonard V. Smith, “Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-Five Years Later,” History and Theory 40/2 (2001): 241–60; Belinda Davis, “Experience, Identity, and Memory: The Legacy of World War I,” The Journal of Modern History 75/1 (2003): 111–31. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London: Pimlico, 1990), ix.



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that “combatants may have found [prewar sacrificial ideology] not only relevant but actually useful in the trenches.”7 Rosa Bracco has demonstrated that authors of “middlebrow” literature in Britain after the war sought to preserve continuity with the past in both form and content, while Michael Paris has identified the persistence of traditional values in juvenile literature through to the Second World War.8 Similarly, Stefan Goebel’s work has highlighted the strands of prewar medievalism used to commemorate the war in Britain after 1918.9 Furthermore, historians, including Hynes himself, have recognized that the interwar years in Britain saw the war remembered differently by different people.10 For Hynes, though, this was a binary contest between two cultures, “a conservative culture that clung to and asserted traditional values, and a counter-culture, rooted in rejection of the war and its principles. Each culture had its art, its literature, and its monuments; and each denied the other.”11 Adrian Gregory has concluded that while the memory of the war was “continually contested and developing,” the interwar years saw the growth of disillusionment with the war – specifically, as it became more likely that another war would follow. He concluded that: Most people, for one reason or another, came to doubt the value of the victory to a greater or lesser extent between 1919 and 1939. This should not be seen as simply a pacifist turn in opinion. Nor was it simply or even mostly a reflection on the experience of the war as such. […] The two meanings of the war, victory and warning, were both dependent on the peace. No peace meant no meaning.12 7

8

9

10

11 12

Alexander Watson and Patrick Porter, “Bereaved and Aggrieved: Combat Motivation and the Ideology of Sacrifice in the First World War,” Historical Research 83/219 (2010): 146–64 (159). Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 12; Michael Paris, Over the Top: The Great War and Juvenile Literature in Britain (London: Praeger, 2004), xii. Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Stefan Goebel, “Britain’s ‘Last Crusade’: From War Propaganda to War Commemoration, c. 1914–1930,” in Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age, ed. David Welch and Jo Fox (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 159–76. See Davis, “Experience, Identity, and Memory”; Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: London Hambledon, 2005). Hynes, A War Imagined, 283. Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 271, 275.

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For Gregory, then, the unraveling of traditional ways of understanding, and celebrating, warfare came in tandem with the economic depression and the increasing disillusionment with the peace. Modernity – the turning from the traditional – perhaps grew out of a disenchantment with the past born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, historians such as Jay Winter have compellingly posited a greater break with traditional ways of understanding and assigning meaning to the Second World War, specifically the twin horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. “Both of these catastrophes,” Winter argued, “raised the possibility that the limits of language had been reached; perhaps there was no way to express adequately the hideousness and scale of the cruelties of the 1939–45 war.”13 In the light of the Second World War, efforts to commemorate, and thereby understand and remember appropriately, the First World War seemed traditional: the continuity of language and symbols from 1914 to 1918 could be seen more clearly from the post-1945 vantage point.

“A Revival of Mediæval Chivalry”: The Most Noble Order of Crusaders Historians of nineteenth-century cultural trends have used the First World War as a caesura. Mark Girouard’s influential exploration of Victorian chivalry, The Return to Camelot, is typical in ending with the First World War. He saw it as having dealt a “death-blow” to the cherished cultural code for the elite British men of the nineteenth century, which was fostered in schools and trumpeted in literature.14 For Girouard, the war marked an endpoint for the dominance of chivalry, a system that had encompassed British imperial militarism, muscular Christianity, and romantic medievalism. While chivalry may have persisted in postwar Britain, it did so in altered and attenuated form. As Elizabeth Siberry has shown, crusading rhetoric and imagery formed a significant part of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British social imaginary.15 A chivalric, imperial interpretation of the Crusades was closely allied to the values of the traditional prewar culture referred to by Fussell 13 14

15

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 290; Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos (London: Constable, 1987); Paris, Over the Top, xii. Elizabeth Siberry, “Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 365–85; Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).



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and Hynes above. While Siberry also closed her study with the end of the First World War, she demonstrated that crusader medievalism was present throughout the war, on both the home and foreign fronts.16 Indeed Goebel, in his work on postwar commemoration, has argued that, “the Crusades, chivalry and medieval spirituality and mythology provided rich, protean sources of images, tropes and narrative motifs for people to give meaning to the legacy of the Great War.”17 If the war represented a break with traditional culture (or the perception of a fracture), which in early twentieth-century Britain included ideas of chivalry and crusading imagery, then examining postwar crusader medievalism can provide insight into the question of whether the outbreak of the Great War can be considered a harbinger of modernity, or whether the advent of modernity is a misleading narrative.18 Established in London in 1921 by three ex-servicemen among the chaos of delayed demobilization, million-strong unemployment, and the attempts of the British government to return to a peacetime footing, the Most Noble Order of Crusaders was designed to be a secret society of British men gathered to tackle the social problems of the country.19 Describing its inception, the Tenth Crusade (the journal of the Order) relayed that: inspiration came to [the founder] to revive the Crusades, to appeal yet again to the innate chivalry, the sense of self-sacrifice, the love of fellowship, in short to all that we call the “Spirit of 1914,” and make once more a Crusade, but this time against all the powers of evil which are threatening England.20 The Order saw itself as being engaged in a new social crusade, but the Tenth Crusade was more than a title of its journal; it located their activities in sequence with previous crusades. In this schema the “Ninth Crusade” was the First World War, in which the “indomitable Spirit of the British” won the war and was equated with that of the crusaders.21 For the Order 16 17 18

19 20 21

Siberry, New Crusaders, 103. Goebel, Medieval Memory, 1. Crusader medievalism, to adapt Tom Shippey’s definition, can be understood as “postmedieval attempt[s] to re-imagine the crusades for the modern world.” Tom Shippey, “Medievalisms and Why They Matter,” in Studies in Medievalism XVII: Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 45. Martin Kitchen, Europe between the Wars, 2nd edn (London: Pearson Longman, 2006), 278. R. M. and A. P., “The Origin and Growth of the Order,” Tenth Crusade 1/1, Bodleian Library, Oxford (hereafter Bod.) (October 1924): 7–9 (7). Walter Faber, “For GOD, KING, and COUNTRY,” Crusader Series 1, The National Archives, Kew, London (hereafter TNA), HO 144/17618, 1–15 (5). See also Tenth Crusade

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the root of all evil in the postwar world was class antagonism.22 The solution was the “comradeship of the trenches” that had marked the experience of the men in the “Ninth Crusade.” Indeed, the Order had broad appeal; trade union members attended alongside high-ranking military officers, salesmen, laborers, and unemployed men. The effort to revive the collective “Spirit of 1914” was a defining aim of the Tenth Crusade.23 As a self-styled Order of Chivalry, the Most Noble Order of Crusaders sought to take up the mantle perceived to have been held by the medieval crusaders, the exemplars of chivalrous knighthood.24 Their 1923 pamphlet entitled, “A Revival of Mediæval Chivalry,” made this explicit, distilling the Order’s aim of chivalric renaissance into four ideals: “Service, Self-sacrifice, Loyalty, Brotherhood.” This was supposedly the same chivalric code that had bound medieval crusaders – the Order was ostensibly engaged in the same cause: In these four words are summarised the ideas that inspired the old Warriors of the cross. On this point an utterance of the present Order may be quoted: “The Order of Crusaders was founded well-nigh a thousand years ago, when men, fired with a desire to render Service in what they considered to be a Just and True Cause, banded themselves together in a great Brotherhood – an Order of Chivalry – such as the world had never before seen.”25 Despite the claims of ancient foundation and use of chivalric ideals to bridge the gap of several centuries, the Order’s understanding of chivalry included values that were distinctively nineteenth century in origin. The first Grand Master, Colonel Walter Faber, wrote that a Crusader knew how to “‘play the game’ – whether it be in the Board-room, the office, the workshop, or on the playing fields”; they were the epitome of a “Christian gentleman.”26 It is notable here that the version of the medieval past being accessed was heavily influenced by a nineteenth-century romantic perception of chivalry,

22 23 24 25 26

1/6 (March 1925): 126; Tenth Crusade 1/3 (December 1924): 49; “The Rites and Ceremonies to be Observed at the Inauguration of the Tenth Crusade,” TNA, HO 144/17618, 1–13 (2); “it was a holy war, if by that term we can understand that we fought to vindicate our principles,” Grand Seneschal, “What’s It All About?” Crusadery 2 (1926): 5–7 (5). Tenth Crusade 1/9 (June 1925): 196. Tenth Crusade 1/7 (April 1925): 159; Tenth Crusade 1/11 (August 1925): 225. “Rites and Ceremonies,” 1–2. “A Revival of Mediæval Chivalry,” Crusader Series 2, TNA, HO 144/17618, 4. Faber, “For GOD, KING, and COUNTRY,” 12; “Christian gentleman” is from the sermon of the Abbot of the Cabot Conclave, quoted in “A Christian Gentleman,” Western Daily Press (16 November 1925): 9.



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mapped onto the medieval crusaders. This revivalism was seen as the cure for the damage inflicted by the war. The Order was organized into conclaves, small groups that met regularly in towns and cities across the UK. By January 1925 there were thirtyfour conclaves in Britain, with another fourteen by June 1926; the Evening News in 1923 estimated membership of the Order at 5000 men, with eighty percent from the working class.27 Naming a conclave was an act charged with significance. While some conclaves honored senior members of the Order or reflected their military origins, by mid-1926 there were conclaves named after Peter the Hermit, local crusaders Pain Peverel and Peter Le Marchael, and two named after King Richard I.28 Additionally, there were conclaves named for King Arthur, Excalibur, and Sir Galahad, while nineteenthcentury heroes David Livingstone and General Gordon were also honored. In the Canadian branch of the Order was a Lord Allenby Conclave in North Vancouver, to whom the British General of the 1917–18 Palestine campaign gave permission to use his crest.29 In fact, the names of the conclaves demonstrated clearly the relationship of the Order to the past: as well as medieval crusaders they encompassed both mythical chivalric and late-nineteenthcentury imperial heroes, as well as elements drawn from the recent global conflict. They precisely reflected a traditional, Victorian amalgamation of imperial, mythical, and historical heroes. The Order from its inauguration was rooted in chivalric perceptions of both the medieval past and recent history, which together framed its social mission. There was a dual attempt to revive the past by combining the high purpose of the crusades (at least, a nineteenth-century version of the crusades) with the camaraderie of the trenches.30 Both were reimagined as they were revived, blurring together into a set of nostalgically missed values that stood at the core of the Order’s mission. As well as local meetings, the Order held annual public ceremonies in churches to commemorate the war.31 These involved processions by the members wearing their medievalesque robes and carrying objects of symbolic importance such as a sword, chest, and Bible. The most prominent of these 27 28 29

30

31

“‘Crusaders’ War on Scandals: Evils Stamped Out by Secret Order,” Evening News (4 December 1923), TNA, 426560. Canada also included Valenciennes, Lens, and two Richard Cour-De-Lion conclaves. For conclave names, see Tenth Crusade 2/9 (June 1926): ii–iii; “To Use Allenby’s Crest,” The Montreal Gazette (19 July 1928): 3, , accessed 4 September 2013. For explicit mentions of the revival of wartime camaraderie, see Tenth Crusade 1/7 (April 1925): 159; Tenth Crusade 1/8 (May 1925): 172–73; and Tenth Crusade 1/11 (August 1925): 225. “A Revival of Mediæval Chivalry,” 2.

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ceremonies came in 1923 when the Order secured Westminster Abbey for its service, which was attended by the future King George VI as well as members of the aristocracy and representatives from trade unions.32 Home Office records show that the then Duke of York contemplated becoming Grand Master of the Order until being warned off by the Home Secretary.33 Conducting a ceremony of remembrance in the Abbey, with royalty in attendance, constituted an international event, and the Order had an opportunity for great influence. This opportunity, however, was never taken. Although a second public procession in 1925 was also filmed by British Pathé and attracted large crowds, the press reaction to the Order was mixed, as they were compared to the Italian Fascisti and the Ku Klux Klan.34 Undeterred, the Order continued its charitable aims: a member of the Holyrood Conclave was credited with founding what became the Edinburgh Blood Transfusion Service, while London Crusaders were acknowledged for their blood donations in the capital.35 By 1939 the Order had opened a second rest home in the Cotswolds for those without other means in the city to use for a holiday.36 With a large turnover of senior figures in the two decades after its establishment and its affiliation in December 1936 with the Royal Society of St George, an English patriotic Society, the Order dwindled to become a charitable organization that faded from national, and then local, record.37 The last mention is of members of the Eastbourne conclave in 1949 attempting to take Christmas dinner to the offshore lighthouse keepers.38 It seems the Order were unable to inspire a new generation with the chivalric ideas they saw embodied by a crusading military order, leaving the high point of the Order its 1923 ceremony at Westminster Abbey. 32 33 34

35

36 37 38

“Crusaders at the Abbey: Duke of York Present,” The Times (29 November 1923). “Report,” 426560/2, TNA HO 144/17618. “Most Noble Order of Crusaders,” British Pathé (18 June 1925), , accessed 4 September 2013. For press reaction to the Order, see “Secret Society of Crusaders,” Daily Express (28 November 1923), TNA: HO 144/17618, ref. 426560; “The Crusaders,” Daily News (6 December 1923), TNA: HO 144/17618; Filson Young, “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” The Saturday Review (8 December 1923), 613, TNA: HO 144/17618; “The Crusaders,” Evening Standard (28 November 1923), TNA: HO 144/17618. GD14 Edinburgh and South East Scotland Blood Transfusion Service, Lothian Health Services Archive, , accessed 4 September 2013; “Blood Transfusion,” The Times (8 July 1925), Is. 44008, 12, col. E; A Concise Statement of the Aims and Ideals of the Order of Crusaders (c. 1933), TNA: HO 144/17618, 7. “New Rest Home in the Cotswold Hills,” The Times (24 April 1939), Is. 48124, 15, col. E. “The Order of Crusaders,” The English Race (December 1936). “In Brief,” The Daily Mirror (24 December 1949).



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Revivalist Medievalism and Moments of Modernity The establishment of a pseudo-medieval order of chivalry in 1921 was a postmedieval response to both the Middle Ages and the changed nature of postwar Britain. Initially the Order can be seen to defy Fussell’s assertion that the First World War represented a total cultural rupture and consequently the onset of modernity. The Order applied aspects of nineteenth-century culture, such as chivalrous crusader medievalism, to postwar Britain, looking to the past for solutions to the present. The Order’s multilayered, palimpsestic medievalism (itself a nineteenth-century version of the medieval past) and revivalism in the face of changing contemporary circumstances present a more complex tale than merely locating a moment of modernity. The recent historiographical emphasis on the diversity of experience of the First World War and ways in which it was remembered is a helpful caution for metanarratives of modernity that could overdetermine the aims and actions of groups such as the Order, whose postwar founding complicates the simplicity of the premodernity–war–modernity schema. Ironically, however, the Order’s revivalism implied the very change in society they lamented; it presupposed that the world had changed and that their values needed restoring. There had been, if not a total rupture, then significant social trauma, and consequently some movement towards modernity – though not necessarily Fussell’s ironic brand. The Most Noble Order of Crusaders, then, can be understood as an attempt to make sense of the war – to give meaning to the conflict, their experiences, and postwar Britain. The Order’s exploration of an alternative way of interpreting the war for the changed postwar context was, however, ultimately abortive. The timing of the failure of their medievalism to gain traction suggests that the hard realities of the interwar years had bred a disillusionment with traditional, nineteenth-century values that celebrated the war as another heroic engagement of the British people.39 Their romantic re-membering of the war as the “Ninth Crusade” lacked wider cultural resonance despite initial opportunity and success, and suggests some form of change had occurred without them. The Order, with its emphasis on the continuity of prewar chivalric values and its crusade to revive them, was increasingly out of step with 1930s Britain, marching out of one war and grimly into the next. That war would, crushingly, render the “Great War to End All Wars” the “First World War.”40

39 40

Hynes, A War Imagined, 271–78. Gregory, The Last Great War, 276.

From the Republica Christiana to the “Great Revolution”: Middle Ages and Modernity in António Sardinha’s Writings (1914–25)1 Pedro Martins The writings of António Sardinha (1887–1925) have still not generated the interest they deserve in the panorama of studies on Portuguese historiography. A poet, politician, and historian isolated from the main academic circles, Sardinha was the leading doctrinal figure of the movement known as Integralismo Lusitano,2 founded in 1913 in the aftermath of the attempts to 1 2

This essay was written as part of a Ph.D. dissertation financed by a Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) scholarship [SFRH/ BD/ 80398/ 2011]. Integralismo Lusitano (“Lusitanian Integralism”) was an integralist and monarchic political movement founded in 1913 that advocated traditionalism and opposed parliamentarism. It favored decentralization, corporativism, the Catholic Church, and the return to a traditional and organic monarchy, based on the king’s personal power. It included among its members António Sardinha (its main ideologist), Alberto Monsaraz, José Pequito Rebelo, Hipólito Raposo, Luís de Almeida Braga, and Francisco Rolão Preto. The movement would lose impetus in the 1930s, with the death of the last Portuguese king in exile, Manuel II, in 1932, and the institutionalization of the Estado Novo. Many “second generation” integralists, such as Manuel Múrias, Pedro Teotónio Pereira, and Marcello Caetano (the last Prime Minister of the Estado Novo between 1968 and 1974), would become notable politicians in the Estado Novo, while others opposed it considering the regime a “fascist corporativism.” For this political movement, see Manuel Braga da Cruz, “O integralismo lusitano nas origens do salazarismo,” Análise Social 18/70 (1982): 137–82; David Ferreira, “Integralismo Lusitano,” in Dicionário de História de Portugal, coord. Joel Serrão (Porto: Figueirinhas, 1992), 3: 332–36; Paulo Archer de Carvalho, “Nação e nacionalismo. Mitemas do Integralismo Lusitano” (master’s thesis, Universidade de Coimbra, 1993); José Manuel Quintas, “Filhos de Ramires: das ideias, das almas e dos factos no advento do ‘Integralismo Lusitano,’ 1913–1916” (master’s thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1997).

Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016

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restore the recently deposed Portuguese monarchy. In the doctrine of Integralismo, the medieval period occupied an important place, both as a reference in national and European history and an example for a future political, moral, and spiritual rearrangement. Sardinha’s contrasting views on the Middle Ages and Modernity are essential to an understanding of the political proposals of the Integralists. Having as a basis nineteenth-century Romantic and positivist historiography, Sardinha portrayed the Middle Ages as an epoch of civilizational progress and spiritual improvement, serving as a counterpoint to a decadence represented by Modernity. As we will see, this discourse was adapted to counterrevolutionary purposes in order to vilify liberal thought and its consequences in the political context of Europe since the French Revolution and particularly during the First World War, the interwar period, and the Portuguese First Republic (1910–26). In this essay, we will examine Sardinha’s writings between 1914 (the year of the release of Nação Portuguesa, the most important Integralist periodical) and 1925 (the year of Sardinha’s death). Our aim will be to uncover how his traditionalist and counter-revolutionary political agenda articulated with his reflections on the political and social system of the Middle Ages and on the deleterious effects of Modernity on Western civilization. We will see that Sardinha’s depiction of the medieval period stands at an opposite pole to his portrayal of Modernity, which he saw as fading at that time in his life. In June 1914, Sardinha published an article in Nação Portuguesa wherein he first confronted his notions of political power in the medieval and postmedieval age.3 According to him, the aristocratic monarchies of Germanic origin that emerged during the Middle Ages had an “oppressive and seigneurial” conception of power. By embracing Catholicism, they acquired the sense of “collective utility” and “common good”; what is usually defined as the “divine right” of kings, in fact, gave them a profound responsibility towards their people, forming the basis of the “social contract.” Medieval monarchy was a “moderate monarchy,” in which the king ruled “with the classes and not against them.” The king was the “keystone of society” – a defender and a judge, and not an “omnipotent lord” of his subjects – and the kingdom was not his private property, as his will resided in the “moral norms that restricted his mandate.” This “coercive norm” led medieval Europe to embrace the notion of the Republica Christiana, a community of Catholic nations united by religious and moral principles. The Catholic Church, represented by the Pope, served 3

António Sardinha, “Teofilo, Mestre da Contra-Revolução III,” Nação Portuguesa 3 (June 1914): 92–100.

From Republica Christiana to the “Great Revolution” 31 as a pacifier of Europe, preventing wars between medieval princes and stimulating their political cooperation.4 However, the advent of Modernity would end this political and religious system. The Protestant Reformation (which Sardinha later called the “schism of nations”5) divided consciences, inaugurated religious individualism, destroyed the principle of solidarity among peoples and individuals, and freed European monarchies from religious sanctions, consequently generating “cold and calculating absolutism.” The “egotistic principle of virtù,” created by the Renaissance, “made the Prince’s personal convenience substitute for the previous rights of society,” leading European society into “political egocentrism.”6 Sardinha would call this process, which led to monarchic despotism and excessive state centralism, “the great Revolution,” of which the French Revolution was nothing more than an episode.7 As he would write in another article later published in Nação Portuguesa, the Renaissance “represented the beginning of the great social and moral disarrays, which today find their fatal and logic conclusion in the irremediable paranoia in which Europe struggles.”8 We can see here that Sardinha’s view of medieval Europe is drawn both from Romantic authors such as Novalis, who idealized it as a “Christian utopia” that modernity destroyed, and from Portuguese nineteenth-century historians such as Alexandre Herculano, who understood medieval monarchies as a balance of disparate powers, later disrupted by the rise of absolutism. In addition to the monarchy, the nobility played an important role in Sardinha’s conception of medieval society. In his essay “Teoria da Nobreza” (1916) he explained his notion of “nobility,” the role it played in medieval times, and the role it should play in current Portuguese society.9 Sardinha begins with the assertion that “the basis of society is family and not the individual.” Citing French sociologist Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play (1806–82), he considered that families were the basis of a social pyramid whose top was occupied by the nation and its intermediary stages by the provinces and municipalities. If the municipalities were presided over by family chiefs, and the nation by the king, the provinces should be supervised by members of the “nobility.” To Sardinha, “the problem of the Nobility” 4 5 6 7 8 9

Sardinha, “Teofilo, Mestre da Contra-Revolução III,” 93–95. Sardinha, “Ao Princípio era o Verbo” (February 1923), in Ao Princípio era o Verbo, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Editorial Restauração, 1959), 12. Sardinha, “Teofilo, Mestre da Contra-Revolução III,” 93–94. Sardinha, “Monarquia e República (Esboço duma teoria),” in Ao Princípio era o Verbo, 137. António Sardinha, “A ‘religião da beleza’ (I),” Nação Portuguesa 12 (1923): 607. Although the article was originally published in Nação Portuguesa 12 (November 1916): 359–76, I will cite the version published in Ao Princípio era o Verbo, 187–224.

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was one of the most important of modern society, because it was linked to several questions raised by modernity. Social mobility, defense of property against capitalist concentration, settling of people on the land, attenuation of the crisis of work and assistance, and the “return to land” (an even more urgent necessity with the “excessive urbanism that devours everything and that never ends”) were some of these questions. Sardinha thus viewed the problem of nobility as inherently linked with the disruptive social and economic effects caused by capitalism, industrialism, and urbanism, in short, by modern civilization.10 From Sardinha’s perspective, the depiction of the nobility offered by “Jacobin mentality” after the French Revolution was a very simplistic one: the nobles were portrayed as parasites that lived in their castles and exploited the people (whose life was completely miserable), and feudalism was represented as persisting until the end of the eighteenth century. To him, this calumnious description still influenced Portuguese culture, including the conservative factions. The Integralists assumed themselves not as conservative but as “renovators” of ideas, and one of these ideas was precisely the one of “nobility.” In Sardinha’s view, the “nobility” was “an inherent fact in Man’s nature,” an inevitable final stage in the process of social ascension desired by every family. Contrary to general thought, it was not a closed caste, but an open class of state servants that received new members as they ascended from the bourgeoisie and the lower strata. The nobility was a “driving factor of society” by which one could obtain the “selection of the best.” The concept of “honor” was the measure of competence in the “old society,” and the mission of the nobility was to serve the state according to Christian principles of abnegation and altruism, which necessarily excluded personal profit. Sardinha contrasts this situation with the new society that emerged from the French Revolution, which abolished aristocratic privileges but did not manage to replace them with a true democracy, a “government from the people to the people.” Instead, a modern plutocratic oligarchy rose to power, an “aristocracy of money,” which, thanks to the extinction of the corporative regime, initiated the deleterious consequences of the excessive predominance of capital over work. Money became the sole measure of social ascension in society, and the individual its most important element. Again, we can observe here a Romantic perspective on medieval society, presented in a contrasting manner with a modern civilization marked by political and social disorder. As he wrote at the end of the essay, Sardinha hoped to change Portuguese mentalities and convince the younger generations of the impor10

Sardinha, “Teoria da Nobreza,” 187–88.

From Republica Christiana to the “Great Revolution” 33 tant social value of nobility. Portugal needed a “true” nobility, based on the concept of “honor” and capable of giving the country a “directive idea,” in order to restore both national pride and monarchy.11 Sardinha’s thought can be inserted in what Zeev Sternhell defines as the fin-de-siècle “revolt against the Enlightenment” and “rejection of democracy.” In his writings, we can repeatedly find an apology of “cultural elites” as the only ones capable of guiding the masses and creating “new values,” and of the “land” as the “last resort” against the fragmentation and corruption of bourgeois society. The remedy to the decline of European civilization is always the same to Sardinha and to the European authors who shared these ideas: an “organic, ‘communitarian’ society, led by virile elites embodying sacrifice, should replace the current mercantile civilization.” The rejection of the eighteenth-century rationalist and individualist cultural legacy and of political liberalism is a common element in these authors, who frequently regarded the Great War as a turning point in European civilization.12 As stated by Sardinha in O Valor da Raça (published in 1915), Europe was then living in a crucial moment regarding the revival of nationalistic values and a return to “Tradition.” The Great War provided powerful evidence of the decline of the “anachronistic ideologies” of the French Revolution, inherited from the Encyclopedists, which caused the rupture of all “moral and social links” and contributed to the process of “denationalization” of peoples. The “fratricidal combat” in which the Europeans were involved was strengthening the “eternal instinct of the Fatherland, served by the invincible reality of the Race,” and smashing the internationalist, humanist, and utopian ideals proclaimed by the Revolution.13 But, as Sardinha would later write, the “traditionalist” and “nationalist” agenda that he supported did not invalidate the existence of a kind of “international society,” based on “universalism” (but not on “cosmopolitanism”). A universalism whose basis was not the “sum of the interests of the different alignments of nations”

11 12

13

Sardinha, “Teoria da Nobreza,” 188–91, 198–205, 210–12, 222–23. Zeev Sternhell, “A modernidade e os seus inimigos. Da revolta contra as Luzes à rejeição da democracia,” in O Eterno Retorno – contra a democracia a ideologia da decadência (Lisbon: Bizâncio, 1999), 15–16, 24–25, 28–29. Sardinha, O Valor da Raça, 119–21. A similar, although much more eschatological perspective of the Great War was exposed by the writer, journalist, and historian Caetano Beirão (1892–1968), in an article published in the monarchic newspaper Acção Realista ten years later. He compared the current European situation with the decline of the Ancient world, claiming that the Great War marked “the beginning of the new Middle Ages, in which the struggle for the rights of the Church and nationalities will purify the peoples from their insanities and perversions.” “Três Mundos,” Acção Realista 14 (1 January 1925): 17.

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but rather the longstanding foundations of Christianity – a Republica Christiana, similar to the one of the Middle Ages.14 In his essay “A Teoria das Côrtes-Gerais,” published in 1924, Sardinha wrote his most detailed apologia for the medieval period.15 Attacking those who criticized the Middle Ages as a “longstanding eclipse of human intelligence,” Sardinha accused them of giving a false account of the period and of the civilizing role of Christianity. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church became “the only element of order amidst the terrible anarchy of the barbarian invasions” and, “under the action of Christianity, a new world painfully emerged,” establishing the first outline of modern Europe. Reiterating his previous theses, Sardinha argued that the Church had contributed to the stabilization of sovereignty through the “benefits of heredity,” enabling the appearance of “the most perfect formula of government”: the royalty of “autonomous, albeit limited power, in which all social classes cooperated with the monarch as parts of a single and conformable whole.” In addition to its contribution to the organization of medieval monarchy, the Church had also allowed the fulfillment of international society […] vigorously expressed in the moral concept of the Republica-Christiana. Through Christianity, the Middle Ages dignified the personality of Man and, with the protection as a solid element of order, laid the foundations of feudal organization, from which Chivalry, the Commune and the Corporation emerged. We can again observe here the predominant role that Sardinha concedes to religion and the Church in particular (in the medieval context) as pacifying, civilizing, organizing, and moralizing agents.16 Resuming his arguments in “Teoria da Nobreza,” Sardinha refused the “Jacobin” depiction of the medieval serf ’s life as miserable, arguing that he “was happier than today’s worker.”17 Although medieval serfs were legally bound to the land, their lord was equally obliged to them: the lord could not expel them or keep their descendants from cultivating it. There were many examples of serfs who refused their emancipation. Born from the Chris14 15

16 17

Sardinha, “Ao Princípio era o Verbo” (February 1923), in Ao Princípio era o Verbo, 11. “A Teoria das Côrtes-Gerais” was the preface to the 1924 edition of the book published in 1827 by the Second Viscount of Santarém (1791–1856), Memórias para a historia e theoria das Cortes Geraes que em Portugal se celebrarão pelos tres Estados do Reino (Lisbon: Impressão Regia, 1827). Sardinha, “A Teoria das Côrtes-Geraes,” xii–xv. In O Valor da Raça, Sardinha had already contrasted the situation of medieval serfs with the one of modern workers, claiming that the first were “much more fortunate” because they did not lack home and subsistence. In contrast, modern workers were “victims of the capitalist tumefaction,” either subjected to the “whims of supply and demand,” or marching to “revolutionary utopia.” O Valor da Raça, xv–xvi.

From Republica Christiana to the “Great Revolution” 35 tian spirit, feudalism gave beneficial contributions to medieval society: it fixed people to the land, developed progressive principles of solidarity, and prepared the revival of state power. Here, Sardinha echoed the assumptions by Herculano and other nineteenth-century authors, who regarded feudalism as an element of progress and a necessary stage in human evolution.18 In conclusion, Sardinha regarded the Middle Ages as a moral and civilizational improvement over Antiquity: if in the Ancient world the individual belonged to the state (represented by Caesar), after the rise of Christianity he became an autonomous entity who only belonged to God, according to the Christian principle of separating spiritual and temporal interests. From this philosophical premise emerged the moral concepts of “human personality” and “liberty”: not the liberty created by modern “revolutionary plots” (which served as pretext to political tyranny), but a “true liberty,” one that “expresses the legitimate concordance between individual initiative and the superior interest of the collectivity.” Sardinha thus dismissed the philosophical, moral, and juridical legacy of the Roman world to European civilization, attributing a greater importance to the role of the Catholic Church. “The historical constitution of Europe […] is structurally medieval and Catholic.”19 Like Herculano’s, Sardinha’s depiction of the Middle Ages can be inserted in both a “Romantic” and “Idealist” historiographical framework. On one hand, he praises the spiritual and communitarian character of the epoch, reflected in its institutions and forms of social organization, and contrasts it with the deleterious effects of modernity. On the other, he concedes a primary importance to the progressist character of the medieval period in the context of human civilization, by stressing the elements that allowed a political and cultural reorganization of Europe, and originated modern philosophical notions of “liberty” and “human individuality.” The tension between these two views is noticeable through the text, reflecting Sardinha’s various readings and influences taken from nineteenth-century Portuguese and foreign authors. In the end, it is difficult to understand whether Sardinha supported a return to medieval social, political, and spirituals models, breaking away with a civilizational decadence represented by Modernity, or merely acknowledged the importance of the Middle Ages in the larger evolutional scheme of human history that gave birth to Modern civilization. In this essay, we have examined António Sardinha’s views on the medieval period, contrasting them with what he perceived as the deleterious effects 18

19

Sardinha, “A Teoria das Côrtes-Geraes,” xvi–xx. On Herculano’s views on feudalism, see Alexandre Herculano “Apontamentos para a História dos Bens da Coroa e dos Forais,” in Opúsculos, vol. 4 (Porto: Editorial Presença, 1985), 426. Sardinha, “A Teoria das Côrtes-Geraes,” xviii–xix, xxvi–xxviii, xxxv.

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of Modernity. Recovering the Romantic appraisal of the Middle Ages as an epoch of progress and harmony, Sardinha viewed Modern philosophical ideals as disruptive elements that gave origin to new political, philosophical, and social systems (centralization, individualism, materialism, liberalism) and made European nations lose their national and spiritual traditions. Only through the cult of tradition (especially the medieval one) and the revival of the old political, social, and spiritual values could Western civilization resume its lost path. This counter-revolutionary view of European history was typical of several traditionalist and Monarchist right-wing movements at the time, which embodied what has been called the fin-de-siècle “revolt” against Enlightenment, liberal, and democratic values.20 As in other contexts, the Integralist anti-modernist view would greatly influence the historical culture of the elites of the Estado Novo, the dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1933 to 1974.

20

Notably the Action Française, whose similarities with Integralismo Lusitano were frequently pointed out by its critics. On this topic, see Hipólito Raposo’s conference Dois nacionalismos. L’Action Française e o Integralismo Lusitano, held at the Liga Naval Portuguesa in March 1925, in which the Integralist author exposed the ideological, cultural, and historical divergences between the two monarchical movements.

Moving through Time and Space in Mercedes Rubio’s Las siete muchachas del Liceo (1957) via Wagner’s Parsifal in Barcelona, Spain (1914) Lisa Nalbone The dates in this essay’s title allude to events in Barcelona between the time of the first authorized production of Wagner’s Parsifal outside of Germany and the publication of Mercedes Rubio’s novel, Las siete muchachas del Liceo. The medieval parallels with the famed opera underpinning Rubio’s novel appear in the plot, themes, and characters as the author recounts strands of protagonist Blanca Galindo’s life that align with Parsifal motifs. Blanca is an innocent and naïve young woman from Barcelona whose mother has died and whose father is absent, drawing on similarities with Parsifal’s family lineage. The girl’s early experiences in the city’s conservatory, much like Parsifal’s initial entry to the grounds of the Monsalvat castle, are shrouded by her obliviousness to the significance of her surroundings and even less awareness of the artist she is to become. Blanca sets out on a path that takes her away from Barcelona, and, during her journey, she acquires the fundamental skills and knowledge that will rank her the top pianist in her country, echoing Spain’s decreasing isolation and growing stature in world esteem during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). Blanca’s innocence also redeems her when she faces criminal charges (and is subsequently found not guilty) for assaulting the conservatory director, Mr. Ramírez, who attempts to sabotage her efforts to attain that top ranking. Ramírez evokes the opera’s Amfortas role, suffering not from a wound to his thigh but from a congenital disability affecting his right arm and hand. Blanca’s family lineage, the journey motif, and her trial constitute the novel’s primary intersections with the Parsifal story. Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016

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Rubio’s adaptation of Wagner’s Parsifal, which is rooted in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, revolves around her creative contesting of the masculinity ascribed to the titular character, as she assigns the role of the seeker of the grail to the feminine subject Blanca Galindo.1 Historically speaking, Rubio’s narrative encapsulates myriad socio-political circumstances at both the textual and metatextual levels, circumstances that evoke the time period from the monarchy of Alfonso XIII (1886–1931) until midway through Franco’s dictatorship. Rubio’s story is specifically anchored in the Parsifal production at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu from 11:00 p.m. on 31 December 1913 to 6:00 a.m. on 1 January 1914, which was the first date Wagner had authorized for production of the opera outside of Bayreuth.2 For that performance, the seven fictitious girls whom Rubio follows for the next two decades of their life are extended the honor of forming part of the choir of angels to sing, sight unseen, from scaffolding above the stage at the end of the first act. Though, because of family hardships, Rubio’s main character, Blanca, is not permitted to perform, she nevertheless continues to associate with the other six girls over the course of the novel, and her development hinges upon the notion that on two levels her innocence leads to her redemption in relationship to this setback. She first succeeds when she is put on trial for assaulting her former music teacher but is absolved of wrongdoing, and she redeems herself again when, after a journey of enlightenment, she is rewarded for her virtuosity by receiving a contract to perform across the globe. While some of the novel’s chapters trace the lives of Blanca’s friends and reveal that they succumbed to infirmities or settled on a life of domesticity, Blanca’s life story, which comprises the bulk of the narration, invokes a number of Parsifal motifs. To begin with, Blanca’s family structure parallels Parsifal’s. When Blanca was a girl, her mother died and her father left her in the care of her aunt and grandmother, as his line of work kept him away from Barcelona. Like Parsifal, Blanca thereafter meanders through life without the direct guidance of her parents. The young woman sets out on a quest to attain the purest form of musical artistry through diligent practice and instruction. 1

2

Rubio’s novel follows several memorable works that feature a modern thematic appropriation of the Matter of Britain in post-1860s Spain. For a list of approximately 125 entries of Arthurian texts in Spain from 1868 to 2002, see Juan Miguel Zarandona, “From Avalon to Iberia: The Contemporary Literary Returns of King Arthur in the Languages of Spain: An Annotated Listing of Arthurian Spanish Literature in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries,” Camelot Project (University of Rochester, 2003). Juan Miguel Zarandona explains that the performance began one hour earlier than the authorized date because of the difference in time zones between Germany and Spain. See his “Daniel Mangrané and Carlos Serrano de Osma’s Spanish Parsifa (1951): A Strange Film?,” Arthuriana 20.4 (2010): 78–98 (81).



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She leaves the familiar surroundings of her home and city, as well as the Conservatory, just as Parsifal ventured away first from his mother and then from Monsalvat. The temporal and spatial distance from Monsalvat initiates the transformative process of discernment that allows Parsifal to become the Lord of the Grail, just as Blanca’s temporal and spatial distance from the conservatory allows Blanca to avail herself of the most modern advances in music and to instill these qualities in a unique style she intends to develop for her own country. Her quest is to achieve prominence as a musician not for fame’s sake, but for a larger purpose: to create a new art form that will shape the musical landscape on both national and international levels. Whereas Wolfram’s “precious stone that gives out food and drink like a marvelous cornucopia”3 and Wagner’s chalice (which supposedly caught Jesus’s blood when he was pierced on the cross) serve as coveted objects in concrete terms and as abstract representations of the ideal, Rubio crafts the goal as one of professional and humanitarian accomplishments. In rewriting the Grail narrative, Rubio feminizes the quest by positioning Blanca to win a coveted distinction in the Conservatory, a prize that would afford her a lifetime of success and fame – and the salvation of her country in terms of its relevance to the music scene – despite numerous adversities along the way. Blanca’s most notable adversary is the lead instructor, Mr. Ramírez, whose character evokes Wagner’s Amfortas (rooted in Wolfram’s Fisher King Anfortas) and who is examined below in further detail. Indeed, Rubio remarked in an interview that she intended her novel to be read as testimony to those who advance in their artistic careers despite obstacles others place in their way.4 The sociocultural context of how Spanish society viewed career women (who contest the picture of women’s happy existence in the domestic sphere) during Franco’s Spain opens a layering of interpretation on a continuum of three distinct time periods: the events leading to the narrative present in 1934 that reach the reader in Franco’s Spain of 1957 in the form of a flashback that begins in November 1913.5 Regarding Rubio’s life, however, little is known. She is part of a larger group of dozens of women writers from mid-twentieth-century Spain who, for reasons that extend beyond the scope of this essay, did not receive the 3

4 5

Mary Cicora, “Medievalism and Metaphysics: The Literary Background of Parsifal,” in A Companion to Wagner’s “Parsifal,” ed. William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 44. Manuel Del Arco, “Mercedes Rubio,” La Vanguardia (Barcelona) (8 December 1956), 27. Each period runs parallel to different political leadership, beginning with the years of Alfonso XIII, who was king from 1902 until the years of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923–30), followed by the Second Republic, which lasted from 1931 to the beginning of Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75).

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critical acclaim that only a handful of women writers of her time enjoyed. Writing from within the dictatorship, Rubio draws on personal experience. Formally trained as a classical pianist in Barcelona, she would have known of the city’s strong ties to Wagner and his music. Since Wagner’s first performed work in Barcelona in 1862 – “Entry of the Guests” from Tannhäuser – and the creation of the Wagner Society of Barcelona in 1901, the German composer has received consistent public attention in the Catalan capital city immortalized through the imagery of Monsalvat (from Wolfram’s Munsalvaesche), with performances often held in the Gran Teatre del Liceu.6 Her novel pays homage to Wagner in its opening chapters, with the third-person narrator reminiscing about the premieres of the composer’s works in Barcelona: Lohengrin around the year 1882, The Valkyrie and Tristan and Isolde in 1899, and the tetralogy of The Ring in 1910.7 The Parsifal performance comes to light through the rich cultural fabric Rubio describes by naming the conductor Franz Beidler and performers such as Catalan tenor Francesc Viñas in the title role and Polish soprano Margot Kaftal in the role of Kundry. In part, the cultural richness is accentuated by religious symbolism, yet it is also tempered against the scenes of the fantastic as well as secular motifs. The importance of the liturgical calendar, specifically Good Friday as a day of salvation in Wagner’s opera, surfaces in the opening of the novel on 23 June 1934, St. John’s Eve. The next day commemorates the birth of St. John the Baptist and is also closely associated with the summer solstice. This night in Spain, as in other countries, represents a time of renewal by fire and water, a time of purity and healing, as celebrated by rituals involving bonfires and midnight bathing. On this night, thirty-two-yearold Blanca Galindo is incarcerated and awaits an interview with detectives. She envisages conversations with her former Conservatory classmates when she was about twelve years old and the other girls ranged in age from nine to eighteen. The spectral presence of these girls evokes an ethereal atmosphere created in response to Blanca’s arrest and isolation, compounded by the sense of shock resulting from her altercation with Ramírez. This scene creates the atmosphere of the fantastic that is also present in Wagner’s opera, in the scenes between Klingsor and Kundry and later when Kundry attempts to seduce Parsifal after he navigates to the nymph flower-fairies. 6

7

The Wagner society in Madrid reached 2000 members in June 1913. See Paloma Ortizde-Urbina Sobrino, Richard Wagner en España: La Asociación Wagneriana de Madrid (1911–1915) (Alcalá de Henares: Monografías Humanidades, 2007), 15. In both Barcelona and Madrid, interest in Wagner spawned the creation of many orchestral groups and influenced architecture, including Barcelona’s Palau de la Música. Ortiz-de-Urbina Sobrino, Richard Wagner en España, 15.



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The other-worldly presence of Blanca’s friends prompts her trance-like reminiscence about her friendship with each of the six girls. The women’s spirits call out to her and remind her of the night of the performance. They recollect the snow that fell on the night of the performance as a “sheet of purity,” immortalized through Wagner’s “mystical drama,”8 with the scenes of good versus evil and specific reference to flower maidens’ temptation of the opera’s titular character.9 The ensuing chapters in flashback narration deconstruct the lives of Blanca’s classmates to explain how their aspirations of performing ended at a young age owing to their death, mental illness, or physical infirmity. Each girl’s failure to succeed in the music world contrasts with Blanca’s upward trajectory over the subsequent two decades. Blanca’s imprisonment coalesces with the narrative present following her attack on Ramírez. However, there is a much more literal scene of seduction than the platonic calling out of friends when Blanca is in jail. In this embedded grail metanarrative, after the young musician returns equipped with the knowledge and skills that set her apart from all other pianists in Spain, the portrayal of the dashing, young lawyer Arturo Piñol as Blanca’s seducer is a gender-reversed counterpoint to the Parsifal–Kundry interaction. Rather than in a garden of flower maidens, they meet when Blanca, now married and the mother of two children, is invited to perform a private recital at the home of an acquaintance. The newly wed Arturo becomes smitten with her and tenaciously tries to win her over, despite her objections. Her ultimate rejection of his kiss leads to his failed suicide attempt, followed by his gradual recuperation and eventual contrition. Arturo’s transformation is symbolically represented through a recurring dream of a bird caged within a type of wooden barrel. His incomprehensibility of the dream reflects his ignorance, which he is only able to understand when the bird breaks through the inflamed beams of the barrel in a Phoenix-like manifestation. Through the bird’s freedom he discerns the error of his ways in pursuing Blanca as “an illusion”10 and resolves to atone for his actions by mending his relationship with his wife. In his King Arthur-like role of leadership and authority, Arturo also plays the role of the lawyer who successfully defends Blanca during her trial for assaulting Ramírez, thereby 8 9

10

Mercedes Rubio, Las siete muchachas del Liceo (Barcelona: Garbó, 1957), 8. Later in the novel, the description of each girl’s arrival at the conservatory on the night of a heavy snowfall is reminiscent of the first procession to the Grail Temple in which Parsifal observes but does not participate, much in the same way that Blanca did not sing in the choir with her friends, accomplishing what Lucy Beckett asserts about Parsifal: “the effect is to make the audience feel that they are watching what takes place through his eyes” (34). See Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: “Parsifal” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Rubio, Las siete muchachas, 264.

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redeeming himself for his former peccadillos and correcting his social transgressions. Arturo’s positioning as a manifestation of the Parsifal character, as is the case with Blanca, supports Mark Berry’s assertion that “Through Parsifal’s redemption of others he himself may be redeemed.”11 Another of Rubio’s appropriations of the Wagner opera aligns with Ramírez’s portrayal as the Fisher King figure, but with notable departures. Unlike Amfortas’s wound in Parsifal or the Fisher King’s wound to the thigh or groin in the Wolfram account, the Spanish counterpart suffers from a deformed left hand and forearm, which are smaller than his right hand and forearm. Rubio updates the “look” of the wounded Fisher King by comparing him to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, who suffers from what appears to be a similar condition. For both men, the defect is accompanied by paralysis or limited mobility and functionality of the limb. Rubio’s readership would have been familiar with Wilhelm’s image because of Wilhelm’s association with the Spanish throne, as the first cousin to Maria Eugenia, wife of Alfonso XIII, king of Spain at the time of the Parsifal production. In his leadership role at the Conservatory, Ramírez holds the keys to Blanca’s potential to earn top distinctions. By thwarting her efforts, he deprives her of what she rightfully considers hers based on her virtuosity as an accomplished pianist and her personal sacrifices (separation from family and homeland, countless hours dedicated to honing her skills). Towards the end of the narration, Blanca attacks Ramírez in reaction to his diabolical plan, when he admits he will disqualify her from the competition by adhering to the previously overlooked age-limitation stipulated in the rules: she would exceed the maximum age by two years. Just as Blanca is leaving the room where they were arguing, she grabs “uno de los preciosos atizadores gigantes que adornaban la apagada y artística chimenea” (“one of the precious, gigantic fire pokers that adorned the unlit, artistic fireplace”)12 and raises it, with the same enthusiasm that Apollo holds up the lyre high above the Paris Opera house, before she swiftly strikes Ramírez on his right shoulder.13 He falls to the floor unconscious. As the reader returns to the action in the novel’s opening pages, her trial ensues. The schema Rubio creates illustrates what Thomas May asserts is the mythic overtone of the “innocent fool who acquires wisdom and thereby solves a crisis. The process of acquiring wisdom requires a trial and a long spiritual journey.”14 11 12 13 14

Mark Berry, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from “Parsifal” to Nono (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 45. Rubio, Las siete muchachas, 275. Rubio, Las siete muchachas, 275. Thomas May, Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus, 2004), 184.



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Rather than the salvation Amfortas receives in the Parsifal story, what befalls Ramírez is further injury, which now compromises the use of his right arm, as well as a sort of public shaming in the court system for his nefarious plan. His role as the guardian of the grail, concretized through the awarding of top distinctions, becomes compromised, with his physical and emotional damages added to his congenital deformity. Blanca triumphs, with her attack on Ramírez vindicated through the court system. The judge deems her actions a crime of passion, justified by the circumstances, and determines that Ramírez would suffer no long-term damage. Symbolically, however, the injury attests to a definitive threat to his masculinity, with both limbs now functioning below capacity. In the end, Blanca receives a lucrative job offer to travel throughout Europe and the United States to continue her career, in contrast to her author’s experience. While Rubio’s aspirations were interrupted by her necessity to return to Spain from her studies in France and to give up her career as a pianist – in essence, exchanging her life as a musician for a life of wife and mother – her protagonist did indeed fulfill her dreams of overcoming obstacles and becoming a world-renowned concert pianist, a positive (attainable) outcome to the grail narrative. She did so, however, at the expense of giving up her family. In sacrificing her domestic role in favor of her career, Blanca made choices that were less transgressive and shocking in early 1930s Spain than during the far more restrictive years of the Franco regime, for the possibility of her attaining financial independence was far more aligned with the liberal political climate of the Second Republic than with the conservative values of the Primo de Rivera and Franco dictatorships that bracketed that era. However, Rubio’s own life circumstances as a gifted pianist who gave up public performance in exchange for her roles as wife and mother ultimately align with the pronatalist ideology of the Francoist regime that defined the ideals of femininity through domesticity, specifically through a family structure that included multiple children. Rubio creates an artimitates-life/art story that transcends the musical genius of the famed opera by delivering a feminine appropriation of Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail to test the mold of womanhood in mid-century Spain. Rubio reframes the quest narrative while simultaneously constituting the feminine subject as independent and career-oriented, but she is careful to situate this subject in the culturally and politically appropriate time that coincides with the Second Republic. The Conservatory director as metonymic representation of the patriarchal dominance that guards the elusive grail poses notable, but not insurmountable, obstacles for the resilient Blanca, while the other six girls who originally formed the choir of angels succumb in different ways. Based on intersecting time periods that contest gender constructs,

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Rubio reconciles her past experiences during the beginning decades of the twentieth century with the reality of her life in the domestic sphere at the time of the novel’s publication by giving her literary character the opportunity to attain her goals and by placing Blanca on the path of an updated grail narrative.

II Medievalist Visions

Introduction Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih The genesis of the essays in this cluster was an exhibition held at King’s College London in spring 2013. The exhibition, entitled Medievalist Visions and curated by Joshua Davies, Sarah Salih, and Beatrice Wilford of the English Department at King’s, and Catherine Sambrook, King’s Special Collections Librarian, displayed material from across the disciplines of art and design, literature, theater, cinema, and architecture to explore ideas of historical authenticity, cultural translation, and appropriation in works of creative medievalism.1 It included items loaned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Lambeth Palace Library, the Geffrye Museum, Senate House Library, and King’s College London’s Foyle Special Collections Library, plus a selection of specially commissioned work by artists, one of whom, Paddy Molloy, has contributed an essay to this collection. Most of the essays in this cluster were either presented at a study day held at King’s to coincide with the exhibition or at linked sessions at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July 2013. One of the most iconic items displayed in the exhibition was a copy of the 1892 Kelmscott Press edition of Reynard the Fox, an item that speaks eloquently of some of the aims of the exhibition and this cluster. Kelmscott Press was founded by William Morris in 1890 and, like Morris’s 1896 edition of Chaucer’s complete works illustrated with woodcuts by Edward Burne Jones, this edition of Reynard is an impressive feat of design. The opening page is a vision of intertwining plant scrolls, and the text is marked by decorative initials throughout. It was published in a limited run of 300 copies (of which the library’s copy is one), and ten copies were printed on vellum.2 As 1 2

, last accessed 13 October 2015. .

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Louise D’Arcens explores (below), Morris’s life and work stand at a meeting point between capitalist, socialist, and medievalist traditions. While Morris understood the Middle Ages as a point of escape from capitalist modernity, his scholarly and poetic work was funded by the success of his design company. This edition of Reynard therefore also occupies a territory interrogated in the essays by Davies, Ed Breen, Catherine Clarke, and Molloy, that is, the space between the creative and the critical. The Kelmscott edition reprinted text prepared by William Caxton in 1481, itself a translation of a Dutch version of Reinaerts historie that was composed in 1479. So, this book reveals aspects of the early history of the printing press and the transnational and multilingual histories of medieval romance as well as nineteenth-century medievalism. It is a multi-temporal object, a work of art and scholarship, and an object of study in its own right. Other items displayed in Medievalist Visions included a copy of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s 1844 work Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, loaned by Lambeth Palace Library, and a salt cellar and spoon designed by Pugin and loaned by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Pugin produced the salt cellar and spoon for his own home, St. Augustine’s (now The Grange) in Ramsgate, and it was made by Pugin’s long-term collaborator John Hardman (1811–67), a Birmingham-based manufacturer.3 Together these two items speak of the breadth of Pugin’s Gothic vision. As was the case with Morris, Gothic was not merely a mode of architecture for Pugin; it constituted a way of life and a social movement that might correct the imperfections of modernity, although each of these designers imagined very different medieval futures. At the 1837 laying of the foundation stone for St. Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham, for instance, Pugin claimed he would not rest “till I see the cross raised high above every chimney in Birmingham, and hear the sound of St Chad’s bells drowning out the steam whistle and the proving of the gun barrels.”4 Pugin’s work, as represented by these two items, expresses a key theme that weaves through many of the essays in this cluster, which is an interest in experiential, bodily, and performed medievalisms, though few of them match the intensity of Pugin’s desire to use material culture to become medieval. As Salih and Michelle Sauer explore, the medieval past is often encountered and perceived through the cracks of medievalist heritage or institutional preservation. It can be difficult to know, or feel, when an authentic relic of the Middle Ages has been discovered. Medievalism may be encountered as a gateway or alternative to a trace of the 3 4

, last accessed 4 February 2016. Quoted by Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008), 221.



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Middle Ages, or it may in fact be impossible to distinguish between a work of medievalism and a medieval artifact. Medievalist Visions was staged in the Weston Room at King’s College London’s Maughan Library, a good example of the kind of heterotopiae Salih and Sauer explore. The Weston Room occupies the site of the former Rolls Chapel, although the first building to have been raised on the site was built by Henry III in 1232. It was called the Domus Conversorum (the House of Converts) and intended to provide a refuge to Jews who had converted to Christianity. Following Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, the Domus Conversorum was no longer required, and in 1377 the site was renamed the Rolls Estate, after Edward III passed responsibility for it to the Master of the Rolls. The chapel was used as both a place of worship and a site of storage for the Rolls, the records of the Court of Chancery. The medieval chapel was demolished in 1895 as the site was transformed into the Public Records Office. The PRO was a complex of buildings designed in the Gothic style by James Pennethorne, known as “the strongbox of the empire” and built between 1851 and 1900. After the records were transferred to new sites in Kew and Islington, King’s College London took possession of the building. Today the Weston Room is a site defined by the palpable presence of the past. The history of worship in the room is demonstrated by three lavish funerary monuments, including Pietro Torrigiano’s tomb for John Yonge (a lawyer and diplomat who was appointed Master of the Rolls by Henry VII in 1508 and 1509), and the equally striking monuments of Richard and Joan Alington (d. 1561 and 1603; Joan’s brother was Sir William Cordell, Master of the Rolls 1557–81), and Lord Bruce of Kinloss (Master of the Rolls 1603–11). The broader history of the site is told in the stained-glass windows that record the arms of former Masters of the Rolls. The windows themselves are multi-temporal objects, as some of their panels, such as the arms of Sir Thomas Egerton, Sir Robert Cecil, and Sir Edward Phelips, date from the early seventeenth century, others, such as the arms of George IV, date from the nineteenth century, and all of the glass was restored and reinstalled in the early twenty-first century. The Kelmscott Reynard the Fox, Pugin’s Glossary and salt cellar, and the Weston Room illustrate how the study of medievalism offers paths across disciplinary as well as temporal boundaries. The Medievalist Visions exhibition and the essays here attempt to address that rich diversity by incorporating critical, creative, popular, architectural, and design-based medievalisms in their analyses. Similarly, many of the essays collected in this issue trace ideas, texts, buildings, and traditions across broad spans of time, noting discontinuities as well as continuities in their long histories. The three items also, however, illustrate the central role the nineteenth century plays in medievalism studies. This is perhaps most clearly expressed by Michael Camille in a

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passage Salih cites. Camille writes that it is impossible to view “the art of the Middle Ages without looking past and through the nineteenth century.” As David Matthews argues, the Medieval Revival of c. 1760–1900 is anomalous in, yet central to, the history of medievalism, as a period in which medievalism captured high culture and offered life possibilities to the present.5 The legacies of Victorian medievalists such as Morris and Pugin are still evident in many works of medievalism and medieval studies. But, as D’Arcens in particular demonstrates, this does not mean that the meanings of nineteenthcentury works of medievalism are stable. The essays in this cluster therefore trace how works of medievalism confound a traditional sense of historical periodicity and how, as Camille writes, medieval culture is “always flowing into other periods, haunting other epochs, emerging where we least expect it, in romanticism, surrealism, and even postmodernity.”6 Many medievalists currently find it productive to think of our present as temporally heterogeneous: “a fuller, denser, more crowded now,” in Carolyn Dinshaw’s words.7 To imagine a period as an “archipelago” in a “temporal flux,” as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it, is not in any absolute sense more true than to imagine time as a river flowing steadily in one direction only; both are metaphors to help us to make sense of something that cannot be fully grasped.8 But the concept of the multi-temporal now allows those of us whose work is to imagine the past to think of what we do as an experience, or “touch,” of the Middle Ages.9 This conceptualization of our work does not permit an absolute difference between scholarly, affective, and creative engagements with the past, though local variations remain as to the appropriate methods for specific situations. If the Middle Ages are in some sense here, access to the period is possible through methods other than, or as well as, the traditional skills of the medievalist. If periods are heterogeneous, then the Middle Ages are no longer imagined as a bounded whole; they are caught up with the other times they have encountered in order to be here now. Thus the distinction between medieval studies and medievalism is inoperative: one cannot be a pure medievalist, because there are no pure Middle Ages. And if the Middle Ages are still here, in a heterogeneous now, then medieval experience can be lived. The re-enactor, formerly something 5 6 7 8 9

David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 118. Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 4. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003), 14. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 3.



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of an embarrassment, features prominently in recent work on medievalism, such as Dinshaw’s opening vignette of “the bathrobe guy” at New York’s Medieval Festival, and David Matthews’s inclusion of re-enactment societies in his substantial study of medievalism.10 In a heterogeneous now, playing at being medieval is no longer a scandalous denial of chronology, but an exploration of its possibilities. And such play has its scholarly counterpart: Laura Kendrick observes a strand of medieval studies that positions itself as playing “the game of interpreting like a medieval interpreter”: scholarship itself may be considered as an imitative performance or re-enactment.11 The essays in this part of the volume interrogate a number of the “rules of the game” of medieval studies. Clarke’s contribution explores the question of when exactly scholarship becomes art, or whether art can be a form of scholarship, while Davies examines artistic creative licence, and Smith draws his evidence from a wide array of traditional and non-traditional sources. Salih, Breen, Davies, Smith, Sauer, and Molloy all consider moments of encounter or pursuit – with and of murals, anchorholds, ideas, traditions, lost streets, or traces of an authentic medieval past – that might be characterized as a playful, or pressing, hunt for authentic evidence of the Middle Ages. For Breen this pursuit is executed by a performer who has to find a medieval voice, and his essay excavates a dispute over how best to perform medievally and considers the physical effects of such medieval enactment on the performer’s body. Clarke, Sauer, and Molloy examine overlaps between the medieval and the contemporary and tell of experiential forays into the medieval. Sauer examines how repurposed anchorholds may be said to re-enact their medieval functions. Molloy’s re-enactment of the medieval involves realizing an apocryphal medieval fragment, the phrase “Here Be Dragons,” in the ancient and contemporary combination of gold-leaf and screen-grab. Davies and Salih deal with the multi-temporal now and explore how presentday encounters with the medieval are also encounters with other times, especially, as Camille suggests, the nineteenth-century medieval revival; D’Arcens likewise interrogates the persistence of the nineteenth century’s desire to live medievally, while Smith reveals some of the repetitions and returns to and of the Middle Ages that punctuate political discourse. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that the contemporary world no longer believes that “as mankind moves along in time, it […] has left the past behind”; in postmodernity, “pasts flood our present.”12 The present day thus 10 11 12

Dinshaw, How Soon is Now, xiv; Matthews, Medievalism, 104–13. Laura Kendrick, “Games Medievalists Play: How to Make Earnest of Game and Still Enjoy It,” New Literary History 40/1 (2009): 43–61 (48). Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xii–xiii.

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shares with the Middle Ages an expanded sense of history and an interest in the availability of other times. A recent collection of essays proposes that “the Middle Ages matter” to the contemporary world; the Middle Ages matter as the origin of structures we still work within, but also offer a repository of possibilities of action.13 It can once more be argued that the present might be improved by becoming more medieval, by re-enacting medieval approaches to issues such as reparative justice, social deviancy, and end-of-life care.14 The essays here agree that the Middle Ages matter, because they are still materially here, and that imitating rather than abjecting them is once more a current option, as it was for Morris and Pugin.

13 14

Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, ed. Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder (London: Routledge, 2012). Celia Chazelle, “Crime and Punishment: Penalizing without Prisons,” G. Geltner, “Social Deviancy: A Medieval Approach,” and Frederick S. Paxton, “End of Life: Listening to the Monks of Cluny,” in Why the Middle Ages Matter, 15–28, 29–40, 41–53.

In/visible Medieval/isms1 Sarah Salih The objects of the past stand before us, but the worlds from which they come are long gone. What should we do with these visual orphans?2 Late medieval London was, like contemporary London, the greatest city of the realm, a center of power, finance, trade, and culture. It mythologized itself as Troynovant, “þe firste citie of Brettayne,” built by Brutus.3 And yet the depredations of time – or, specifically, of fire, bombing, and redevelopment – ensure that medieval London is barely visible today. There are, of course, two world heritage sites, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, bookending the city to east and west. But most of medieval London is hidden, or glimpsed in passing, or a trace of something lost, or virtual. The City’s street plan is still substantially medieval: the stone or glass palaces of the financial institutions cluster on streets named for medieval parishes and commodities. Medieval material survives underground, in crypts and cellars; lost buildings such as Baynard’s Castle are commemorated with blue plaques. Or one might see, momentarily, a medieval illusion: from the corner of an eye misrecognize Renzo Piano’s ultra-modern Shard (completed in 2013) as a scaled-up church spire. Seeing medieval London takes effort, imagination, luck, or knowledge. The city offers chance, routine, and quotidian encounters with the Middle Ages, of which its inhabitants and visitors might not even be conscious. Bruno Latour writes of the packaging of time into mate1 2 3

Thanks to Karl Fugelso, an anonymous reader for SiM, and Josh Davies for comments on drafts of this essay. Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), xix. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby (London: Longman, 1865–86), 2.57.

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rial culture, “Time is always folded. […] Action has always been carried on thanks to shifting the burden of connection to longer- or shorter-lasting entities.”4 The past acts on the present through material things: in London, the medieval past acts upon the present even in the absence of those material things, operating through the spaces where they were. If I walk from London Bridge to the Strand, for example, I follow much the same route as I would have 600 years ago, though what I see is almost entirely different. The medieval city thus acts on me, through me, as it determines my steps, whether I remember to think so, or not. Meanwhile, the city is full of structures that allude to the medieval, but are not medieval, thanks to the adoption of neo-Gothic as the house style of the British state in the nineteenth century: one of these, the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, is perhaps the city’s most famous icon. Hence looking at medieval London is always a complex and mediated business, more so than in other British cities with more substantial survivals of medieval fabric. The city is inescapably the accumulated sum of all its pasts. Michael Camille’s account of the medievalist gargoyles of Notre Dame in Paris describes the multi-temporality of such palimpsestic sites: What these insistent monsters have taught me is the impossibility of viewing the art of the Middle Ages without looking past and through the nineteenth century, without appreciating our own and the cathedral’s substantial modernity. This should not preclude our wanting to understand the Middle Ages as a distinct historical period; we find, however, that it is hardly ever as distinct or as separate as we might want to think, but always flowing into other periods, haunting other epochs, emerging when we least expect it.5 London, too, offers medieval things that are not purely medieval, and a present day that incorporates medieval survivals, sometimes visibly, sometimes not. This essay aims to sketch out those variations in visibility, the material and discursive frames that mark or conceal the intrusion of the Middle Ages into the present day. The visibility of medieval London is thoroughly fragmented. No two individuals have the same medieval London (mine, for example, focuses more clearly on the late than the early Middle Ages, centers on the areas where I live and work and the transport networks around them); no individual has the same one twice, as knowledge, atten4 5

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 201. Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xi.



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tion, circumstances are all transient. There is an infinite number of medieval Londons, their frames of visibility continually shifting. I am excluding for this purpose the charismatic heritage-sites such as the Tower, Westminster Abbey, and Southwark Cathedral, significant though they are. These are marked off as heterotopiae, which people visit in order to encounter the past, while also being partially functioning continuities of their medieval iterations. The Tower is no longer a royal residence or prison, but it still houses the Crown Jewels; Southwark Cathedral and Westminster Abbey are no longer monastic sites, but they remain churches and mausoleums. There is much that might be said about the kinds of medievalism these great sites generate in the process of framing their medieval material. The medieval-ness of the Tower, for example, contributed to the 2014 installation, “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” which poured a tide of ceramic poppies into the moat to commemorate the First World War, an event significantly related to the Middle Ages as the imagined endpoint of chivalry.6 The location reanimated the Tower’s medieval history as the seat of monarchical and state power by placing it as the source of violence, which could thereby be relegated to the premodern and disavowed. However, I am interested here not so much in event destinations such as these, but in sites where the Middle Ages are on the verge of visibility. A post-medieval, post-Roman city such as London is a conglomeration of long-lasting material entities, all trailing their own specific histories. Few things are longer-lasting than the London Stone. The Stone currently occupies a niche, guarded by an elaborate ironwork grill, built into the wall of a shop currently occupied by the newsagent and stationery chain W. H. Smiths, in Cannon Street, opposite a busy commuter station serving the City. In the latest available figures, the station has an annual footfall of over 20 million, many of which will be regular commuter journeys, so encounters with the Stone, whether or not people pay it any attention or even know what it is, mark for many the moment of transition between sites and selves, work and home.7 The Stone is a site of memory, remarkable for the disparity between the utter mundanity of the material object and the grandeur of its accumulated meanings. Its very ordinariness generates narratives to account for its otherwise perplexing prominence. Of course London is full of stones, is indeed made of them: this one is marked out as an individual actant, not just a stone but the Stone, by material and discursive frames of medievalism. The decorative elaboration of the neo-Gothic grating contrasts to the stone’s blank stoniness. The grating is superimposed onto the stone, so one can 6 7

, last accessed 28 August 2015. , last accessed 28 August 2015.

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never look only at the stone, but always at the stone and setting together: the setting makes this stone into the Stone. Its discursive frame is perhaps best represented by Peter Ackroyd’s enthusiastic propagation of its mythology: One token of Brutus and his Trojan fleet may still remain. […] For many centuries it was popularly believed to be the stone of Brutus, brought by him as a deity. “So long as the stone of Brutus is safe,” ran one City proverb, “so long shall London flourish.” Certainly the stone is of great antiquity […]. It seems likely, therefore, that this ancient object came somehow to represent the power and authority of the city. It sits now, blackened and disregarded, by the side of a busy thoroughfare; over and around it have flowed wooden carts, carriages, sedan chairs, hansom cabs, cabriolets, hackney cabs, omnibuses, bicycles, trams and cars. It was once London’s guardian spirit, and perhaps it is still.8 Ackroyd’s “biography” of the city, combining history, legend, and psychogeography, has been prominently on sale in central London bookshops ever since its publication in 2000, and can reasonably be assumed to have informed many of the Stone’s current visitors. He lists the major identifications of the Stone – as Brutus’s foundation stone and as the Roman milestone from which distances were measured – and incidents of its history, such as its role in Jack Cade’s rebellion: this combination of the accumulated, incoherent, mythohistory of the Stone and Ackroyd’s attention to its continual, if low-key, presence is the most likely discursive frame for visitors encountering it. The Stone can reasonably be classed as a remnant of medieval London, but of course that classification is selective. It is a stone: it is as old as stones are; that is, its age is measured in a geological scale incommensurate to that of human history. If this stone is medieval, then so too are all of the city’s stones, insofar as they were in existence during the period, though the medieval is a barely perceptible flicker on the scale of a stone’s existence. “To touch stone,” as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, “is to encounter alien duration.”9 However, the Stone certainly had a medieval personality: it first appears in the documentary record at some point between 1098 and 1108,

8 9

Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 18–19 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 80. Cohen discusses the London Stone and its Twitter account on pages 44–45.



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and early references use it as a marker of location.10 So, it was an actant, some kind of landmark, possibly also a memory place, in medieval London’s culture; but we know little more about its medieval character. As John Clark has established, “no medieval source suggests that London Stone then had a ceremonial function or any particular significance.”11 Clark argues that it is likely to have been part of a Roman building, as the Romans brought limestone to London.12 If medieval Londoners were aware of that history, then the Stone’s medieval character was founded in its antiquity, but there is no firm evidence that they did know it. It appears in medieval accounts of the city as an insistent but quotidian presence, for example in London Lickpenny: Then went I forth by London Stone Thrwghe-out all Canywikestrete. Drapers to me they called anon; Grete chepe of clothe, they gan me hete; Then come there one, and cried “Hot shepes fete!”13 There is no awe here. The Stone is evidently framed and visible, but what it does, or means, is quite obscure: it is, then as now, just somehow irreducibly there in the background as the city goes about its daily business. Attributions of special powers to the Stone are always retrospective: it is said to have been a site of power in the past, not to be one in the present. The Stone’s post-medieval fame is founded upon its appearance in an early modern account of medieval history that invests it with obscure power. In Shakespeare’s dramatization of Jack Cade’s rebellion in Henry VI Part 2, Cade’s seizure of the city is staged as an appropriation of London Stone: Enter Jack CADE and the rest, and strikes his staff on London Stone CADE. Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting upon London Stone, I charge and command that, at the city’s cost, the Pissing Conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign. And now henceforward it shall be treason for any that calls me other than Lord Mortimer.14 10 11 12 13

14

John Clark, “London Stone: Stone of Brutus or Fetish Stone – Making the Myth,” Folklore 121/1 (2010): 38–60 (39). Clark, “London Stone,” 39. Clark, “London Stone,” 39. London Lickpenny, in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1996), last accessed 28 August 2015 from , lines 81–85. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 2, ed. Roland Knowles, Arden Shakespeare 3rd series (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), IV.vi.1–5.

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Shakespeare’s version makes appropriately theatrical use of the Stone as mock-throne, departing from the historiographical accounts that have the Stone playing a more casual and fleeting role in events.15 Hall’s Chronicle, the likely source, reports that Cade: entered into London, and cut the ropes of the draw bridge, striking his sworde on London stone, saying: now is Mortymer lorde of this citie, and rode every street lyke a lordly Capitayn.16 Later elaborations of the mythology of the Stone read as attempts to make sense of Shakespeare’s version of Cade’s carnivalesque appropriation of it. The legends are a post-medieval back-formation, explaining how the Stone might originally have been invested with the official power that Cade apparently appropriated. William Blake imagined it as a site of monstrous authority, a druidic cult of human sacrifice, but also as “the primal matter from which Britain and its civilization are built.”17 The identification of it as Brutus’s stone, foundation and guardian of the city, was made in 1862 by a Welsh cleric, Richard Williams Morgan, drawing on the forged ancient British lore of Iolo Morganwg to fabricate the proverb quoted by Ackroyd.18 Its status as guardian spirit, which is central to the current character of the Stone, is thus an unexpected offshoot of Iolo’s brand of medievalism, a combination of Welsh nationalism, proto-hippy idealism, and outright personal aggrandizement.19 Iolo’s narrative of the national past, like Blake’s, centered on Druids, but his were humane, wise, and monotheistic resisters of Roman imperialism.20 The Stone, in its inscrutable stoniness, can work as a figurehead of whatever medievalism anyone chooses to assign to it. So, the Stone is at once a Roman, medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, contemporary, and stone-aged stone. The Stone is a survivor of multiple pasts and numerous medievalisms, and carries traces of them all: like the gargoyles of Notre Dame, its medievalness is mixed up with other periods and alternative histories, speaking of both Rome and Troy. 15

16 17 18 19 20

See John Clark, “Jack Cade at London Stone,” Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 58 (2007): 169–90 for further discussion of this episode and its representations. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. III: Earlier English History Plays, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 115. Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London from Chaucer to Dickens (London: Verso, 2015), 283. Clark, “London Stone,” 44–52. Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 182. Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 156.



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The multiplicity of its connections ought to make it an enriched site of interaction; yet it is a curiously muted object today. Its location and material characteristics make it difficult to approach: the resulting obscurity then allows it to be imagined as a latent, esoteric actor. The Stone is no longer a landmark; indeed, it is barely visible in its current setting and is notably unsatisfactory as a visitor attraction. I have never actually seen anyone paying attention to it. It is sited on a not very broad pavement in a busy thoroughfare in the City, a location that does not encourage contemplative gazing; so, the Stone remains, typically, momentarily glimpsed in the background. It is more clearly visible from the interior of the shop, but from there you have to edge behind a magazine rack and look sideways at it; there is no room to look at it frontally. It is sited low in the exterior wall; so, to see it at all from the pavement, you have to crouch to peer into the grill, getting in people’s way. The Stone itself only shows up in photographs if backlit, which it no longer is: to photograph the setting at any sensible angle you have to stand back, almost stepping into the road. It cannot be touched and could only be attentively gazed upon in those rare moments when the street is empty. And then, after all, it is just a stone: gazing upon it has limited returns. It is better contemplated virtually, via its textual supplements. However, its semi-visibility and unobtrusiveness contribute to its current character. The much larger medieval Stone had been a forcefully visible free-standing monolith: the contemporary remnant has retreated into the shelter of its setting.21 A 2006 BBC report claimed that it was so unobtrusive it had almost been accidentally destroyed by builders refitting the shop.22 But this obscurity also gives it power. Alfred Gell argues that humans intuitively imagine a conscious being as “primordially spatial and concentric; the mind is ‘internal’ enclosed, surrounded, by something (the body) that is non-mind. Now we begin to see why idols are so often hollow envelopes, with enclosures.”23 The Stone in its setting is easily imagined as a beast within a cage, or ghost in the machine, a being with some kind of unimaginable lithic consciousness. The difficulty of photographing it adds to its mystique. I cannot tell for certain, looking at my recent attempts, whether it is visible at all, or whether I have captured only reflections in the glass: the Stone, it seems, declines to make itself available. Its withdrawal from the plane of the street can be read as lurking: it gives a strong impression of latency, of power held in check. A 1920s photograph of a policeman standing beside it, reproduced in Clark’s 21 22 23

Clark, “London Stone,” 40. , last accessed 28 August 2015. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 132–33.

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article, has a thrill of ambiguity: is the policeman guarding the Stone from ill-wishers, or guarding the city from the Stone?24 The mundane modernity of its setting is now itself part of the composite object that is the Stone. When in 2012 it was proposed to move it indoors, where it might be put on display, Rosemary Hill speculated that “Maybe Blake’s emanations of Albion are manifesting in the Occupy protesters, waiting ‘upon the Thames and Medway (…) drawn through unbounded space’ to wreak vengeance on the City if the stone is moved.”25 Its current character is dominated by a sense of its occultness and obscurity, based on its being hidden in plain view. That the Stone is, as Ackroyd says, very largely “disregarded,” is reimagined as the ground of its power. Its mythology claims it as a former site of official power, power that can be appropriated now that it has lost status. Knowledge of the Stone becomes self-consciously esoteric; recognizing it at all puts you in select company. Ackroyd hints that it might still, silently, guard the city. China Miéville, in his 2010 contemporary fantasy novel Kraken, draws on the common stock of mythology to imagine it as still-living presence in an enchanted London that co-exists with the city as we know it. The novel’s action pauses, as it makes time to contemplate the Stone: Cannon Street, opposite the Tube. In the emptied remains of a foreign bank was a sports shop. Below posters of physically adept men was a glass-front cabinet and iron grille, behind which was a big chunk of stone. […] The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances. Trusting in that old rock was a quaint or dangerous tradition, depending on to whom you spoke. The London Stone was a heart. Did it still beat? Yes, it still beat, though it was sclerotic. Billy thought he could feel it, a faint laboured rhythm making the glass tremble like dust in a bass line. This had been the seat of sovereignty, and it cropped up throughout the city’s history, if you knew where to look.[…] But forgotten, hiding, camouflaged or whatever, the Stone was the heart, the heart was stone, and it beat from its various places, coming to rest at last here in an insalubrious sports shop between cricket equipment.26 24 25 26

Clark, “London Stone,” fig. 4. Rosemary Hill, “Emanations of Albion,” 30 March 2012, , last accessed 28 August 2015. China Miéville, Kraken: An Anatomy (London: Macmillan, 2010), 181.



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The description of the Stone combines a verifiable, mappable (if dated, now that the shop has changed hands) location of it in mundane London with esoteric elements: in the novel the Stone is the power-source of the Londonmancers, prophets who read the city’s destiny. In this fantasy world, human agency can enliven various material objects – its resolution, indeed, turns on which human or human-ish actors can claim responsibility for enlivening the titular Kraken, a preserved giant squid – but the Stone has inherent vitality. Again, its obscurity in fact empowers it: its vitality is concealed behind a façade of mundane stonishness, but may be exploited by those able to perceive its essence, a position imaginatively occupied by readers of the book. This scene both describes, and itself enacts, an attentive scrutiny of the Stone that brings it to life. The Stone has enough vitality to have generated a material supplement, in the form of its namesake, the neighboring “Eerie Pub,” one of a small chain of horror-themed pubs. The pub is not, in truth, all that eerie: it materializes the commercial-sensationalist strand of Gothic, its décor combining antique chemical jars and skeleton-themed articles with pointed furnishings. The Stone itself, however, is curiously absent from the array of pictures and decorations. One notice explains that John Dee took an interest in the Stone, but there is no image of it, and no explanation of why the vicinity of the Stone presented itself as the most eerie spot in London. The pub no doubt gains some custom from people visiting the Stone, and thus acts as an extension of it, but it feels oddly located. The City is not a Goth-friendly zone, and most customers are city workers or tourists who presumably just find it a convenient place to stop. The pub is a frame for the Stone from which the Stone itself has escaped. The London Stone, then, is a medieval thing that is more than medieval. Complementarily, the prevalence of Gothic Revival architecture fills London with modern things that are not only modern, in that they refer also to the medieval. The existence of the copy, the revival, necessarily changes the character of the original; indeed, it is only the existence of the copy that constitutes it as original. Kenneth Clark’s history of the Gothic Revival points out that “For centuries the Gothic style had no name; it was the only way of building.”27 “Gothic,” that is, is defined retrospectively: it came into visibility only when “not-Gothic” became a possibility, and its profile was later entirely transformed by the Gothic Revival. The Revival generated the study of medieval architecture: the chronological divisions of Norman, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular that we still use 27

Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (1928; rev. London: Constable, 1950), 16.

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today to make sense of it were established by the architect Thomas Rickman in 1817, in order to guide architects and clerics building new churches.28 We would see medieval architecture itself quite differently if the Revival had not happened as and when it did. Neo-Gothic public and private buildings, from the Houses of Parliament to suburban chapels, are so widespread and so characteristic of the look of London that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary undertaking the Gothic Revival was. In re-enactment, argues the performance theorist Rebecca Schneider, “History is not remembered […] as it was, but experienced as it will become. It must be acquired, purchased, begun again and again.” She characterizes present-day North America as a multi-temporal experience in which “we are rarely exactly ‘in time’ or ‘in place’ but always also capable of multiple and simultaneous elsewheres, always a step or more behind or ahead or to the side, watching through open windows being watched, performing ourselves performing or being performed.”29 This is, however, not only an experience of contemporary digital culture, but of any cultural moment in which the things of the past move in and out of visibility. The Gothic Revival intentionally forged new relations between past and present. For Augustus Welby Pugin, building a neo-medieval church was an exercise in time-travel; such a building, he argued, would actually import the Middle Ages into the nineteenth century: “revivals of ancient architecture, though erected in, are not buildings of, the nineteenth century, – their merit must be referred back to the period from whence they were copied.”30 He combined this sense of the power of anachronism with an appreciation of the agency of architecture. Explaining the rightness of the Gothic form for Christian purposes: It is, indeed, a sacred place; the modulated light, the gleaming tapers, the tombs of the faithful, the various altars, the venerable images of the just, – all conspire to fill the mind with veneration, and to impress it with the sublimity of Christian worship. And when the deep intonation of the bells from the lofty campaniles, which summon the people to the house of prayer, have ceased, and the solemn chant of the choir swells through the vast edifice, – cold, 28 29 30

Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 71. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), 25. Preface to 2nd edition of Contrasts, in A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, intro. Timothy Brittain-Catlin (Reading: Spire Books, 2003), v. Emphasis in the original.



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indeed, must be the heart of that man who does not cry out with the Psalmist, Domine dilexi decorum domus tuae, et locum habitationis gloriae tuae.31 For Pugin, then, to build neo-medieval buildings was to utilize the power of architecture to make the nineteenth century more medieval, and more Catholic. His neo-medieval structures would channel the Middle Ages into the present world. Charles Eastlake, detaching Gothicism from Catholicism, produced a more mainstream and official version of Gothic Revival, but one that was still an attentive attempt to become more medieval. The Gothic style, he argued, “kept alive the memories of the past”; the task of the modern architect was to learn to reproduce that medieval past.32 The turning point of his history of the Revival was the choice of “Gothic or Elizabethan” for the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in 1835: the decision of the Government as to the style of the new buildings gave an impulse to the Revival which could have been created in no other way – an impulse that has kept this country advanced before others in the earnestness with which ancient types of national Architecture are studied and imitated.33 Eastlake’s understanding of Gothic Revival is lower-key than Pugin’s, emphasizing patriotism and dignity rather than mystical piety, but for both, the Revival allows history to be begun again. In the present day, however, the visibility of these tensions over the meaning of Gothic, and indeed its very anachronism, have faded and take an effort to recover. Gothic Revival is just what much of official London looks like. The diversity of observers multiplies meanings; there are as many cities as there are observers, and no two viewing moments are quite the same. In a city with such a diverse population, educational, class, cultural, and ethnic differences fragment the experience of looking at the city. Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel of 1980s London, The Line of Beauty, includes a scene dramatizing how two people may see the same thing quite differently. Here Nick, a Ph.D. student, is making conversation with Ronnie, a drug dealer:

31 32 33

Pugin, Contrasts, 5. Emphasis in the original. Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival in England (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1872), 116, 131. Eastlake, Gothic Revival, 184–85.

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They pulled in behind the church at the crown of Ladbroke Grove, in the shadowy crescent of plane trees. “Thanks very much,” said Nick. He really had to rush but he didn’t want to seem unfriendly. Ronnie was looking out thoughtfully through the windscreen. “This is an old church, Rick,” he said. “This must be old.” “Yeah – well, it’s Victorian, I suppose, isn’t it,” said Nick, who in fact knew all about it. “Yeah?” said Ronnie, and nodded. “God, there’s some old stuff round here.” Nick couldn’t quite tell what he was getting at. He said, “It’s not that old – sort of 1840s?” He knew not everybody had a sense of history, a useful image, as he had, of the centuries like rooms in enfilade. For half a second he glimpsed what he knew about the church, that the reredos was designed by Aston Webb, that it was built on the site of the grandstand of a long-vanished racetrack. It was a knobbly Gothic oddity in a street of stucco. “I’m telling you, I’m moving up here, too fucking right I am,” said Ronnie, in his protesting murmur.34 The church is St. John’s, Notting Hill, and Nick’s information is accurate: “architecturally undistinguished, although […] archaeologically correct,” Nikolaus Pevsner remarks, locating it in the turn of the Gothic Revival in the 1840s to a more historically precise form of medievalism.35 The failure of their attempt to converse about it is complex. They share a profound indifference to any spiritual claims of the building, but Nick is on the face of it better informed than Ronnie, able to tell the difference between “old stuff” and “sort of 1840s,” Gothic and Gothic Revival. He is the kind of person who knows that kind of thing: such knowledge contributes to the cultural capital that he deploys to land a sinecure as the “aesthete” on his wealthy boyfriend’s vanity project.36 Ronnie, however, has no use for that specific knowledge, and is not interested in Nick’s tentative attempts to inform him. His perception of the church conjures the medieval prototype, not the Gothic Revival, sketching an imaginary alternative history of the locality. Knowledge of specifics such as the date and the names of the designers 34 35

36

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2005), 234–35. Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 3: North West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 458. Historic Buildings report by The Architectural History Practice Ltd at , last accessed 28 August 2015. Hollinghurst, Line of Beauty, 209.



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is not necessary for the church to convey tradition, dignity, venerability, or indeed for it to advertise the prosperity of the neighborhood. Ronnie reads all these meanings perfectly well: the precision of Nick’s art-historical knowledge would only get in the way. Gothic, when the church was built in 1844–45, had become the default style for new churches, conveying both historical depth and universal timeless values, patriotism and spirituality. As Rosemary Hill writes, Gothic Revival had become “a national style, a public principle, the proper form for the Houses of Parliament, for schools, shops, railway stations and nearly every church.”37 The style, for Ronnie, is effectively anachronic, its specific period obscured by a general impression of venerable antiquity. Nick’s knowledge of it functions as a form of resistance to its claims, while Ronnie impressionistically registers them. In buildings with fewer pretensions, Gothic becomes even less visible as a form of medievalism. In the miles of residential streets in the nineteenthcentury railway suburbs, builders unleashed a miscellany of naturalized ornamental detail, in which loosely Gothic arches and the occasional turret amicably rub joists with almost classical porticos and slightly Dutch gables. While the Houses of Parliament and Gothic Revival churches certainly mean something by their medievalism, a pointed arch on a suburban house may be visibly Gothic in form, but its medievalness is attenuated to invisibility; pointedness is just one of the possibilities from the repertoire of decorative detail. There is even a formless form of medievalism. Merton Abbey Mills, in the south-west London borough of Merton, is both a medieval and a medievalist site, once the location of Merton Abbey, later the site where Morris & Co. and then Liberty printed fabrics, a history now recalled in the presence of the William Morris pub in a former workshop on the riverside. The remains of the Abbey’s chapter house, tucked into an underpass below a ring road, are open to visitors on special occasions, but patches of medieval stonework have been incorporated into walls in the area. Entering the shopping center, one encounters fast-food shops whose contemporary red-brick walls include square patches of embedded flint and pebbles. Given the history of the area, it looks as if these are remnants of the abbey’s fabric, with the modern brick acting as a frame for the medieval remains, or the medieval remains embellishing the brick. According to the conservation report on the area, however, they are merely an eccentric decorative feature in a modern building.38 This decorative feature, however, mimics the genuine hybridity of the wall in 37 38

Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008), 2. “Wandle Valley Conservation Area: Merton Abbey,” 21–22, , last accessed 28 August 2015.

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nearby Station Road, where medieval stonework blends with brick. Here the stones are unremarkable and undecorated, mere flint and rubble, with no period detail to date them. The wall’s fragmentation, and the visibility of its individual stones, shows it to have been arrested in the process of dissolution into its constituent parts: once released from the wall, the stones would become once more mere stones, their work holding up one of the great abbeys of medieval England forgotten and invisible. Jaś Elsner argues that the preservation of a visibly damaged or defaced monument is an exercise both in active forgetting and in memory: “the preserved damaged object, in its own material being, signals both its predamaged state – a different past, with potentially different cultural, political, and social meanings – and its new or altered state.”39 London’s medieval has been here long enough to show multiple layers of attempts to remember and to forget: memorial attempts themselves may have been, in their turn, forgotten, abraded, or overwritten. Memorializing frames, as we have seen in the London Stone and Merton Abbey Mills, may be ignored, misread, or produce impressions quite foreign to the original object. Theorists of urban space are fascinated by the indeterminacy, unfixedness, and elusiveness of the urban experience. Michel de Certeau distinguishes the voyeur who sees the city as an imaginary bounded totality, from the experience of the walker of its streets: The panorama-city is a “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. The voyeur-God created by this fiction, who, like Schreber’s God, knows only cadavers, must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviours and make himself alien to them. The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it.40 It is thus impossible to maintain the sense of the city as a fully bounded totality while one is moving around within it: the city is reconstituted in 39

40

Jaś Elsner, “Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Memory,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 209–31 (210). Thanks to Sophia Wilson for bringing this to my attention. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93.



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every experience of it, never quite the same place twice. Its visibility is inherently unstable and dependent upon the position of the observer. However, the walker’s experience is not only immediate and material: locations are accompanied by a constant, transient babble of memory, association, and interpretation. Civic authorities invest in the legibility of the streets, offering walkers prompts to imagining the totality of the city. Central London is well supplied with maps and labels. Taking a mapped walk is an attempt to stabilize a route through the city, combining the positions of voyeur and walker, one’s vision continually flickering between the immediate surroundings and an overview. London’s Roman, then medieval, walls survive only in patches, but the route of the wall is known and is made visible in occasional information boards along the route, the information from which is also available on the Museum of London’s website. The maps instruct walkers how to travel, to walk, to reconstruct in imagination the lost walls of the city, using their own bodies to construct them. The resulting virtual wall is an unstable, collective enterprise. To be performed, the map relies on walkers, but each individual walker will take up the invitation to perform this articulation of the city differently. The walls were already visibly ruined and multi-temporal long before they lapsed into virtuality. The Roman walls participated in the medieval experience of the city, marking out its limits. The walls visibly suffered from the effects of time: it was a continual labor to keep them in good repair, and they became hybrid combinations of Roman and medieval: If at its eastern and western extremities the Roman wall of London had been strengthened in the thirteenth century, yet in between it was a thing of shreds and patches. By the middle of the twelfth century the Roman riverside wall had keeled over into the encroaching tidal mud and had not been rebuilt. […] The fourteenth century repairs took the form of tile or brick courses between layers of Kentish ragstone. The more extensive rebuilding of the 1470s was carried out entirely in brick, decorated in places (as can still be seen in the section preserved at St Alphege gardens) with a diaper pattern.41 The Museum of London’s website acknowledges that the wall walk, too, has fallen into disuse and might remain only in traces: “the accompanying booklet is now out-of-print and the Wall Walk panels have deteriorated or 41

Caroline Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 243.

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have been removed.”42 The wall is already a preserved ruin, and the virtual wall that once memorialized it is now itself falling into ruination, performing its own microhistory of memory and re-forgetting. In practice, following this route, trying to be both walker and voyeur, is rather like being the astronomer in The Miller’s Tale, who fell into the immediately material “marle-pit” while trying to “prye/ Upon the sterres” for an overview of his situation.43 One cannot read the guide and walk the route simultaneously; attention flickers continuously between the immediately material and the imagined past. Only at the remaining portions of material wall do these perspectives coincide, and then only partially, for the information sheets provide further information, such as the medieval presence of hermits at Cripplegate, on which the wall itself is silent. I recently walked a portion of it, failing to find the promised traces of wall in Warwick Square, not spotting any information boards until I arrived at the inescapably present patch of the wall itself at Cripplegate, and giving up the attempt entirely at Moorgate, because the Corporate Challenge Run had blocked off the route thereafter. The invisibility of the wall contributes to the pleasure of the walk. The route follows major streets, in working rather than tourist zones of the city, so while walking the virtual wall, one walks the same route as many others about their own business, but briefly, momentarily conscious of the Roman and medieval city beneath the present one. Walking the route of the wall – rather than any of the other purposes for which one might make exactly the same journey – one consciously occupies the position of a medieval body. In Pilgrim Street, the wall’s route is represented in the pavement by a metal line that, lacking any visible explanation, could presumably function as such a marker only to someone who came looking for it. Identifying and recognizing it – which took me a few minutes – produced a moment of pleasure when knowledge of the route and visual experience of it were momentarily aligned. Seeing the virtual wall is possible only with a textual supplement and mental map: the mere location is not enough. Time and space are intersecting planes. Everything is contemporary in the moment of experiencing it; all of it, nevertheless, also reaches back into numerous pasts. But the material city, at the moment of encounter, is often muted, or confusing, in what it says. Its material quiddity continually provokes and is supplemented by narratives, but is never fully accounted for. Medieval London is elusive precisely because it is mundane; because 42 43

, last accessed 28 August 2015. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Canterbury Tales, A.3458–60.



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it is not actually other than our London, and we have to work to see it as such. Michael Ann Holly, quoted in the epigraph, argues that the work of art historians stages melancholy encounters with the material remains of the lost past: but such enlivening, recreation, and continuation is not only a scholarly exercise, but an activity performed, differently, by all of us who live among them.

Art, Heritage Industries, and the Legacy of William Morris in Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory Louise D’Arcens For the reading public and beyond, the French author Michel Houellebecq is arguably most notorious for his public denunciation of Islam as “stupid,” a statement that led to him being tried unsuccessfully in 2002 for religious and racial incitement.1 Because of this and other controversial views on contemporary society (in particular about commercial sex, which he praises), the author is widely perceived as a nihilist, an ideologically scattergun commentator whose provocations are locatable within a French tradition of “critical insult” reaching from the inflammatory cynicism of 1960s magazines such as Hara Kiri through to the incendiary iconoclasm of Charlie hebdo, on whose cover Houellebecq featured the week when twelve of that magazine’s staff were shot to death.2 Yet the unsurprising obverse to his public pronouncements against religion is the ongoing fascination throughout Houellebecq’s oeuvre with belief and the communities that form around it. His novels are renowned for their explorations, albeit extremely critical, of utopian and dystopian traditions, from the philosophical and the sociological through to the New Age. His 1998 Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires), for instance, caused wide outcry with its deflationary assessment of the legacy of 1960s counter-cultural and feminist 1 2

See Sophie Masson, “The Strange Trial of Michel Houellebecq,” The Social Contract 14/2 (Winter 2003–04): 110–13. Wendy Michallat, “Modern Life is Still Rubbish: Houellebecq and the Refiguring of ‘Reactionary’ Retro,” Journal of European Studies 37/3 (2007): 313–31. For some of his controversial views in interview, see Susannah Hunnewell, “Michel Houellebecq: The Art of Fiction No 206,” The Paris Review 194 (Fall 2010), , last accessed 30 July 2015.

Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016

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utopias, while also offering a pessimistic prediction about the displacement of human reproduction by science. 2001’s Platform (Plateform) examines not only ecotourism’s monetization of ecological idealism, but also the life-denial of Islamist terrorism. In 2006 The Possibility of an Island (La Possibilité d’une île), the title of which alludes to Aldous Huxley’s exploration of a utopian society in Island (1962), fuses a depiction of New Age cults with a dystopian forecast of how the scientific promise of human cloning will turn out. His 2011 novel La Carte et le territoire (here referred to in its English translation The Map and the Territory) continues this preoccupation in a way that brings it into the orbit of medievalism studies. In this novel we encounter discussions of the utopian cooperative societies devised by proto-socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837), of the futuristic idealism of modernist design and architecture, epitomized in the work of Le Corbusier (1887–1965), but the most attention is paid to the medieval-inspired utopias of William Morris (1834–96). What makes this novel distinctive within Houellebecq’s oeuvre is that the evocation of Morris constitutes what is arguably the author’s most receptive treatment of any utopian program so far. In The Map and the Territory the utopia envisaged by Morris, which is famously based on a romanticized notion of preindustrial labor and medieval organic community, is explored as a possible blueprint for a future revitalized post-post-industrial European culture. In doing so, however, Houellebecq does not let his apparent admiration for the socialist medievalist prevent him from complicating Morris’s project and its legacy. In particular, the novel teases out the ways in which Morris’s nostalgic vision has proven vulnerable to recuperation into the neoliberal economy of the twenty-first century, especially in the thriving niche tourism and lifestyle industries that deftly harness a yearning for authenticity with the desire to consume. Houellebecq’s novel is timely in offering an admiring but also sobering twenty-first-century assessment of Morris in light of the commercialization of “heritage” and medievalist nostalgia. Moreover, Houellebecq is ingenious in his decision to use Morris as a figure who raises complex questions about the paths that have been taken and the paths that have been missed in modern culture and economies. The Map and the Territory, which won for Houellebecq the prestigious and till-then-elusive Prix Goncourt, is a Künstlerroman tracing, with the author’s characteristically deadpan humor, the fertile and fallow patches in the career of the fictional artist Jed Martin. In Jed it offers the portrait of an artist whose Beckettian impassivity – he prefers to be one of life’s onlookers, having concluded early in the story that “[t]hey really don’t amount to much, anyway, human relationships”3 – makes him the perfect vehicle for reflecting via his art 3

The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd (New York: Knopf, 2012), 9. This edition will be referred to in all future citations, with page numbers cited internally.



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on the twenty-first-century Zeitgeist. Despite his almost total disengagement with current affairs and personal relationships, Jed produces three major art series in different media that together not only bring him enormous wealth on the art stock market but later make him a towering figure in art history, regarded as emblematic of his age. These works, conjured with remarkable ekphrastic clarity by Houellebecq, are a photographic series in which he enlarges and lovingly distorts a number of Michelin maps of the countryside; a group of paintings called the Series of Simple Professions, depicting workers from a range of industries; and, finally, a series of videos produced in old age, in which industrial objects and photographs are gradually consumed by the weather and sink into the earth. Some parts of the book, which narrates Jed’s life from an unspecified point in the future, cite fictional posthumous scholarship on his work, and in other places the narrator even moves into producing interpretive analyses of his work. Houellebecq’s use of the Künstlerroman genre allows him to meditate on one of his favorite subjects, which has already cropped up in different guises through several of his previous novels: industry, both in the larger sense of examining which industries and markets are ascendant or in decline, and in the more intimate sense of tracing how individuals experience the patterns of labor and leisure in the neoliberal economy. This theme is pursued most famously in Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the title Whatever, which captures perfectly the anomic apathy of its characters, who are young IT workers in the age of the “flexible” labor market and listless but compulsive consumption.4 The Map and the Territory differs from the earlier work in that is does not focus as insistently on a single area of productivity in its exploration of what work means in the post-industrial age. Instead, the waxing and waning of jobs, industries, and markets, and in particular the shift from a manufacturing to an information economy is traced in Jed’s Series of Simple Professions. This is a series of forty-two portraits of workers in industries ranging from the endangered (Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher; Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager) and the ascendant (Maya Dubois, Remote Maintenance Assistant) to the flourishing (a TV lifestyle journalist in The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting; a resort architect in The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management of His Business), and, finally, the dominant (traders in The Stock Exchange Flotation of Shares in Beate Uhse; IT billionaires in Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology: The Conversation at Palo Alto). Offering, in the words of the fictional 4

For an analysis of work in Whatever, see Carole Sweeney, “‘And yet for some free time remains…’: Post-Fordism and Writing in Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever,” Journal of Modern Literature 33/4 (Summer 2010): 41–56.

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art historian Wong Fu Xin, “an exhaustive view of the productive sector of the society of his time” (77), the series makes Jed world-famous and stratospherically rich, but in no way improves his personal life or prevents his eventual decision to become a recluse. By analyzing The Map and the Territory’s dovetailing of Houellebecq’s abiding dual interests in utopias and in work, we are able to make sense of what could otherwise seem like an incongruous preoccupation with William Morris in a story that is otherwise engaged in exploring cultural anomie and its paradoxical symptom, manufactured community. The importance of Morris to the novel’s development of Houellebecq’s pet themes is evident in the fact that his moral-aesthetic socialism is the centerpiece of two lengthy disquisitions by two separate characters: one by Jed’s father, and one by Michel Houellebecq, who appears in his own novel as a hilarious trainwreck, a reclusive alcoholic misanthrope who nevertheless agrees to be the subject of one of Jed’s Simple Professions paintings (representing the creative worker), and whose essay for the exhibition catalogue is an eccentric but insightful account of Jed’s special fascination with industrial objects and workers. This twofold examination of Morris is especially noteworthy given what the Houellebecq character claims is Morris’s relative and unwarranted obscurity in France (“almost no one knows William Morris” [172]). Although accounts of Morris’s reception in French leftist circles, and indeed Jed’s father’s knowledge of him, cast doubt on this assertion,5 it is nevertheless important that the Houellebecq character believes he and Jed have stumbled onto a Victorian thinker and artisan whose utopian vision is of incredible significance for the post-industrial age. The centrality of Morris’s legacy to the novel also becomes clear when it dawns on Jed, to his surprise, that his ulterior motive for paying a rare (and final) visit to Houellebecq is actually to ask him what he thinks of Morris, believing that the response will convey some kind of deeper “message” about the purpose and even consolations of creativity under late capitalism. The character Houellebecq’s praise of Morris is directed chiefly at the proven success of Morris & Co.’s commercial and industrial practices. He claims that while it would be easy to dismiss Morris as a utopian fantasist based on the extreme libertarianism of his views, such as his call for the abolition of schools and prisons, it is a matter of record that his model for industrial labor created a positive, motivated, and profitable work culture. 5

On Morris’s reception in France, see Margaret Werth, The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art circa 1900 (London: University of California Press, 2002), 110. For a discussion of the Anglo-French cultural exchanges in the Aesthetic movement, see James K. Robinson, “A Neglected Phase of the Aesthetic Movement: English Parnassianism,” PMLA 68/4 (September 1953): 733–54.



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Possibly taking his information from E. P. Thompson’s biography of Morris,6 he praises how Morris’s ideals of artisanal production were reflected in the humane, non-alienated labor conditions of Morris & Co.’s factories: His employees worked much less than those in the factories of the time, which were nothing other than labour camps […] [t]he essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated, no more than they were in the Middle Ages. According to all the reports, the working conditions were idyllic: well-lit, well-aired workshops on the bank of a river. (174) This description paraphrases closely Victorian accounts of Morris’s business, such as Emma Lazarus’s “A Day in Surrey with William Morris” (1886), which reports of Morris’s factory at Merton that its surroundings were lovely and “there was plenty of air and light in even the busiest room.”7 It is also strongly reminiscent of Morris’s own 1884 essay “A Factory as it Might Be,” which, after describing the ideal physical, aesthetic, labor, and remunerative conditions for factory workers, and likening them to the work spaces of “the monks and craftsmen of the middle ages,” concludes: Thus our Socialistic factory, besides turning out goods useful to the community, will provide for its own workers work light in duration, and not oppressive in kind, education in childhood and youth. Serious occupation, amusing relaxation, and mere rest for the leisure of the workers, and withal that beauty of surroundings, and the power of producing beauty which are sure to be claimed by those who have leisure, education, and serious occupation.8 Having lauded the humanity of Morris’s work arrangements, the Houellebecq character hastens to add that “success was immediate, including on the commercial level […] the firm Morris & Co. was constantly in profit, throughout its existence” (174). Comparing Morris’s practical medievalist utopianism favorably to others of the same era, such as “the Fourierist phal-

6 7 8

E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1955, repr. 1977). Emma Lazarus, “A Day in Surrey with William Morris,” Century Magazine 32 (July 1886): 388–97. William Morris, “A Factory as it Might Be,” Justice (April–July 1884), , last accessed 28 July 2015.

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ansteries and Cabet’s Icarian community”9 as well as to “the communist societies that came later” (174–75), he insists that Morris & Co. was the only nineteenth-century utopian socialist cooperative that managed also to organize efficient production and make a profit. Morris and Co.’s business success thus documents for Houellebecq the possibility of an industrial Aufhebung, that is, a fusion and transcendence of the dialectical opposition of preindustrial work practices and the demands of industrial capitalism. Retreating into his characteristic misanthropy, the character declines to offer a sociological account of why Morris’s medievalist model of socialist industry has not continued to prevail under late capitalism, implying rather that human self-interest and indifference has blighted its chances. Indeed, he concludes that Morris’s model of artisan industry “would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris” (175). This speech, the character Houellebecq’s last meaningful words in the novel, turns out to be not just nostalgic but also deeply prescient, as the last person he encounters in his life is the antithesis, yet also perhaps a perverse descendant, of Morris. The next we learn of Houellebecq, he has been murdered and his body sliced into strips by a psychopathic killer who steals the portrait of him because of its astronomical market value. Although, in a grisly irony, the killer attempts a kind of artistry by arranging the strips of flesh into an imitation of a Jackson Pollock painting, he is later revealed to be a cosmetic surgeon from Cannes. As a profiteer in the billion-dollar “Beauty Industry,” he represents the ultimate capitalist perversion of Morris’s wish that labor and the production of beauty be intertwined. The Houellebecq character might demur from offering a cultural explanation for Morris’s decline, but the answer is embodied in his killer, for whom inorganic beauty is the ultimate neoliberal commodity. Houellebecq’s view is different but compatible with that already advanced by Jed’s father Jean-Pierre, a retired architect who has made his fortune designing acclaimed holiday resorts, but who regards Morris as a founding figure manqué for modernist aesthetics and industry. Here we also see Morris singled out over Charles Fourier, who, despite being comparably utopian and similarly interested in “the organisation of production,” is pronounced a “guru” (144); Morris, conversely, inspired by balancing optimism with pragmatism, and pragmatism with beauty: for William Morris, the distinction between art and the worker, between design and execution, had to be abolished. Any man, at his own level, 9

Etienne Cabet (1788–1856) led a community of French emigrants to the U.S. to found workers’ cooperatives. Although these communities, called Icarian colonies, were successful for a while, internal tensions eventually led to their demise.



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could be a producer of beauty – be it in the making of a painting, a piece of clothing or furniture – and he had the right, in his daily life, to be surrounded by beautiful objects. He allied this conviction with a socialist activism that led him to become more and more involved in movements for the emancipation of the proletariat; he wanted simply to put an end to the system of industrial production. (148) Suffering from a terminal illness, Jed’s father suspends his customary reticence to confess that he had once harbored, but then had ultimately been forced to abandon, an ambition to found an architecture firm based on Morris’s principles of design, artisanal production, and ornamentation, in order to challenge the prevailing inorganic minimalism of modernist architecture. He laments not only the fact that Morris’s integration of art and industry was eventually replaced by a modernist design movement that shifted “closer to industry” and hence “bec[ame] functionalist and productivist” (148), but also that Morris & Co.’s use of medieval- and oriental-inspired ornamentation was displaced by the austere “concentration camp-like” and “empty, multi-purpose” industrial aesthetic of functionalists such as Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe (145). Scholarly accounts corroborate this account of the modernist rejection of the preindustrial ethic and medievalist aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement. James Dunnett, for instance, explicitly squaring Morris and Le Corbusier against one another, has argued that in Decorative Art Today (1925) Le Corbusier rejected the Arts and Crafts movement’s belief in the continuity between fine and decorative arts and its argument that the Machine Age would enslave workers (he believed it would free them for the higher activity of making art).10 It is nevertheless true that Jed’s father’s portrayal of the French architect as anti-medievalist is not without its blind-spots. As Peter Serenyi has pointed out, Le Corbusier’s famous 1922 Immeubles Villas apartment complex project, with its communal blocks of cell-like studios, was inspired by an earlier visit to the Carthusian monastery at Ema in Tuscany;11 indeed he took monasticism as his model for communal living, and one of his late projects was the Dominican priory Sainte Marie de la Tourette, near Lyon. By focusing on Le Corbusier’s signature modernist apartment blocks, Jed’s father institutes a decisive breach between medievalist and modernist architecture and design, which in turn reinforces his conviction that the adoption of Morris’s design ethic and medievalist-orientalist aesthetic would have 10 11

James Dunnett, “The Architecture of Silence,” The Architectural Review 178/1064 (October 1985): 69–75 (70). Peter Serenyi, “Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastey of Ema,” The Art Bulletin 49/4 (December 1967): 277–86.

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led to a more beautiful and humane twentieth-century built environment. The twenty-first-century art scene, moreover, convinces him further that the Pre-Raphaelites’ condemnation of industrial art (here he conflates their views with Morris’s, though art historians might draw finer distinctions) was not just a thwarted corrective to modernism, but prescient of the cynical postmodern art market. Glossing the pre-Raphaelite belief that “art had begun to degenerate just after the Middle Ages, that from the start of the Renaissance it had cut itself off from any spirituality, any authenticity, to become a purely industrial and commercial activity” (147), he goes on to state: Exactly like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst today, with an iron hand the so-called great masters of the Renaissance ruled workshops of fifty, even a hundred assistants, who chain-produced paintings, sculptures, and frescoes. They just gave general guidelines, signed the finished work, and above all devoted themselves to public relations with the patrons of the moment. (147–48) While Morris and his allies opposed the industrial art system, they were, in Jed’s father’s view, regrettably on the wrong side of history, whereas the system’s natural heirs, Hirst and Koons (who are the subject of Jed’s only failed painting, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market), are now superstars of the global art world. While the nature of Houellebecq’s death seems to confirm the perversion of Morris’s ideals, Jed’s father’s decision to be euthanized to end his suffering from rectal cancer offers a more complex depiction of the world after Morris. On the one hand, his decision, triggered by pain and the indignity of his new artificial anus, defies what he has come to regard as the medical industry’s pseudo-humane prolonging of life. In this respect he appears to have returned to a Morris-like nostalgic embrace of nature’s cycle of birth, decline, and death. On the other hand, when Jed visits the euthanasia clinic in Zurich after his father’s death, he finds a bland establishment dedicated to service provision on an industrial scale, “satisfying the demands of one hundred clients every day” (251). He realizes, with a rising fury that shocks him, that his father’s death, despite seeming defiantly ecological and humane, has actually been a procedure carried out by a niche arm of the same medical industry that had kept him artificially alive. The clinic building itself is: [a] building of white concrete, of irreproachable banality, very Le Corbusier in its girder and pole structure opening up the facade and, with the absence of decorative embellishment, a building basically identical to the thousands of white concrete buildings that characterised semi-residential suburbs across the globe. (251)



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This temple to utilitarianism, combining modernist aesthetics with the commodification of death, is a symbol of a dystopian world where Morris’s medievalist dream has no place. Although the speeches, and indeed the deaths, of the Houellebecq character and of Jed’s father suggest that Morris’s labor and aesthetic vision has been snuffed out, the narrative suggests that its nostalgia for preindustrial artisan culture has lived on. However, rather than locating this survival in art or in improved labor conditions, the novel locates the legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement in what can be described as France’s heritage-leisure industries, particularly those industries targeting bourgeois niche consumption of “traditional” goods and services. This is conveyed chiefly through the novel’s account of Jed’s short-lived relationship with Olga, a Russian Francophile who works for the Michelin company, overseeing the content and marketing of their French Touch tourist guide. Olga is the perfect person for this job, because her idea of France is essentially touristic, having been formed as a young girl growing up in Moscow. As the couple holidays together so that Olga can monitor the tourist businesses promoted in French Touch, the reader is exposed to a satiric portrayal of a sector whose business is founded on offering French urbanites and foreign visitors (especially the new power demographics of Chinese, Indian, and Russian tourists) carefully curated escapades into la France profonde, a nostalgic fantasy space where rustic hôtels de charme and historic résidences d’exception offer “traditional” hospitality and, especially, gastronomic experiences catering to fantasies of Gallic cultural continuity and chthonic authenticity. Through Jed’s bemused perspective, the novel offers satiric paraphrases of the guide’s descriptions, including the following: In the grandiose setting of the Château de Bourbon-Busset, whose descendants elegantly perpetuated the art of hospitality, you could contemplate deeply moving souvenirs […] that went back to the Crusades; some bedrooms were fitted with waterbeds. The juxtaposition of Old France or terroir elements with contemporary hedonistic facilities sometimes had a strange effect, almost that of an error of taste; but it was perhaps this improbable mixture, Jed thought, that was sought by the chain’s clientele, or at least its core target. (62–63) This portrait of ex-aristocrats repurposing their family’s ancestral châteaux as heritage hospitality is a familiar satiric trope in France, and was featured in Jean-Michel Poiré’s 1993 hit comedy Les Visiteurs, in which the twelfthcentury Count Godefroy de Montmirail is mistakenly sent forward to 1992 only to discover his castle is now a hotel run by the descendant of his squire Jacquouille. Although much of the film’s comedy arises from Godefroy and

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Jacquouille’s medieval ignorance and unsanitary habits, they are still preferable to the unctuous ways of the modern managers running converted résidences d’exception. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the modern commercial appetite for nostalgia has, seemingly inevitably, turned history into a commodity, and the descendants of aristocrats into purveyors of heritage. Despite the French Touch guide’s occasional allusions to Crusade-era knick-knacks, this industry is not specifically medievalist in its evocations of la France profonde and its traditions; indeed, when remnants of the medieval past do not lend themselves to touristic or heritage fantasies, they are neglected. The novel’s portraits of second-tier towns such as Rouen and especially Beauvais, which are in decline despite their significant medieval histories, subtly points to the disjunction between the marketable heritage of la campagne and the unmarketable history of more urbanized environments. Despite Beauvais’ “considerable prosperity from the eleventh century onwards” as a center of trade, its famous medieval textile industry, and its possession of a high-vaulted thirteenth-century cathedral deemed “worth the journey” by the Michelin guide, its slow demise since the industrial revolution has not been halted by the kind of nostalgic aestheticization that has worked so successfully in rural France. The latter areas, by contrast, have adapted to the loss under neoliberalism of primary industry and a manufacture economy by making heritage tourism the heart of their survival, trading on a generalized pastoral fantasy of deeply rooted Frenchness. An example of the fetishizing of “deep heritage” under the star of the medieval is Souppes, the childhood village of the character Houellebecq to which he relocates later in life, the heritage-consciousness of which is evident in its whitewashed and half-timbered houses with “ancient tiled roofs” and its “permanent exhibition of local crafts.” Most iconic, however, is the village church, which, “with its ivy-clad flying buttresses, bore the traces of a thorough renovation; here, manifestly, they didn’t take heritage lightly” (167). Probably the historic Église Saint-Claire-Saint-Léger, reaching back to the twelfth century but partly restored in the nineteenth, the church’s Gothic edifice reflects a wholesale municipal effort to recapture a fantasy of authentic medieval community. What this reflects is that, notwithstanding the historical breadth of the “heritage” fantasy, the novel’s allusions to concepts such as la France profonde and terroir (native soil), which today appears most commonly in discussions of wine, are a symptom of medievalism insofar as they are a legacy of the same nineteenth-century romantic nationalism that fueled the recovery of medieval literature and architecture as “native forms” across Europe and the British Isles. This triangulation of nation, soil, and “heritage” (generalized, but again realized under the star of the medieval) was famously exploited in François Mitterrand’s 1981 “La force tranquille” presidential campaign, which is



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recalled in passing in the novel.12 This campaign, devised by the advertising guru Jacques Séguéla, famously featured posters in which the veteran politician (Jed, in a rare burst of political awareness, calls him “the old Petainiste mummy” [154]) appears in front of the tiny Burgundian village of Sermages, with its twelfth-century Église de Saint Pierre, the Romanesque edifice of which connoted a deep Gallic history. The poster’s embrace of the nostalgia evoked by village life is especially striking given that the publicity for Mitterand’s earlier campaign posters, such as a well-known one from 1965, had featured images of him with electricity pylons and fields with smoking factories in the distance, and the slogan “Un Président jeune pour une France modern.” Geoffrey Hare links the campaigns to the instability of the global marketplace, arguing that the aim to associate Mitterand with “tradition and continuity” was a response to the “bouleversement” turmoil created by the second oil crisis of the late 1970s.13 Jed recalls that the 1981 campaign was the first he had paid attention to (an observation that affirms Hare’s statement that this was the election that decisively marked “a conscious attempt to tailor [Mitterand’s image] to ‘demand’”14), and in retrospect he sees it as ventilating a nationalist nostalgia within French politics that has now come to rest more conspicuously in the agrarianist end of the political spectrum occupied by parties such as CPNT: Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions (Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions). Whereas the ideological values of CPNT have tended toward a scepticism to global capitalism, within the novel’s constellation of hospitality and leisure industries the concepts of terroir, tradition, and heritage have instead met their niche capitalist destiny in the forms of bespoke, cottage-industry goods and services. In satirizing the commodification of tradition, Houellebecq’s novel sits, albeit uneasily, within a longer tradition from the late nineteenth century, in which canny satirists both on the emerging Left and on the Right mocked the Arts and Crafts movement’s deep implication within, or at least its adulterated uptake by, aspirational consumer culture. Late Victorian critics, the most famous being Punch magazine’s George du Maurier, mocked those middle-class consumers who were courted avidly from the 1870s on by the “Arts and Crafts” emporia springing up in Western metropolises in the wake of (and capitalizing on) Morris & Co.’s success. One of most famous, and most amusing, instances of satire is du Maurier’s 1880 cartoon “The Six-Mark Teapot,” in which an “Aesthetic Bridegroom” and an “Intense Bride” (modeled unmistakably on William Morris’s wife, 12 13 14

The novel incorrectly dates the campaign to 1988. Geoffrey Hare, “Marketing Mitterand: The Presentation of Image in Election Posters 1965–1988,” Francophonie 6 (December 1992): 35–42 (37). Hare, “Marketing Mitterand,” 37.

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the Pre-Raphaelite muse Jane Morris) wax ecstatic over a decorated china teapot, resolving to “live up to” their orientalist-medievalist possessions.15 Another is F. C. Burnand’s smash-hit 1881 play The Colonel, in which the “Æsthetic High Art Company, Limited” represents a much-lauded parody of Morris & Co. While the ideology behind the Arts and Crafts movement differed fundamentally from the l’art pour l’art ethos of the Aesthetic movement, their mutual accommodation within consumer culture meant they were conflated by a number of satirists. The impact of both the emporia and the satiric treatment of them was widespread, finding its way into colonial novels such as Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890), which ridicules the décor introduced into the home of a local parvenu by a great “decorative” firm.16 These satirists’ mockery of these so-called “kalizoic” or “beautiful life” emporia is uncannily if accidentally reprised in Houellebecq’s satiric reproduction of one hôtel de charme’s promotional blurb, which ends with the phrase “here, life is beautiful” (62). The Map and the Territory updates and nuances the earlier critiques by tracking the transition of commodified nostalgia from a manufacturing economy to a post-industrial service economy, and the mass-media uptake of heritage leisure in the twenty-first century. In respect of the latter, the particular figure on whom the novel focuses is the real-life French telejournalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut, renowned for his promotion of regional and traditional French artisan culture and cuisine both in his TV programs and his numerous heritage-themed coffee-table books, which include such titles as Au Coeur de Nos Régions, the annual Almanach des Régions, Les magnifiques métiers de l’Artisanat, La France des Saveurs, and La France en Fêtes. In an amusing scene, Jed attends a New Year’s Eve party at Pernaut’s home with the theme “The Provinces of France,” at which guests consume regional cuisine served by staff dressed as Vendée peasants and Alsatian maidens, to the strains of Breton bagpipers and a Corsican polyphony ensemble. The scene’s satire of niche consumption resides in a key aesthetic incongruity: while the party is heaving with regional fare – Emmental-flavored canapés, “vendage tardive” Gewürtstraminer, Jésus-Laguiole brochette, and Saint-Pourçin wine are among the traditional foods listed – only Jed and one other hapless guest, a teleshopping magnate, have turned up in an approximation of “peasant” 15 16

Punch, 30 October 1880. Catherine Martin, An Australian Girl (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1891), 43. This is very probably a parody of Adelaide’s wealthy Barr Smith family, who were one of Morris & Co.’s most important international clients and had several large homes fitted out by the firm. See Louise D’Arcens, “Meta-medievalism and the Future of the Past in the ‘Australian Girl’ Novel,” Australian Literary Studies 26/3–4 (October–November 2011): 69–85.



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garb, while all the others are in elegant modern dress. Jed has previously made his host Pernaut a subject of one of his “Simple Professions” paintings, regarding him as symptomatic of the rise of lifestyle journalism and the transformation of heritage impulses into a media industry. The novel’s paraphrase of the fictional Wikipedia entry for Pernaut attributes his success to his simultaneous love of Gallic heritage and his understanding of the market: [his] stroke of genius […] had been to understand that after the “flash your cash” 1980s, the public hungered for ecology, authenticity and true values […] [he] carried out the messianic task that consisted of guiding the terrorised and stressed viewer towards the idyllic regions of a protected countryside, where man lived in harmony with nature, with the rhythm of the seasons. (153) In a familiar collapsing of the medieval into a non-specific “deep past,” the entry goes on to stress that the comforting France purveyed by Pernaut, despite borrowing strongly on medievalist fantasies of it as “both rural and ‘the eldest daughter of the Church,’” nevertheless exceeds this historical anchor: “[his] Weltanschauung […] would have gone just as well with a pantheistic, or even epicurean wisdom” (153). On reading Pernaut’s books on artisan tradition, which reveal him to be “less an apologist for immobility than one for gradual progress” (153), Jed concludes that, despite the celebrity’s apparent ideological neutrality, “[t]here were […] some points of convergence between Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s thinking and that of William Morris” (153). Pernaut inherits Morris’s mantle not just because he promotes the flourishing of preindustrial practices and products in the post-industrial economy, but also because, like Morris, he possesses a shrewd understanding of consumer demographics and market share. Yet in continuing the clear-eyed Aufhebung of niche consumption instituted by Morris, Pernaut’s success also discloses something that history could not have revealed to Morris, yet which can be seen retrospectively to be coiled within his Socialism and his anti-industrial project: the market’s seemingly infinite powers of recuperation, in which heritage, tradition, and idyllic premodernity are not resistant qualities but products of the marketplace. Houellebecq takes this line of thought even further by way of a forward projection in the novel’s Epilogue, which is set in the near future. After his father has died, and the “Simple Professions” series is complete, Jed, like his friend Houellebecq before him, moves to his grandmother’s village, Châtelus-le-Marcheix in the Creuse region, where he lives for perhaps two decades or more as a recluse behind an enormous electric fence he has

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erected around his property. When he finally emerges as an old man, he discovers that the formerly unglamorous village has been transformed into a simulacral Morris–Pernaud earthly paradise of agrarian economy and artisanal industry, populated by market-savvy tree changers17 who sell bespoke regional goods to tourists and drink coffee in cafés with belle époque décor. The “traditional inhabitants,” modest rural folk, have been almost completely replaced by “incomers from urban areas […] motivated by a real appetite for business and, occasionally, by moderate and marketable ecological convictions” (282). With the revival of “old professions […] such as wrought-iron work and brass-making, market gardening, and blacksmithing” (283), the village appears to reflect exactly the Houellebecq character’s account of the dream of Morris’s follower G. K. Chesterton in his novel The Return of Don Quixote, which calls for “the abandonment of the industrial system of production for both artisan and agrarian communities” (172). Indeed, in the novel’s epilogue France in general has become “a mainly agricultural and tourist country” and thereby survived the successive “financial convulsions” that had devastated the manufacturing economies (28). Looked at more closely, however, the success of this apparently socialist nirvana is, Jed observes, “based on a precise knowledge of the laws of the market and on their lucid acceptance” (282). The basket-weaving and cheese-making locals are not counter-cultural; rather, “educated, tolerant and affable, they co-habited easily with the foreigners present in their region […] since the latter constituted the core of their clientele” (284). So, again, we see not just a continuation, but in fact an amplification and an incorporation, of the logic of Aufhebung that characterized the leisure industries of twenty-first-century France. Here primary industry is not dead, but its operation is entirely in the service of the triumphant neoliberal service economy (284). It is hard not to read this as an affectionate but pointed neoliberal extrapolation of the medievalist future depicted in Morris’s 1890 utopian novel News from Nowhere, in which disaffected city-dwellers have fled the industrial centres and “flocked into the country villages […] [until] in a very little time the villages of England were more populous than they had been since the fourteenth century.”18 Morris’s vision of a “world of the country vivified by the thought and briskness of town-bred folk” who have “yielded to their surroundings and bec[o]me country people” (60–61) 17

18

In lifestyle and Real Estate discourse, “tree changers” are urbanites who move to rural environments; the inland equivalent to a “sea change,” , last accessed 16 September 2015. William Morris, News from Nowhere: or an Epoch of Rest, ed. James Redmond (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 60.



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has not required significant recasting to look like Houellebecq’s serviceeconomy heritagescape. That this is the unanticipated yet retrospectively predictable outcome of Morris’s vision is suggested also in Jed’s encounter with a “hefty bearded man with a ponytail” (282), whose appearance cheekily echoes the earlier description of Morris as a “stocky, hirsute guy with a ruddy and lively face, small glasses and a bushy beard” (175). Yet, if this man is Morris’s avatar and cultural heir, he also represents a further dilution of the lineage, for while he describes himself as an artist, his main income comes from renting out quad bikes to tourists. His art, moreover, reads as a debased descendant of Morris’s; for while the latter’s paintings are based on medieval heroic legends and romances, particularly the Morte Darthur, the bearded artist’s lurid paintings take their lead from the swordand-sorcery fantasy genre derived from medieval legend, in the manner of airbrushed “van art”: His paintings, manifestly inspired by heroic fantasy, mainly depicted a bearded ponytail warrior, who bestrode an impressive metal charger, visibly a space-opera interpretation of his Harley. […] Other canvases, figuring rather the warrior’s repose, revealed a typically male imagination based on eager sluts, with avid lips, generally going about in pairs […] his faulty painting technique unfortunately did not enable him to achieve the level of hyperrealism and brushstrokes classically required of heroic fantasy. All in all, Jed had rarely seen anything so ugly. (285; italics in original) Here the queenly figure of Morris’s famous 1858 painting “La Belle Iseult” and Edward Burne-Jones’s slender angels have degenerated, via sexist kitsch, into nubile sex objects. Despite his aesthetic objections, Jed does not seem sentimental about the adulteration, in these pictures or in the village life in general, of Morris’s medieval socialist vision. In fact, never one to fight the market, he appears to prefer the village in its gentrified state, having formed the view during his trips with Olga that “outside of certain very touristy zones […] the inhabitants of rural zones are generally inhospitable, aggressive and stupid” (278). If he had been sympathetic to Beauvais for its failure to cash in on its heritage value, he extends no such sympathy to the regions. The general hostility of the regions is also underlined when the Houellebecq character moves back to Souppes, and the locals are so unwelcoming that none of them seem to know or care anything about his brutal murder and dismemberment. Jed’s preference for pastoral fantasy over authentic rural experience motivates his first exhibition, the series of photographic enlargements of Michelin regional maps that are exhibited under the heading THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY. His

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reworking of Alfred Korzybski’s dictum “The map is not the territory,”19 both here and in the novel’s more ambiguous paratactic title, expresses a refusal of the famous phrase’s implicit privileging of transparently authentic terrain over the representational inadequacies of emotional and cultural topography. This querying of the value placed on la France profonde continues in his unsentimental documentation of endangered jobs in the “Simple Professions” series. Summarizing the critics’ view of his work, the narrator, speaking from the future, states: Jed Martin’s first paintings […] could lead you down the wrong track. By devoting his first two canvases […] to professions in decline, Martin could give the impression of nostalgia for a past age, real or fantasised, in France. Nothing […] was more foreign to his real preoccupations; and if Martin began by looking at two washed-up professions, it was in no way because he wanted to encourage lamentations on their disappearance: it was simply that they were, indeed, going to disappear soon, and it was important to fix their images on canvas while there was still time. (75) So, while the two other main characters in the novel appreciate Morris’s valuation of the preindustrial past, Jed seems relatively unmoved. The fact, however, that Houellebecq shows medieval traditions adapting slickly to the post-GFC marketplace does not mean there is no place in the novel for nostalgia. In fact, the nostalgia Morris felt toward the artisanal objects produced by medieval labor – the tapestries, leadlight windows, murals, and furnishings – is transposed in the novel to a nostalgia for the products of industrial modernity. These are objects of almost fetishistic appeal to Jed: his first artwork, produced when he is a schoolboy, is a large series of photographs of mass-produced metal objects called “Three Hundred Photos of Hardware,” taken on an old-model camera, accompanied by an essay in which he declares that the age of polymers and plastics has not produced a mental transformation in humanity to match that brought about by the use of metals. His breakthrough Michelin maps series, as mentioned above, is a love letter to maps, which he sees as “the essence of modernity, of scientific and technical apprehension of the world […] combined with animal life” (29), as well as a tribute to tourism in the industrial era, which emerged in response to the rise of the automobile. A later conversa19

The phrase is from Korzybski’s paper, “A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics,” presented before the American Mathematical Society at the New Orleans, Louisiana, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 28 December 1931.



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tion between him and the Houellebecq character reveals a shared powerful melancholy at the passing of industrial products. Examining Jed’s artworks, Houellebecq astutely identifies in them “a sort of nostalgia […] for the modern world, for the time when France was an industrial country” (109), an impulse with which he sympathizes. While attachment to these products is chiefly aesthetic, Houellebecq’s is moral. In a typically black comic rant, he goes on to explain: In my life as a consumer […] I have known three perfect products: Paraboot walking boots, the Canon Libris laptop-printer, and the Camel Legend parka. I loved those products, with a passion: I would’ve spent my life in their presence, buying regularly, with natural wastage, identical products. A perfect and faithful relationship had been established, making me a happy consumer. I wasn’t completely happy in all aspects of life, but at least I had that: I could, at regular intervals, buy a pair of my favourite boots. It’s not much, but it’s something, especially when you’ve quite a poor private life. Ah yes, that joy, that simple joy, has been denied me […] it’s brutal, it’s terribly brutal […] manufactured objects are wiped off the surface of the earth in a few days; they’re never given a second chance, they can only suffer, powerless, the irresponsible and fascist diktat of product line managers who of course know better than anyone else what the consumer wants, who claim to capture an expectation of novelty in the consumer, and who in reality just turns his life into one exhausting and desperate quest, an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines. (109–10) Beneath the slightly unhinged surface of this speech, the character laments a transition that theorists of neoliberalism such as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have noted as among the key indicators of the shift from industrial modernity into a postmodern neoliberal economy: the increasing obsolescence built into the lives of manufactured objects produced under the throwaway standards of neoliberal, globalized manufacture.20 Houellebecq also points to the concomitant loss of loyalty between producer and consumer, which has been replaced by the restless pursuit of novelty at the heart of late-capitalist consumer desire. This elegiac speech is significant because it again reinforces the novel’s fascinating refusal of the standard narrative of industrial rupture and revolution under modernity. It suggests instead that rather than simply aban20

Boltanski and Chiapello cite the “increasing rapidity of the life-cycle of products” as a symptom of late capitalism in The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007), 195.

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doning the high standards of premodern production favored by Morris & Co., industrial modernity continued, despite its manufacture methods, to be tethered to the premodern values of quality and product durability. The real rupture from the preindustrial past has come, then, courtesy of neoliberalism’s throwaway approach to production and consumption. Paradoxically, however, it is also precisely under the conditions of neoliberalism that medievalist products and methods have had a market resurgence; indeed the leisure industries of niche tourism and gastronomy, which fuse the apparent permanence of tradition with ephemeral modes of consumption, may well be the ultimate expression of the neoliberal economy. The particular tragedy for the Houellebecq character, however, is that unlike “traditional” goods and practices, whose methods have been revived within the novel’s new niche economy of bespoke goods and regional gastronomy, the production processes behind twentieth-century manufactured goods means that they, with all their stubborn longevity, have vanished never to return. Despite the aged Jed’s amused appreciation of the medievalist neoliberal utopia his village has become, and his only partly contradictory longing for an idealized vision of the industrial age, his final art series subscribes to neither. Creating the works under conditions of old age and terminal illness, he looks forward in them to what can be called a vegetal utopia, in which earth is victorious over humanity and its products. In this series of intricately layered time-lapse videos, manufactured objects and remnants of the digital age, along with photos of Jed’s very few loved ones, dissolve and are destroyed by the elements. “Then everything becomes calm. There remains only the grass swaying in the wind” (291). Not only is the novel’s final utopia free of the global information economy, and free of factories; it is free of people. Jed’s misanthropic disposition reaches its destination not in the pre-industrial, the industrial, or the post-industrial, but in the ecological. Right up to death he cannot abandon his impulse to map, that is, to represent; but this time what he maps is the territory’s dissolution of culture’s cartographies. This is a nostalgia beyond nostalgias, heralding, as the novel’s final sentence tells us, his own return to the earth: “[t]he triumph of vegetation is total.”

Travel in Space, Travel in Time: Michael Morrow’s Approach to Performing Medieval Music in the 1960s Edward Breen Thurston Dart’s dictum “travel in space: travel in time” serves as a moniker for Michael Morrow’s London-based early music ensemble, Musica Reservata. Morrow developed a hard-edged performance style for medieval and Renaissance music throughout the 1960s and 1970s that baffled many critics. In particular, Morrow demanded “bite and attack” from singers to promote a congruent sound with period instruments. By using folk models for this philosophy, Morrow’s medievalism also displayed aspects of an orientalist approach. The other then-major performing ensemble for medieval music in Britain was David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London. Munrow took a different approach to performance, an approach driven by his belief that early instruments attempted to imitate the human voice. Both ensembles were regularly broadcast on BBC radio, and their interviews and scripts make it possible to contrast their convictions. Taking Johan Huizinga’s notion of medieval contrast as a starting point, this essay traces several themes of medieval performance through the middle decades of the twentieth century to suggest ways in which such constructs of space and time are made manifest in Morrow’s 1969 recording of Landini’s yearning love-song Questa fanciulla. This striking performance is contrasted with another, made just days later, by David Munrow. Huizingian Transpositions During the twentieth century one particular study, as Christopher Page pointed out, exerted a strong and lasting influence on the perception of Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016

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the Middle Ages.1 Consider the opening paragraph of Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages: To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outline of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life.2 Histories such as Huizinga’s have had a profound influence, merging into a subtle but persuasive medievalism that feeds public taste for what Page once called a “rumbustuous” Middle Ages.3 Huizinga can help us to understand changing views of the Middle Ages and the medieval through the twentieth century because, as Page points out, he influenced what the many pioneers of the early music revival did when they approached questions of medieval performance practice: they, too, focused on contrasts. Furthermore, Page once commented that audiences for medieval music had a considerable amount in common with audiences for Huizinga’s style of book: Maybe it’s just the way that our educational system works in Britain, but I think that many people expect that any sound picture of the Middle Ages is going to be rumbustuous and good fun. It’s that sort of medieval banquet, rosy-cheeked wench, sucking-pig view of the medieval past and, well, that’s something I think that people like to have confirmed in performances.4 Huizinga’s approach may have been influential, but the influence may not have unfolded in quite the way he intended. Linguistic nuances lost in the first English translation (1924) resulted in a variant text nearly one-third shorter than the Dutch original. A second translation (1996) attempted to address this shortfall, and, in doing so, used noticeably less sensational language, neatly exemplified by the first chapter’s title, 1 2 3 4

Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 140–88. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 9. Christopher Page speaking on: “After Munrow,” Anthony Burton, Early Memories, aired 1992, BBC Radio 3. British Library Sound Archive reference: H777/01. Christopher Page speaking on: “After Munrow.”



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previously “The Violent Tenor of Life,” now “The Passionate Intensity of Life.”5 Shortly after this new English translation of Huizinga, Page explored the reception history of the Middle Ages in print. He began with a close reading of the epoch’s construction as a useful bridging period, invoking Brian Stock’s argument that the Middle Ages simply served, and continue to serve, subsequent periods of history rather than themselves.6 Page also confronted the larger narrative of Huizinga’s work, chiefly the concept of waning, or the autumnal metaphor of the new translation, as being continually difficult to prove through music despite many musicological studies citing the book as important. Huizinga’s argument that the harsh realities of medieval life contributed to a retreat into a dream-like state that continued in an increasingly over-wrought fashion until the Renaissance, was distilled into the very concept of vivid contrasts that had percolated into musicology. Page summed the situation up: “No doubt these contrasts are essential in some form, if we are to make any sense of what we find; I do not suggest that they be abandoned. My proposal […] is that they sometimes lead to simplistic and stereotyped reasoning.”7 Similarly, Timothy Day has identified the influence of Huizinga’s contrasts in studies of performance practice by the musicologist Rudolf von Ficker in the late 1920s that suggested the use of contrasting instrumental groupings.8 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has also argued that “Netherlands art played a part in the process of translating an image of the colourful Middle Ages into colourful sound.”9 Indeed, after noting that medieval life is frequently depicted in bright manuscript miniatures protected from lightdamage, in contrast to Renaissance paintings dulled by dirt, he concludes that medieval history had been similarly infused with high contrast.10 From these examples we can observe a significant groundswell of research into this notion of Huizingian contrast. However, focusing on contrasts in this way was not a stance held in isolation by Huizinga; other pre-war and immediately post-war academics also fueled this style of narrative. Take for instance a passage introducing instruments of the

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Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1. Page, Discarding Images, xvi. Page, Discarding Images, xvii. Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 176. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59. Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention, 59.

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late Middle Ages from Karl Geiringer’s Musical Instruments, published in 1943: The instruments of the late Middle Ages were far too delicate and weak to stand alone. In the paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, […] instruments of like tone were seldom combined; indeed, the groupings were plainly arranged as to provide the greatest wealth of contrast and variety. This becomes intelligible if we turn from the painting to the actual scores that have come down to us. The essentially different, shrill, and apparently discordant instruments were able to differentiate the separate parts, to which the period of Landino, Dunstable and Dufay aimed to give individual characters. Effects of harmony were not sought after in that heyday of contrapuntal virtuosity, and the contrasting tones of the instruments gave full emphasis to the polyphonic life of the composition. The orchestra of the Middle Ages was instinct with light, radiant, imponderable colours, like the paintings of the primitives.11 Geiringer shows how searching for contrast influenced the way music was expected to sound. For Geiringer, medieval music was formed from layers of musical lines that were to be differentiated in performance, a viewpoint not now widely held. Although Geiringer was published in 1946 he began his book much earlier and was disturbed by the Second World War, thus his observation that instruments of like tone are seldom combined is considerably earlier than the writing of Thurston Dart (1954), who points to similarities in instrumental grouping when he says that “Broadly speaking it is true to say that the Middle Ages liked their music and musical instruments to be either very loud or very soft.”12 We could usefully consider this loud and soft distinction as a Huizingian transposition: a school of thought that began to gather pace in the aftermath of The Waning of the Middle Ages. Another key foundation for thinking about medieval music along this binary was also laid in 1954 with the publication of Edmund Bowles’s paper “Haut and Bas: The Grouping of Musical Instruments in the Middle Ages.” In it, Bowles traced literary sources that divide instruments into broad groupings of loud and soft, or haut and bas. He based 11

12

Karl Geiringer, Musical Instruments: Their History in Western Culture from the Stone Age to the Present Day, trans. Bernard Miall, 2nd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1943), 89. Quoted in: Leech-Wilkinson, Modern Invention of Medieval Music, 70. Thurston Dart, The Interpretation of Music (New York: Harper Colophon, 1954; repr. 1963), 154.



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this investigation on three fundamentals: medieval instruments as representing an abandonment of Greco-Roman instruments; the development of polyphony as creating more roles for instruments; and instruments used as substitutes for, or aids to, singers in the Gothic Era.13 The objective of Bowles’s paper was to break down assumptions that instruments always belonged in modern orchestral families – woodwind, strings, brass – and suggest that they were once thought of in simple haut and bas categories instead. “In general, the more noise, the more the instrumental combination was generally admired and enjoyed in festive gatherings.”14 This paper added further credence to the growing picture of an age of extreme contrasts. The evidence that Bowles produced was entirely based on surviving documents: household expenses, descriptions of pageants, memoirs, and the poetry of Guillaume de Machaut and of Christine de Pisan, to name but a few of his sources. The paper is a tour de force of cumulative quotations, ending with Bowles summarizing confidently: In this brief survey of the grouping of musical instruments in the later Middle Ages, we have followed the important role of sonority in determining their use, as well as the undeviating principle of selection which runs through all the musical events of this era. In every performance, sacred or secular, the esthetical question of dynamics and tone color was paramount: loud or soft; haut or bas.15 So, by the time medieval music came to be recorded in significant quantities during the 1960s and 1970s, the knowledge of haut and bas was commonplace. The stark contrast between these two groups of sonorities mirrored the contrast in medieval life that Huizinga described.

A Vocal Attempt to Imitate Haut and Bas Instruments? During the later 1960s Michael Morrow began to direct performances of medieval and Renaissance music that explored haut/bas distinctions in singing timbre as well as instrumental combination. His first commercial recording of these theories was Music from the Time of Christopher Columbus (1968), followed immediately by French Court Music of the Thirteenth 13 14 15

Edmund A. Bowles, “Haut and Bas: The Grouping of Musical Instruments in the Middle Ages,” Musica Disciplina 8 (1954): 115–40. Bowles, “Haut and Bas,” 118. Bowles, “Haut and Bas,” 140.

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Century (1968).16 These albums became notorious for the loud, harsh singing of mezzo-soprano Jantina Noorman and quickly ignited debate among audiences and critics. On BBC Radio in 1970 Ian Partridge, who sang with Musica Reservata, wondered to what extent medieval instruments influenced medieval singing, and he suggested that early vocal techniques could have been significantly different from the clip of Janet Baker singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder that he had just played: Have singers always striven for such beauty of tone and line? I think not. In medieval times and even before, it’s thought that singers often tried to imitate the sounds of instruments with which they were performing. […] Moreover, many of the early instruments accompanying them had a very penetrating tone and much of the singing would have taken place out of doors. In these conditions today’s extremely cultured style of singing would certainly have sounded out of place and would have been quite ineffective too.17 To illustrate the point, Partridge then selected a recording of Jantina Noorman singing Kalenda Maya (accompanied by the recorder, tenor rebec, and percussion of Musica Reservata), which he described as a “lively rendering” and which he suggested listeners would find “fascinating and exciting.” Noorman’s singing stood out for being raucous and shouted, a quasi-belted technique. Here, Partridge suggested, was a voice trying to imitate the penetrating tone of an instrument. If this were the case then it would be a short and logical step to suggest Noorman was, in this specific instance, imitating an haut instrument. Partridge’s assertion that voices imitated instruments in medieval times did not go unchallenged; in fact, it was openly contradicted a few weeks later. The program that Partridge presented was the fifth in a series of eight, and David Munrow, director of The Early Music Consort of London, presented the final program: “Early Ensembles.”18 Munrow began his talk by 16

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Musica Reservata, Michael Morrow, and John Beckett, Music from the Time of Christopher Columbus. Philips SAL 3697, 1968, LP. And: Musica Reservata, Michael Morrow, and John Beckett, French Court Music of the Thirteenth Century. Delysé ECB 3201, 1968, LP. David Munrow, “Study on Three: The Sounds of Music,” 1970, DM7/11, Papers of David Munrow, Royal Academy of Music Library Special Collections, London. The record mentioned is Kalenda Maya (band 1) on: Musica Reservata, Michael Morrow, and John Beckett, French Court Music of the Thirteenth Century. David Munrow, “Early Ensembles [Radio Script],” c. 1970, DM/7/7, Papers of David Munrow, Royal Academy of Music Library, London. This collection has copies of BBC correspondence and the scripts for all seven programs in this series.



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explaining that music notation had become increasingly prescriptive since the Middle Ages and attributed the lack of performance instructions in early sources to a lack of need. “[M]usic embraced only one kind of style, and that the latest and most up to date,” he argued, adding that, since musicians were only ever concerned with the music of their own time, they would, necessarily, all have known how to play it and, more specifically, what to play it on. He likened this concept of “stylistic unity” to a modern jazz ensemble or dance band. To illustrate the paucity of surviving stylistic knowledge, Munrow played the Spanish song Passe el agoa sung first by Victoria de los Angeles in a classically trained style, and second by Jantina Noorman in a loud and penetrating style. He could not resist a note of mischievous delight as he said, “Compare these two versions of a Spanish song written about 1500. Both versions use exact copies of old instruments and both believe fervently in their authenticity.”19 He explained that although they were widely different, they were both permissible within the loose confines of current knowledge. He summarized the situation: “Those two performances also illustrate one of the most important distinctions in musical sound before about 1600 – soft and loud – a distinction which I believe applied to singing as well as a playing.” Munrow was explicit; he strongly suspected there was an haut and bas distinction in voices, so, therefore, he presumably concluded what Noorman was doing was an illustration of that. There is a good reason to believe that his line of thought stemmed directly from Musica Reservata’s director Michael Morrow, since Munrow also worked with Musica Reservata around the time he wrote this script. With that in mind, what follows is extremely interesting; Munrow’s script blatantly contradicted Partridge’s earlier program: The history of early music is really the history of vocal music: composers wrote for voices and adapted vocal forms for instruments; instrumentalists were often singers themselves and instruments accompanied or imitated voices: makers designed instruments to sound like voices. Pick up any sixteenth-century instrumental tutor and you’ll find it begins, like the first recorder tutor written by Ganassi in 1535: “Be it known that all musical instruments in comparison to the human voice are inferior to it. For this reason we should endeavour to learn from it and imitate it […].” 20

19 20

Munrow, “Early Ensembles [Radio Script].” Munrow, “Early Ensembles [Radio Script].”

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Munrow believed that, since instruments were designed to complement the sound of voices, voices could not have imitated instruments. He went on to berate those who thought otherwise: Some people today think that this relationship between the instruments and voices was all the other way round – that voices tried to sound like instruments. This, I believe, to be a vast delusion since it seems to go in the face of all the evidence. It is clear from the music which composers wrote that they thought of the human voice as infinitely fuller, richer and more varied than any single instrument. Of course there were different styles of singing in use just as there are today, not only in different countries, but in different acoustical conditions like the outdoors and indoors division I suggested earlier.21 In this script, Munrow avoided direct reference to Musica Reservata, yet, as director of the other main British ensemble specializing in medieval music, “some people” surely implied Michael Morrow. If this was the case, Munrow might have been politely distancing himself from Morrow’s ensemble, explaining why he pinned his line of argument to source studies: it was impersonal. Again, what follows appears to implicate Jantina Noorman’s singing and might be read as a justification for Munrow’s own differing approach to vocal styles: “But a singer would only have used one style – whilst an instrumentalist could play several instruments imitating different aspects of different styles of voice production. Any singer who tries to sound like a shawm one minute and a recorder the next will ruin his voice in no time.”22 If, indeed, this comment referred to Noorman, then Munrow appeared to argue that, although her vocal style was a perfectly viable option, it is not the only option and therefore other performers were free to choose different styles. One might also read in this a veiled criticism, since Noorman could, and often did, try to blend with both recorders and shawms. Munrow perhaps felt she would ruin her voice singing both haut and bas? Furthermore, Munrow appeared to imply that Morrow arrived at this striking vocal sound through a misguided attempt to make voices imitate instruments. To explore Morrow’s motivation for these loud performances we need to look further into the biography of Musica Reservata.

21 22

Munrow, “Early Ensembles [Radio Script].” Munrow, “Early Ensembles [Radio Script].”



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Michael Morrow and Musica Reservata Musica Reservata were based in London and directed by Michael Morrow. They gave their first performance in 1960 for The Society of The White Boar, later described by Morrow as having “something to do with Richard III.”23 Morrow trained as a fine artist in Dublin before moving to London, and attributed the development of his interest in early music to the BBC. In one radio talk he traced the wider familiarization of early music from the pioneering work of Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) through German scholarship to the founding of the BBC’s Third Programme (1946). As for gramophone records, he admired Nadia Boulanger’s recordings of Monteverdi (1937) but described the Anthologie Sonore (1933–1950s) and Columbia History of Music (1933) series as “musicologically out of date practically before they were conceived”: This, then, was the state of affairs before the BBC Third Programme began its marathon series of series, that included a year-long history of music, a geographical and historical survey of plainsong, a history of English lute music (performed by the foremost lutenists in England and Europe), numerous programmes of non-European music, and of folk music from most countries. Without this musical background neither Musica Reservata nor, indeed, any other English professional early music ensemble could have come into being.24 Embedded here is a suggestion that folk music broadcasts influenced Morrow’s approach to early music, and while his interest in folk music grew, others became interested in period instruments. As early as 1943 Eric Halfpenny, a founder member of The Galpin Society – for the study of musical instruments – and a performer in Morrow’s early concerts, published a paper entitled “The Influence of Timbre and Technique on Musical Aesthetic,” which bemoaned the prevailing practice of performing early music on modern instruments: “But because, regardless of its period, we still possess in name at least, the instruments specified in its scores, we are well content to let these sleek and efficient prototypes

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Michael Morrow and J. M. Thomson, “Early Music Ensembles 1: Musica Reservata,” Early Music 4/4 (1976). This society was founded in 1924 and is still in operation under the new name (adopted in 1959) of “The Richard III Society.” Details of the society are available from their website, , last accessed 8 April 2014. Michael Morrow, “Musica Reservata,” February 1971, Box 1, Michael Morrow (1929–94) & Musica Reservata, King’s College London Archives.

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stand token for the whole of their several ancestries.”25 When writing in the early 1950s, Thurston Dart, another Galpin Society member, also suggested that period instruments could restore lost sounds: “First of all a very careful attempt must be made to discover the acoustical surroundings in which the music was first performed. […] Next, the appropriate instrumental sonorities must be restored.”26 Dart also promoted the notion of haut instrumental groupings. When responding to Musica Reservata’s debut concert invitation he offered advice: “Good luck to you all (most of whom I seem to have the pleasure of knowing already), & let me know of your next concert. Make the music sound robust now & then – so often one hears it as though everyone were wearing kidgloves […].”27 Dart’s only recording of medieval music was indeed robust but the singing did not break away from stylistic norms of the mid-twentieth century.28 For both Halfpenny and Dart, the sound of the instruments was paramount to the performance, yet neither mentioned the sound of voices. But as we shall see, period instruments can help us to understand Noorman’s loud vocals in Kalenda Maya. Morrow’s performances were highly innovative because of the style and the techniques in both playing and singing. In the words of John Sothcott, who played recorder with the ensemble: [Morrow’s] enthusiasm for early music seemed […] to be sustained by an instinctive feeling that the few pieces he knew would sound wonderful if played convincingly in an appropriate style. […] The spirit and the style of the performance were everything. Michael’s reason for attempting performances […] was to bring the music to life for its own sake and, as he often said, so that he could hear it.29 To be sure, Musica Reservata performances employed period instruments, but Morrow had no illusions of authenticity. In one talk he went as far as to provide a caveat: “It is impossible – lacking a time machine – ever to know with any real degree of certainty how medieval music originally sounded. We know a little more about some periods, some countries, than others, 25 26 27 28 29

Eric Halfpenny, “The Influence of Timbre and Technique on Musical Aesthetics,” The Music Review 4 (1943): 250. Dart, The Interpretation of Music, 153. Thurston Dart to Michael Morrow, 6 May 1960, Box 1, Michael Morrow (1929–94) & Musica Reservata K/PP93, King’s College London Archives. For a consideration of Dart’s medieval performances, see Thurston Dart and Vokal- und Instrumentalensemble, Notre Dame de Paris Im 13. Jahrhundert, Philips 839 306 EGY, 1967, LP. J. M. Thomson et al., “Obituaries: Michael Morrow, 1929–94,” Early Music 22/3 (1994): 538.



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but we’ve never actually heard it performed by the players for whom it was composed.”30 For Morrow, the adventure was in the possibility of arriving at an authentic performance outcome through stylistic experimentation, even if there would be no way of ever knowing it had been attained: For myself, it is only the occasional glimmering of the real thing that is all-important and this can be attained solely by performance backed by research: research, not only in the sifting of statistics – although this is a vital aspect, but also by creative research, that is, becoming aware of the relationship of two or more apparently unconnected factors. And when, very occasionally, these unite to form a hitherto unknown reality, life itself becomes a little more real.31 Yet, while Morrow was adamant he could never know how early performances sounded, he was convinced that his own performance practice should not be based on twentieth-century aesthetic taste: And this question of taste is also relevant to the admittedly difficult problems of instrumental and, indeed, vocal colour. Here, again, if one’s only musical experience has been that of Western art music it is very easy to believe that these standards might be absolute ones. But I think one could say that every musical sound that seems ugly to one musical tradition may seem beautiful to another.32 This explains why he asked for sounds that were shocking to twentiethcentury Western listeners, and as the performers of Musica Reservata settled into a loyal troupe with Noorman’s sound leading the way, they certainly were not afraid to provide them. Yet Noorman had not always sung in this brash, penetrating way; the high use of chest voice was, for her, a constructed style. If we consider her first commercial recording, Dutch Folk Songs, Noorman’s singing is quite the opposite: entirely in head voice, soft and gentle.33 She only pursued her haut style after she started working with Musica Reservata. The reasons for such 30

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“Chelsea,” 26 June 1971, Box 1, Michael Morrow (1929–94) & Musica Reservata, King’s College London Archives. These notes appear to be aimed at art students; so, it was presumably a concert at Chelsea Art College for which Morrow begins, “I have been asked to say what’s called a few introductory words about this concert.” Morrow, “Chelsea.” “The Performance of Medieval and Renaissance Music,” c. 1970, Box 1, Michael Morrow (1929–94) & Musica Reservata, King’s College London Archives. Jantina Noorman, Dutch Folk Songs, Folkways FW6838, 1955, LP.

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haut singing appear in a script explaining how particular playing styles are innate to certain instruments: We’ve seen how many 13th century instruments could have produced only a certain type of sound. The human voice, however, is capable of producing virtually any sort of sound that is required of it. And I think it’s true to say that fashions in singing tend to follow fashions in instrumental playing.34 Although Morrow does not claim early voices directly imitated instruments, this passage offers a strong suggestion that Partridge’s 1970 radio script was informed by Morrow. Morrow thought early voices would have aligned themselves with the sounds of instruments (out of necessity for good tuning and ensemble), and this is the point that David Munrow deliberately separated himself from in his follow-up episode. Assuming the above passage by Morrow reflected the nub of his idea, how did it develop into Kalenda Maya? John Sothcott remembered a Balkan folk recording as the catalyst, and such an appropriation of the Balkans indicates an orientalism. He recounted the story to Christopher Page on BBC radio with Jeremy Montagu, the percussionist for Musica Reservata: [JS] I remember with the Kalenda Maya piece at the beginning for example – we were working out ways of doing that and we went into the record shop in Hampstead and heard a Romanian pipe player playing some very percussive dance music with a drum and we suddenly realized this was the sort of approach that would suit that Kalenda Maya – or would be one approach that would suit it and didn’t seem to clash with any of what we knew about the performance of this area of music. And I remember that grew that evening from that performance of music and almost exactly as we did on the record it never altered. By I think that time we had Jantina Noorman of course with us who makes a very special sound. [CP] Yes, she was, very much wasn’t she, the defining, one of the most distinctive sounds of the whole ensemble. And the way she sang sounds to me like the way some women in Bulgaria sing today for example with the bagpipes which wouldn’t you say so Jeremy?

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Morrow, “The Performance of Medieval and Renaissance Music.”



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[JM] Well deliberately! Because I think Michael took her to Bert Lloyd [A. L. Lloyd], and so on, and she heard a lot of that sort of stuff and so she deliberately acquired that style of singing – a very hard cutting edge. [CP] So Michael actually took her to see an expert in folk music to groom her as it were? […] [JM] Certainly Michael was close to Bert and worked with him a lot.35 So, folk music recordings and advice from folklorist Bert Lloyd were influences. Before focusing on this folk connection, the haut/bas binary can first be detected in Kalenda Maya. A BBC announcer carefully introduced its debut broadcast from notes prepared by Michael Morrow: “The second half of this concert is devoted to French and Spanish Music. It begins with a performance, in outdoors style, of Kalenda Maya. […] It’s a monophonic song, based, according to a contemporary account, on an instrumental dance tune.”36 The phrase “outdoors style” suggests that Morrow was indeed asking Noorman to imitate a shawm or some other such haut instrument, and this live performance is similar to the recording that Partridge referred to in 1970, but doubles Noorman’s vocal line with a countertenor. Could this “outdoors” idea be traced back to the Huizingian haut/bas binary? Is it possible – through such an example – to infer that the emphasis was firmly on a binary solution (loud or soft)? First, Morrow and Noorman’s reading (on the commercial LP release) of Kalenda Maya used a recorder, a tenor rebec, and percussion, not all haut instruments as defined by Bowles. There was no reason on the basis of balance alone for Noorman’s singing style; although elsewhere on the same album her haut singing was essential when paired with bagpipes in Adam de la Halle’s Le jeu de Robin et Marion.37 In reviewing this record “the quintessence of fishwifery,” is how Howard Mayer Brown described her singing. He thought it ignored “everything that is courtly and refined” in the music but, despite this, succeeded because it embodied “such a strong, personal and

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A program in the series Spirit of the Age presented on BBC Radio 3 by Christopher Page between 1992 and 1997. The title/date of this particular broadcast is unknown. Quotes are taken from a recording off-air in the private collection of John Sothcott. Home recording of BBC broadcast: “A Concert of Renaissance and Medieval Music,” in the private collection of Geoffrey Shaw. Undated. The repertoire matches the concert: Musica Reservata, Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), 2 July 1967. Concert program in Michael Morrow (1929–94) & Musica Reservata, King’s College London Archives. Musica Reservata, Michael Morrow, and John Beckett, French Court Music of the Thirteenth Century.

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coherent conception of the music.”38 Strength, as a description of the Musica Reservata sound, was also invoked by David Fallows, who, when writing Morrow’s obituary, said he stood for “clarity of line, absolute firmness of pitch, rock-hard intonation and absolute confidence in performance,” adding that “[t]he bright, aggressive sounds of those no-compromise performances was a major shot in the arm for everybody present.”39 Elsewhere, he wrote that Morrow’s performances were “calculated to eliminate the Good Queen Bessery” and the Merrie England invoked by madrigal singing and recorder groups.40 This recalls Morrow’s avoidance of Western aesthetic beauty and suggests a fetishization of “hard-edged alterity.”41 Part of this “shot in the arm” approach was, as Montagu remembers, based on a hearty and constant approach to dance rhythms: And you look at Arbeau’s Orchesography – the basic dance manual of 1588 – the only two dances that he gives in full with the percussion part there’s no variation whatsoever. It’s absolutely constant; which is what we did. That and the fact that we went, as you might say, slapbang into things is what broke the ground with the audiences who had never heard medieval music played like that – they’d been brought up with Dolmetsch – and we were fundamentally anti-Dolmetsch.42 Here, Dolmetsch is associated with softer, amateurish performances sometimes dubbed the “Merrie England” movement. The larger context for Montagu’s comment involved a discussion of problems with using Dolmetsch-festival players as deputies in Musica Reservata since they were prone to play gently, with rubato and vibrato. John Sothcott has already related Morrow’s conception of Kalenda Maya to Balkan dance music. Likewise he suggests a folk origin for these “antiDolmetsch” sounds in his obituary piece: The conscious and deliberately used influence of various traditional or exotic forms of music in his versions of medieval music are very 38 39 40

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42

Howard Mayer Brown, “Review: [Untitled],” The Musical Times 114/1563 (1973): 498. Brown, “Review: [Untitled],” 498. David Fallows, “Performing Medieval Music in the Late-1960s: Michael Morrow and Thomas Binkley,” in Essays in Honor of Laszlo Somfai on His 70th Birthday: Studies in the Sources and the Interpretation of Music, ed. Laszlo Vikarius and Vera Lampert (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 52. This phrase was coined by Stephen G. Nichols, “Modernism and the Politics of Medieval Studies,” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), 49. Jeremy Montagu, interviewed by author, Oxford, 6 December 2009.



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evident on recordings made at the time. This kind of empirical research was previously unheard of and has often been made use of by others, usually without acknowledgement.43 Perhaps this “empirical research” stemmed from Morrow’s interest in what Fallows called “records of folk-singers on the borders of Europe” in the same obituary piece.44 Recordings of what Sothcott remembered as traditional (read: European folk) music, and exotic music (read: anything nonEuropean, folk or otherwise) became readily available from the mid-1950s onwards, and Morrow was kept abreast of this fieldwork through friendship with a folk music scholar, A. L. Lloyd (Bert Lloyd), who suggested close connections between medieval music and longstanding traditions in folk music communities. This line of reasoning is apparent in a photograph taken by Lloyd that accompanied Morrow’s 1978 article on performance practice for the magazine Early Music, a photograph showing bagpipe dancing to gudulka accompaniment (a Bulgarian folk instrument similar to the medieval rebec).45 A photograph from that same event is used on Lloyd’s collection of Bulgarian Music for Columbia Records.46 Morrow, however, was not alone in exploring folk music connections. As Keith Potter recalls, it was also a theme explored by Munrow: David Munrow used to say that if you wanted to travel in time you should travel in space: he claimed that it is possible to learn something of the aesthetics and the techniques of medieval and Renaissance music of Western Europe by studying the folk musics of the wider world.47 This phrase apparently originated with Thurston Dart and was also explored notably by the Munich-based ensemble Studio der frühen Musik during the 1960s.48 Dart’s phrase invokes a key twentieth-century viewpoint that the cultural historian John Ganim describes as “a sense of geography being transmuted into history that is repeated throughout the discourse of 43 44 45 46

47

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Sothcott in: Thomson et al., “Obituaries: Michael Morrow, 1929–94,” 538. Fallows in: Thomson et al., “Obituaries: Michael Morrow, 1929–94,” 538. Michael Morrow, “Musical Performance and Authenticity,” Early Music 6/2 (1978): 233. A. L. Lloyd, The Folk Music of Bulgaria, Columbia Records KL 5378, 1954, LP. Further photos from this reel of film can be seen among Lloyd’s papers in the special-collections library at Goldsmiths, University of London. Keith Potter, “Oriental Influence: Keith Potter on a New ‘Music in Our Time’ Series Devoted to East-West Musical Relations, Which Begins on Thursday (R3, 10.15pm),” The Listener (29 September 1983): 34. It is remembered as having originated with Dart by David Fallows speaking on “Mr Munrow, His Study,” Jeremy Summerly, The Archive Hour, aired 7 January 2006, on BBC Radio.

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medievalism and orientalism.”49 It is this very “sense of geography being transmuted into history” that we see in operation with Musica Reservata, and this suggests that Dart’s work was also an influence. In fact Dart’s enthusiasm for appropriating folk music is palpable as early as 1952 in The Interpretation of Music: Other evidence may be found in the remoter regions of Europe and the Near East. The music and musical instruments heard in the mountains of Sardinia and Sicily, and the bands still used for Catalan dance music are medieval in flavour. The Arabian lute, rebec and shawm are still much the same as they were when they were introduced into Europe by the Moors.50 So, it is Dart who drew attention to the very borders of Europe that later fascinated Morrow. “The borders of Europe,” the Balkans in particular, are a key theme in Morrow’s research into medieval performance practice. Interviewed in 1976, he said: I remember once listening to a singing Balkan […] and being struck by the male singer’s perfect intonation and thinking that a 13th-century motet must have sounded something like this – perfect fourths and fifths, very wide major seconds and wide major thirds that really are dissonant – otherwise it would sound like nothing at all.51 The attraction of Balkan voices for Morrow seems to have been this ability to sing unyieldingly in tune within non-tempered systems. When interviewed by Tony Palmer around the same time on LBC Radio, Morrow touched on Balkan voices again and selected a folk recording as an example of style: [TP] That sounded very suspiciously to me like some bagpipes! Michael Morrow, Musica Reservata: tell me more! What was that? [MM] It’s a Jugoslav folk song which the woman is singing in a very moving style. The text sounds as if it’s very sad indeed. In fact it’s all about old husbands marrying young wives and it’s deeply 49 50 51

John Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave 2005), 7. Thurston Dart, The Interpretation of Music, 153–54. Morrow and Thomson, “Early Music Ensembles 1: Musica Reservata,” 515.



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satirical. And I think it’s a good example of if one doesn’t know the style of the area, or period, one can mistake the mood of the piece.52 Morrow was so struck by Jugoslavian performance that he also discussed it in print on a separate occasion in Early Music magazine.53 In an undated script Morrow went into further detail as he bemoaned the early music performances of the 1940s that he felt were “somewhat watered down to suit the musical taste of the time”: the lack of conviction and vitality in most modern performance of this music became startlingly apparent when, in the early 1950s, I heard a broadcast of part of a Jugoslav festival of folk music, which included a group of villagers singing in simple but throat-cuttingly precise harmony. I realised for the first time that if a harmonic language is limited, its effect upon the listener will – of necessity – depend upon the existence of a tradition of exact intonation: the details of intonation may vary considerably from district to district, but the tradition of intonation of each area will constitute an essential and immutable part of its music.54 He went on to say that the innovations of nineteenth-century orchestral writing had not continued the demand for precise intonation. For Morrow, it seemed obvious that when dealing with less dense harmonic textures, such as those demanded by drone accompaniment, precision of intonation was paramount. At which point, when talking about slightly later repertoire, he launched into a critique of modern performance and modern vibrato: The variety of tuning systems employed in the instruments of the modern orchestra would have been intolerable during the renaissance, and the result is only acceptable to the modern listener because an excessive use of vibrato blurs to some extent the intonational anomalies and, of course, modern ears – or fairly modern ears – have become

52

53 54

Tony Palmer, LBC Radio Interview with Michael Morrow: 1CDR0005846, c. 1974, Musica Reservata collection British Library Sound Archive.This recording can be identified as between 1974 and 1976 because earlier in the broadcast James Callaghan was mentioned as foreign secretary. Morrow, “Musical Performance and Authenticity,” 234. Morrow, “Musica Reservata.” This festival was, possibly, the 1951 Opatija festival recorded by Peter Kennedy, which became the Columbia World Library volume Yugoslavia.

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conditioned to what would have seemed to a 16th-century listener to be sheer cacophony. Morrow even compared the tuning of a recording by Nellie Melba (1861– 1931) with a modern Wagnerian “whose aim appears all too often to be one of accuracy to the nearest semitone” to prove his point. He quoted Percy Scholes as saying “the modern singer has come to rely on interpretation at the expense of technique,” and used this reasoning to justify the hard-line stance of Musica Reservata: John Beckett, John Sothcott and I all feel deeply and unanimously on the subject of the need for total stylistic conviction and accuracy in the performance of the music of any period. Without this, the music at worst, does not exist at all; at best, it is deformed, dishonoured, and sent out to walk the streets. In order to eschew modern interpretation, Morrow also asked singers to perform without modern translations in order to prevent them putting “any false feeling into their singing.”55 In another Early Music interview, when asked directly about how Noorman’s style evolved, Morrow said, “My principal aim was not to have people singing like the BBC Singers,” and he went on to reiterate that what he was after was “precision of articulation and precision of intonation.”56 He also mentioned in print that: With several very happy exceptions I have always found it very difficult to work with singers. This is partly due to my ignorance of 20th-century vocal-technique: articulation from the diaphragm rather than the throat, expression by means of the eyebrows instead of the voice.57 This all amounts to something of a manifesto, and from this manifesto we can infer Morrow’s strength of feeling. His attraction to Balkan voices, therefore, can now be summarized in the following broad terms: Balkan traditions of monophonic music have styles understood by both indigenous performers and audiences that are particular to repertoire and region. Balkan singing has a consistency of intonation appropriate to harmonically sparse music and vocal techniques that allow for clear and direct portrayal of that intonation. Morrow focused 55 56 57

Morrow, “Musica Reservata.” Morrow and Thomson, “Early Music Ensembles 1: Musica Reservata,” 516. Michael Morrow, “Musical Performance and Authenticity,” 237.



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on Balkan techniques because such voices often perform outdoors. Finally, many Balkan vocal techniques avoid diaphragmatic articulation, assumed to be an invention of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century operatic technique. The resulting styles employed by Musica Reservata aimed at precision. Precise they may have been, but many listeners just thought they were ugly. Morrow knew this when he remarked, “there are two things most audiences and all music critics abhor: non-conventional singing and nonconventional violin-playing. With crumhorns, of course anything goes.”58 Jeremy Montagu explained the approach to articulation as “bite and attack” when he prepared a biography commissioned by the British Council for Germany under their auspices in 1972: Some of the evidence for the authenticity of this bite and attack comes from the instruments themselves. For example, the wide-bored renaissance recorder plays more strongly and with more attack than the conical baroque recorder; if one plays the renaissance instrument in the gentle way which is current with the baroque instrument, it sounds wrong and the player can feel that this style doesn’t suit the instrument. The crumhorn gives even better evidence: unless one blows strongly, attacks firmly and maintains full air pressure, the instrument immediately goes out of tune. Confirmatory evidence comes from the few old organs […], in particular the Compenius organ of Frederiksborg Castle near Copenhagen […]. The attack of this organ is a complete revelation to those who thought that early music was gentle; it is strong and virile and immensely exciting. 59 In particular of singers Montagu also explained: And so Michael Morrow had to find singers whom he could persuade to forget all that they had learned; to listen to folk music; to sing absolutely in tune without any vibrato; to develop the same form of attack as the instrumentalists, and all this he triumphantly achieved.60 In the light of this evidence we can, therefore, suggest a preliminary conclusion that Morrow pinned the reasoning for this style on both the preci58 59 60

Michael Morrow, “Musical Performance and Authenticity,” 236. Jeremy Montagu, “Musica Reservata,” c. 1972, Box 1, Michael Morrow (1929–94) & Musica Reservata, King’s College London Archives. Jeremy Montagu, “Musica Reservata.”

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sion and intonation in European folk singers because he found it to be “congruent” with a “bite and attack” demanded by medieval instruments. Returning to the original comments made by Ian Partridge, we can now understand that, while Munrow believed voices the exemplar, Morrow appeared to believe voices imitated instruments because they were dutybound to align themselves with the prevailing sonority of an instrumental texture to avoid tuning problems that medieval and Renaissance listeners would have found “sheer cacophony.” Morrow’s diplomacy suggests a wistful air of necessary compromise to his beliefs: singers had to imitate instruments to avoid a clash of sonorities, but this did not mean they wanted to, as he also implied in remarking, “vocal tone has always been related to the tone produced by the instruments of the time, and it seems unreasonable to expect musicians of any period to admit serious incongruity between vocal and instrumental colour […].”61

The Point of Departure: Landini’s Questa Fanciulla David Fallows once wrote an article suggesting that David Munrow’s album Ecco La Primavera, on which this ballata by Landini can be found, was “an attempt to set the record straight” after his experiences of recording the same repertoire on the Musica Reservata album Music from the Time of Boccaccio’s “Decameron” a few days earlier, suggesting that the former album influenced the latter.62 Munrow was furious at Fallows’s assertion that he was influenced by Morrow, and asked for a printed apology.63 This apology was never granted, as there were good reasons for subscribing to Fallows’s point of view. Ecco la Primavera can be seen as both an album that is influenced by the work of Musica Reservata and an album that takes a deliberate and significant step away from the Musica Reservata orbit. Indeed, Ecco La Primavera was a bold statement on the part of Munrow: an assertion of independence from the gravitational pull of Michael Morrow’s uncompromising vision for medieval music as well as the first album made solely by Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London. The contrast in the performances of Landini’s Questa fanciulla was referred to by Munrow himself in a radio script for his 1970 program Medieval Florence:

61 62 63

Morrow, “Musica Reservata.” David Fallows, “Performing Early Music on Record–1: A Retrospective and Prospective Survey of the Music of the Italian Trecento,” Early Music 3/3 (1975): 259. David Fallows, e-mail message to author, 15 December 2012.



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One simply can’t be dogmatic about how music of this period was performed. The composers just didn’t give any performance indications: no tempo, no dynamics, no instrumentation, and they left the performers quite a few problems of textual underlay to sort out as well as considerable license to ornament the music themselves. Here are two utterly different interpretations of “Questa fanciulla Amor” in the first, a tenor is accompanied by viols and lute; in the second, a mezzo soprano is accompanied by two crumhorns and triangle […].64 Despite what is clearly a different approach, both performances used Leo Schrade’s 1958 edition of this song and followed his suggestion in the editorial commentary that the song was most likely to have been performed with a vocal top line and instrumental accompaniment.65 That several performers were shared across the albums further highlights the difference in approach taken by both directors. Questa fanciulla is both a prayer and a love song: Love, please make this girl compassionate, for she has wounded my heart in your fashion. / Lady, you have so stricken me with love that I can only find rest when thinking of you. / You have drawn my heart out of my body with your beautiful eyes and joyous face / Have pity on your servant, I ask for pity on my great distress.66 We will consider both performances of this song. Performance

Approx. tempo

Instrumentation

Musica Reservata 196867

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Mezzo Soprano (Jantina Noorman) 2 crumhorns, triangle

Early Music Consort of London 196868

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Tenor (Nigel Rogers) 2 viols, lute

64 65 66

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David Munrow, “Medieval Florence [Radio Script],” 29 October 1970, DM/7/12, Papers of David Munrow, Royal Academy of Music Library, London. Francesco Landini, The Works of Francesco Landini, ed. Leo Schrade (Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1958). Translation copyright Decca 1968. Printed in Early Music Festival, Decca 289 452 967–2, 1968, CD. A reissue of: David Munrow and Early Music Consort of London, Ecco La Primavera, Argo (Decca) ZRG 642, 1969, LP. Musica Reservata, Michael Morrow, and John Beckett, Music from the Time of Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, Philips SAL 3781 / 802 904 LY, 1969, LP. Munrow and Early Music Consort of London, Ecco La Primavera.

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Taking these performances in chronological order, we find that Morrow’s version used one of Jantina Noorman’s haut styles accompanied by crumhorns and a triangle. The anatomy of this performance can be summarized using the evidence for Musica Reservata’s approach already discussed: Noorman has been asked to sing absolutely in tune, and that means without vibrato and with a sound that is not incongruent with Morrow’s chosen instruments, crumhorns. Crumhorns, although historically anachronistic, presumably deputize for the long-lost douçaine.69 The decision to include percussion suggests dance accompaniment, which in turn invokes a contemporary account of girls dancing a ballata.70 This, in itself, is a good reason for assuming that Morrow was at least familiar with Leonard Ellinwood’s edition of Landini, despite it being much criticized by Schrade, since Ellinwood describes a ballata as “a song-dance which has close connections with the Troubadour music and also resembles the French virelais. All of this music is very close to the social life of the period. It is, for example, the sort of music used in the daily interludes of Boccaccio’s Decameron.”71 Furthermore, the association with Boccaccio chimes with the title of Morrow’s album – Music from the Time of Boccaccio’s “Decameron”. Musica Reservata’s performance does not defamiliarize this music entirely: one aspect still immediately recognizable is the dance quality. This rhythmic character seems essential to Morrow’s conception and Noorman’s execution of this piece. Indeed, Johannes Wolf (1931) also described the balata as “a song to be danced,” emphasizing that its “relation to the estampida of the troubadours is evident.”72 Taking Schrade’s edition as a basis, the dotted crotchet beat is about 112. Fallows described this performance as “a grotesque dance,” but was also quick to explain the surprising hard-edge was “not ignorance, […] Michael Morrow was posing questions about the nature of music, about musical expression, and about the very prettiness of the performing style he had inherited.”73 6768

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71 72 73

Munrow uses this reasoning in his liner notes for the album: David Munrow and Early Music Consort of London, Music of the Crusades, Argo (Decca) ZRG 673, 1970, LP. It seems reasonable to conclude that Morrow is possibly making the same point. Also, for David Fallows’s account of Thomas Binkley’s attempt to reconstruct a douçaine, see David Fallows, “Notes on a Mystery: Cornamuse and Dulzaina,” Early Music 7/1 (1979): 135. Ellinwood recounts a story where some dancing and singing girls were performing Orsu, gentili spiriti “…so sweetly that even the birds in the Cyprus trees sang more sweetly.” Francesco Landini, The Works of Francesco Landini, ed. Leonard Webster Ellinwood (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1939), xv. Francesco Landini, The Works of Francesco Landini, xiii. Johannes Wolf, “Italian Trecento Music,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 58 (1931): 19. Fallows, “Performing Medieval Music in the Late-1960s,” 54.



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Considering the first entry of the balata as recorded by Morrow, Noorman’s voice is strong from the start, and she places her consonant slightly ahead of the first entry of the instruments, so that their initial attack occurs as she opens into a vowel-sound. The net result is that her full-voiced vowel aligns with the instrumental entry. Her tone is strong, even, and devoid of audible vibrato. There is no legato singing in the first phrase, since Noorman bumps the front of each note of her melisma with a surge in intensity. That Munrow heard this performance before he directed the recording of his own, just a few days later, is obvious; Munrow is playing the crumhorn on Morrow’s record. It is therefore possible to read into the sleeve notes of Munrow’s Ecco La Primavera a barbed comment in his choice of a madrigal-text by Jacopo da Bologna, thought to be Landini’s teacher, which he quotes: “I do not praise a singer who shouts loudly: / Loud shouting does not make good singing / But with smooth and sweet melody / Lovely singing is produced, and this requires skill.”74 Munrow says of Jacopo’s text: “this gives us an insight into the style of vocal performance which he preferred.” Making such aesthetic assumptions about the concept of “lovely singing” in the Trecento is, as we have just noted, exactly the sort of reasoning that Morrow avoids. Through Munrow’s performance we are alerted to this fundamental branching of opinion between these two directors, and, as a result of this branching, I would suggest – as, indeed, Fallows did – that Munrow’s album can be read as a response or even a riposte to Musica Reservata. It is, in effect, a statement of intent for the future differences between these ensembles: the point at which their paths first significantly diverge. With the loud, nasal sounds of Musica Reservata still fresh in Munrow’s mind, he eschewed the crumhorns and percussion for his own performance, and chose soft strings to accompany a “lovely” style of singing. He justified this through Trecento poetry. He describes this process in his 1970 script for the radio program Medieval Florence: The majority of ballate have three parts of which the top part is melodic and vocal, and the lower two are without text and are intended to be played on instruments. The result is a type of accompanied solo song with a wide range of expressive possibilities. We aren’t sure what sort of instruments are used because the composers never indicated instrumentation. But sometimes the poets provide a little evidence. In Prodenzani’s Saporetto we read: “With the lute played the tenor / With such 74

As translated on the sleeve notes to: Munrow and Early Music Consort of London, Ecco La Primavera.

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melody that everyone’s heart / was cheered through its sweetness. / With the cithern he also made some music / Then came the muted shawm with the tenor.”75 Munrow’s first sentence paraphrases the preface to Schrade’s edition of Landini when discussing the vocal top line, but his passage about Prodenzani’s poetry draws on the preface to Ellinwood’s 1939 edition, proof that Munrow consulted both.76 The Prodenzani quote is from sonnets 33 and 34 in a section entitled mundus placitus in saporetto and quoted in full in Italian by Ellinwood. This poetry led Munrow to conclude that “In practice, a combination of plucked and bowed strings seems to suit the more serious pieces very well […].”77 Such open acknowledgement of the use of subjective performance descriptions is characteristic of Munrow’s approach. The resulting EMC recording of Landini’s Questa Fanciulla can be seen as a deliberate attempt to make a popular and attractive performance with “lovely” singing that did not sound like “shouting.” This suggests that Munrow was uncomfortable with the “hard-edged alterity” of Morrow’s performance and sought to refamiliarize Landini’s song. Under Munrow’s direction, the tenor soloist Nigel Rogers uses a minimal but noticeable, and indeed constant, vibrato. His sound is closely aligned with conventional Western singing due to this vibrato but also due to legato phrasing, the slight portamenti and the richer vocal tone synonymous with Western classical style. That this performance is also slower allows legato phrasing to be heard more obviously, the dotted crotchet beat being approximately 78bpm. Looking back over the evidence collected, a logical argument can be constructed: the central problem is that we do not know how medieval and Renaissance voices sounded because none have survived and we cannot reconstruct a lost vocal style. Michael Morrow believed voices have always 75 76

77

Munrow, “Medieval Florence [Radio Script].” Ellinwood mentions Prodenzani’s sonnets on p. xxviii, and David Munrow presumably read this. On p. xxxviii Ellinwood also discusses the role of instruments, citing his own paper: Leonard Ellinwood, “Francesco Landini and his Music,” Musical Quarterly 22/2 (April 1936): 190–216. He also recommends: Theodore Gérold, La musique au moyen âge (Paris: H. Champion, 1900), chapter xx. On p. xxxix Ellinwood goes on to say “that instruments were used to a considerable degree none will deny. The parts given without texts have intervals difficult or impossible to sing, and have an excessive use of ligatures which again excludes the possibility of singing. In the frequent instances where the ballata parts have texts omitted in one or more manuscripts, but not in others, there is a constant simplification made by omitting repeated notes and by using more ligatures.” Munrow, “Medieval Florence [Radio Script].”



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been congruent with instruments of their time in timbre and in style. Because instruments do survive, and/or can be reconstructed and their physical properties reveal some necessary playing techniques, he was able to observe that some European folk singers sound a bit like the old instruments. Furthermore, Morrow observed that the same European folk singers displayed accurate and unwavering intonation skills. He concluded that if modern singers borrowed techniques from European folk singers in order to sound congruent with old instruments, then they might move closer to older styles and away from twentieth-century aesthetics. David Munrow worked as an instrumentalist with Musica Reservata in the late 1960s and shared their interest in music from across Europe as a model for the performance of medieval music. This influence can be traced back to Thurston Dart’s book The Interpretation of Music in both cases. Whereas Morrow tended to confine his inspiration to “the borders of Europe,” the Balkans in particular, Munrow went further, to South America and Turkey. Another group, Studio der frühen Musik, made a reputation for exploring influences from the Maghreb inspired by illustrations of Arabic instruments in Spanish medieval manuscripts. Fundamentally, these two men disagreed about singing, and this disagreement caused an irreconcilable branching of approach between the two ensembles. Morrow felt that singers would have always had to adapt their technique to align with the sonorities of the instruments performing with them, whereas Munrow felt that all instruments were imperfect attempts to match the human voice in prowess and flexibility, so he took a broader and more personal approach to singing and singing styles. This conflict appears to illustrate both medievalism and orientalism in performance practice. Morrow stated clearly that twentieth-century aesthetic taste had no place in early music and sought the alterity of Balkan music, hoping it retained ossified remains of medieval performance practice. Munrow, searching through medieval poetry, interpreted descriptions of singing using modern taste as a reference. In this specific example of Landini’s song both ensembles operate at extremes of their arguments, but in other performances captured on recording it should be noted that similarities may be observed more keenly.

Imagining Medieval Chester: Practicebased Medievalism, Scholarship, and Creativity Catherine A. M. Clarke In what ways can we conceive of medievalism as a practice-based discipline, bringing creative, performative, and collaborative methodologies to bear in formulating new understandings of the past? In Medieval Studies – and Humanities scholarship more widely – where might we site the boundary between conventional critical approaches and more imaginative, subjective, and affective forms of inquiry? And what is at stake if we enlarge our definitions of scholarship to encompass more diverse methods and media? Questions about the place of imagination and creativity in scholarship are currently emerging as a major debate in the Humanities, driven in part by the growing emphasis on engaged or participatory research and partnerships beyond academia, perhaps most visible in the context of research discourses and frameworks in the United Kingdom, but also increasingly in Europe, North America, and other international settings. Beyond this, a number of leading medievalists have themselves, in recent years, posed propositions and provocations that seek to challenge our assumptions about the limits of scholarship and authority, and the kinds of discourses and registers through which we can practice and communicate research. And a growing number of medievalists are seeking opportunities to work in creative idioms that extend beyond traditional academic forms and contexts. This essay engages with these broad-reaching questions and their implications by taking as its starting-point the artwork Hryre at St. John’s ruins, Chester (2012), which I created in collaboration with the artist Nayan Kulkarni, drawing on new research into the literature and culture of medi-

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eval Chester.1 This dynamic, light-based installation presents a constantly changing collage of fragments from manuscripts in English, Latin, and Welsh, reflecting the multi-lingual culture of medieval Chester, and seeks to provide a point of imaginative engagement with the past at the site of the medieval monastic ruins of St. John’s. As an experiment in practice-led medievalism and creative collaboration, the Hryre project opened up new directions for research and shaped new ways of thinking about the city’s medieval heritage. It also brought into focus questions about the relationships between scholarship and creative practice, which I interrogate here by exploring Hryre alongside other imaginative presentations of the medieval past in Chester since 1800. Questions about the place of imagination and creativity in scholarship are far from new, as this long-view analysis suggests, and the Chester sources, of course, speak to the concerns and cultural contexts of their own particular historical moments. Here, I will investigate three pieces produced in modern Chester that engage with the city’s past through imaginative idioms and creative modes: the visual drama of Hryre as a site-specific artwork; W. P. Greswell’s long poem of 1823, The Monastery of St Werburgh, which imagines Chester’s history as a ghostly procession or series of tableaux; and the sumptuous civic performances of the 1910 Chester Historical Pageant. Like Hryre, Greswell’s poem and the 1910 Pageant use Chester’s surviving medieval architecture (and particularly its ruins) as an impetus to imaginative engagement with the past. As with Hryre, Greswell and the writers of the 1910 Pageant also rely heavily on the interplay between a creative or artistic element and a more conventional scholarly, interpretative paratext. Across their diverse genres and media, these three sources call attention to concerns about history, authority, and imagination: the ways in which creative practice can be located and licensed within historical inquiry, and how we determine and police the limits of what we understand as scholarship. My analysis will lead into a discussion of recent work by medievalists including Carolyn Dinshaw and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who have challenged academics to explore the potentials of alternative critical modes and registers. How can these three Chester sources illuminate current questions about the place of creative practice and imagination in academic research? And why, now, are these questions of such critical value to Humanities scholars and medievalists? Hryre is a site-specific, permanent public artwork, located at the medieval ruins at the east end of the Collegiate Church of St. John the Baptist, 1

This artwork was funded jointly by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, as one element of a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship (“Discover Medieval Chester,” 2012–13), and by Cheshire West and Chester Council, as part of an urban regeneration program at the St. John’s site. The Old English title, Hryre, chosen by the artist, translates as “fall.”

1. Hryre, Nayan Kulkani (2012), St. John’s Ruins, Chester (photo: Nayan Kulkani)

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Chester, which comprise the extant stonework of the fourteenth-century Lady Chapel, chancel, and choir (Figure 1).2 The commissioned artist, Nayan Kulkani, came to the project with extensive experience in creating site-specific, light-based artworks: his catalogue features installations such as Cascade (2008), on the site of the former mill race by the Silk Mill Museum, Derby, which uses ground-based light projections suggesting the movement of water across mill races, and Mirrie Dancers (2007 onwards), a series of temporary installations in the Shetland Islands, which include the projection of light through Shetland lace onto buildings.3 The twin funding streams for the St. John’s art project, via a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Knowledge Transfer Fellowship and Cheshire West and Chester Council funding, presented a series of aims and objectives for the installation. For local government in Chester, the St. John’s installation was a flagship initial project in a new strategy for urban lighting, public art, regeneration, and heritage interpretation,4 while the AHRC co-funded the artwork as an innovative way of disseminating new research on medieval Chester and its literature. This underpinning research had also been funded by the AHRC as part of the “Mapping Medieval Chester” project, which explored questions of place and identity in Chester – a frontier city on the border of England and Wales – by exploring textual and visual mappings, and by analyzing varied representations of the urban landscape across medieval sources in English, Latin, and Welsh, with their contrasting ethnic, cultural, and political perspectives.5 While the St. John’s artwork was initially envisaged in terms of dissemination and public engagement with academic research, it soon became evident that the development process would include, and lead to, further scholarly inquiry and new research questions. The completed artwork itself is a light-based installation, in which fragments of multi-lingual medieval texts from or closely relating to Chester (in both manuscript facsimile and modern typography) are projected over the medieval stone ruins at St. John’s. The installation is based on LED projector systems, using specially fabricated glass slides (similar to theatrical gobos) that are focused on the medieval ruins using cinema lenses. The dynamic 2

3 4 5

For a discussion of the terms “public art” and “site-specific” artwork, see Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures (London: Routledge, 1997), especially Chapter 5. For further details, see , last accessed 10 January 2015. See Cheshire West and Chester Council, Public Realm Strategy document “Arts, Wayfinding and Lighting Strategy” (Chester, 2010), 42. “Mapping Medieval Chester: Place and Identity in an English Borderland City c. 1200–1500,” (2008–9), Principal Investigator Catherine Clarke (see ).



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projection cycle – in which patterns of brightness, projected images, and timings vary – is controlled by a computer program. The full projection cycle runs over a year, with Easter chosen by the artist as its “harmonic fulcrum,” when the full range of projections converge and display together.6 The installation presents a kind of drama, in which the shifting juxtapositions and intersections of medieval texts suggest thematic connections, tensions, and oppositions. Medieval Welsh poetry, often loaded with invective against this English colonialist city, collides with panegyric from Chester authors such as Henry Bradshaw, Ranulph Higden, and the twelfth-century monk of St. Werburgh’s, Lucian, praising and mythologizing their home. An interpretation booklet that accompanies the artwork (and is available from St. John’s Church and other locations in Chester), reproduces and translates the medieval sources. The artwork can also stand alone – and does, for many viewers passing the site – without the interpretative notes, as a striking collage of fragments, visually recognizable as the Gothic and cursive forms of medieval scripts and as words of different languages (Latin, Welsh, and English). Yet, there is obviously a significant difference between these two ways of encountering the artwork: either as a more purely aesthetic experience, or as framed by the scholarly paratext that glosses the medieval fragments and links them explicitly to their historical, cultural, and research contexts. The artwork’s location at St. John’s ruins proved to be a key factor when selecting medieval texts for inclusion in the artwork: a process that involved a new reading of the medieval material with a very specific set of critical interests, as well as practical requirements. The chosen excerpts share concerns with questions of ruin, loss, endurance, and renewal, and through our rereading of the medieval sources it became apparent how prominent these themes were in the texts’ own engagement with Chester’s history. For example, the projections include a passage from Henry Bradshaw’s early fifteenth-century Life of St Werburge, which compares Chester’s great fire (probably in the late twelfth century) to the fall of Rome, or Troy “all flamyng as fire,” alongside Lucian’s reflection in his De Laude Cestrie that St. John’s offers enduring “solatio” (“solace”) in contrast to the changeable “tempestas” (“storms”) of urban life.7 An excerpt from Lewys Glyn Gothi’s poem “Satire on the Men of Chester” wishes destruction on the city, imagining with relish the vengeance to be wreaked on its inhabit6

7

Hryre (ruin): An Artwork by Nayan Kulkarni, interpretation booklet (Chester, 2012), 4. Also available online at , last accessed 22 September 2015. Henry Bradshaw, Life of St Werburge, ed. Catherine A. M. Clarke, Book II, l. 1627; Lucian, De Laude Cestrie, ed. and trans. Mark Faulkner, fol. 5r (both at , last accessed January 2015).

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ants, but adding “ond yr eglwysau yn dir glasach” (idiomatically, “but let the churches stay in a greener land”).8 This poignant qualification, with its allusion to a pastoral, paradisal space of endurance outside the ravages of time, reflects the affection felt by many Welsh poets, and the medieval Welsh community more generally, for Chester’s churches – and especially for St. John’s as an important pilgrimage destination. But the artwork also involved situating the medieval textual fragments in new contexts and investing them with new meanings. Phrases speak to each other directly across texts and centuries, and excerpts derive new valency from their location at the ruins. Ranulph Higden’s celebration, in his Polychronicon poem, of Chester’s walls as “velut Hercules actus” (“like a deed of Hercules”) gains dramatic irony when projected over the collapsed stonework of St. John’s, though this recontextualization serves to illuminate ambivalences and hints of hubris already latent in the medieval text, such as Higden’s claim that pagan gods reign in the city and that its people follow “mores Babylonis” (“the customs of Babylon”).9 These were more active, interventionist readings than are conventional in critical practice: our analysis extended to creative remakings and interpolated meanings as we assembled passages into new contexts and juxtapositions. Even the act of breaking the medieval texts into our selected fragments raised some questions. Were we “ruining” medieval texts for our own creative purposes? Could the artwork claim any value or authority as a research project, or did our creative aims and techniques preclude that? A long tradition of visual spectacle and pageantry in Chester stretches back to the medieval period and the city’s Whitsun plays, and later, for example, to Chester’s Triumph in Honour of Her Prince, performed for (an absent) Henry Frederick Stuart in 1610.10 From the early nineteenth century onwards, pageants – both real and imagined – have featured prominently in the creative recovery and reconstruction of the city’s past. The imagined tableaux of W. P. Greswell’s 1823 poem and the series of short performances in the 1910 Chester Historical Pageant offer further case studies for exploring the interaction of imagination and scholarship in presentations of the past, and what happens when historical inquiry moves from the page into visual (and aural), creative, and performative modes. Importantly, 8 9 10

Lewys Glyn Cothi, Dychan i Ŵyr o Gaer, ed. and trans. Helen Fulton, l. 44 (, last accessed January 2015). Ranulph Higden, poem in praise of Chester from the Polychronicon, Book I, ed. and trans. Helen Fulton, ll. 5 and 17 (, last accessed January 2015). See the discussion in Robert W. Barrett, Jr., Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), Chapter 3.



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Greswell’s poem and the Historical Pageant date to periods before the ossification of modern definitions of the academy, subject disciplines (such as History), and professionalized research, embodying instead emergent notions of specialist scholarship and authority alongside the more capacious possibilities of antiquarianism, which accommodates a more diverse range of critical positions and a greater tolerance of imagination, affect, and subjective engagement.11 Though located amid the concerns and debates of varied historical moments, Hryre, The Monastery of St Werburgh, and the 1910 Historical Pageant all negotiate, in varying ways, the question of what constitutes scholarship: what activities and registers it can include, and where its boundaries should be located. W. P. Greswell’s long poem The Monastery of St Werburgh, printed in Manchester in 1823, offers a dramatized history of Chester prompted by a walk through the ruins of the medieval cloister. The first stanza introduces the medieval site in terms typical of the romantic fascination with ruins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:12 Lo! where triumphant o’er the wreck of years The time-worn Fabrick lifts its awful form: Scath’d with the blast its sculptur’d front appears, Yet frowns defiance on the impetuous storm. What Pow’rs – to more than giant bulk ally’d, Thy firm-compacted mass conspir’d to raise! Then bade thee stand secure to latest days, Wonder of after times, – of Cestria’s sires the pride.13 The narrator concedes that the past is “lost in oblivious maze – in vain the Muse inquires,” but his leisured, affective engagement with the ruins (“I – solitary – love to linger here”) leads to the imagined historical scenes 11

12

13

For background to the idea of antiquarianism, as distinct from modern formations of scholarship, see, for example, Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) or Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004). The “feeling for ruins” in this period is well documented and discussed in a range of scholarship. See, for example, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994); Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). W. P. Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh: A Poem with Illustrative Notes (Manchester, privately printed, 1823), 1.

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that form the poem’s main focus.14 St. Werburgh, “the Genius of the place,” appears in a dream vision as a ghostly guide to both the narrator and a young minstrel depicted within the narrative. She beckons them out of “Conjecture’s labyrinth” and presents a “fleeting pageant” of ghostly characters associated with St. Werburgh’s over the centuries. “Mark now; – and let the sight thy wondering thoughts engage,” she commands, as the imagined spectacle offers an immediate, compelling way into Chester’s medieval past.15 From “Saxon Maids” to Hugh Lupus and Chester’s other medieval Earls, to Benedictine monks and festive pilgrims, the vision gives an overview of the medieval history of the Abbey of St. Werburgh in a succession of imagined tableaux. The first stanza of The Monastery of St Werburgh also introduces another significant feature of the text: its substantial paratext, which takes up twentythree of the volume’s forty-eight pages.16 Note 1 glosses the line “Scath’d with the blast its sculptur’d front appears” in the first stanza, commenting ruefully on the partial restoration of the monastery ruins shortly before the poem’s publication: Very recently several parts of the exterior have been restored by a new casing – and others are now undergoing a like process. At present therefore, the sacred Pile no longer wears its late uniform aspect of decay; but the eye is somewhat offended by an incongruous mixture of recent and antique.17 Strikingly, Greswell sustains a dual, or parallel, discourse throughout the text, using these detailed historical notes included at the end of the poem to license and sanction the imaginative flourishes of the verse. The poem main14 15 16

17

Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 2, 3. Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 8. For a seminal discussion of the functions of paratextual material in literature, see Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For discussion of the particular phenomenon of paratexts in literature of the Romantic period, see, for example, Alex Watson, Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012) or Brian R. Bates, Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015). Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 25. This program of building work began with the restoration of the shrine of St. Werburgh, from fragments incorporated into the Episcopal throne, in 1748. See Sally-Beth MacLean, Chester Art: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art Including Items Relevant to Early Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 81–85; Alan Thacker, “Cathedral and Close,” in A History of the County of Chester, ed. C. P. Lewis and A. T. Thacker, vol. V, Part 2: The City of Chester: Culture, Buildings, Institutions (London: Boydell & Brewer for the Institute of Historical Research, 2005), 185–204 (191).



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tains its authority and value as an antiquarian text only through the presence of the scholarly paratext, which includes citation of scholarly sources and discussions of history, specific historical figures, architectural features of the Abbey, and the text of the Benedictine Rule. For example, two women appear alongside Werburgh: Each in her hand a flickering taper bore, That shed faint lustre through the dim abode: Sable, their robes descending swept the floor; A snowy veil adown each bosom flow’d.18 Interpreting the scene, St. Werburgh identifies the figures only briefly as “Milburg and Mildred lov’d – of Woden sprung […] my kindred vestals they.” The explanatory endnotes, however, give detailed historical background on these figures and the genealogy of the Mercian royal line, drawn partly from a study of the iconography of Werburgh’s shrine, published around the time of its reconstruction in 1748.19 Similarly, Werburgh reveals “Visions long past,” as the medieval splendor of the abbey church is displayed to the minstrel and the poem’s narrator, while the notes give a detailed account of the monastery buildings and their later uses.20 Yet the dual structure of The Monastery of St Werburgh, with its creative, imaginative verse and detailed, meticulously referenced scholarly paratext, generates a tension at the heart of the work. Greswell’s work betrays an unease with its own project of recovering history through imagination and creative engagement and, specifically, through the visual medium of the ghostly “pageant.” Indeed, the minstrel / narrator’s vision of later medieval Chester reflects an ambivalent attitude to pageantry and display, and a deep suspicion of performance and festivity. Stanza 38 presents the dreamer accosted by a “wild commotion” of new scenes, representing late-medieval popular religion and performative devotional practices: More had he said: – but now his startled eye Beholds new sights: – Processions, Pilgrimages, Mix’d shows of “Holy Mummeries”, – antic Joy, And rabble-Rout; – and Interludes and Stages.21 18 19

20 21

Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 9. Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 30. The study of Werburgh’s shrine is attributed by Greswell to a “Mr Cowper,” and printed by Elizabeth Adams for the benefit of the Chester Bluecoat School as A Summary of the Life of St. Werburgh (Chester: E. Adams, 1749). Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 14, 37. Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 20.

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The paratextual notes link these references explicitly to Chester’s Whitsun Play tradition, reflecting a typical conservative Protestant attitude to “superstitions […] practised under the reign of Popery.”22 Chester’s Whitsun Play tradition had been the subject of Protestant concern since at least the investigation by Christopher Goodman, Robert Rogerson, and John Lane (reporting to the Archbishop of York) in 1578, examining the plays’ “ignorance & superstition according to the Popist policy.”23 While Greswell may not have read the Whitsun Plays himself, as only a very few had been printed, in a very limited edition, by 1823, his views are probably influenced by those of commentators such as Thomas Warton, who, in 1778, described medieval religious drama as “disgraced with the grossest improprieties, corrupted with inventions and additions of the most ridiculous kind, sullied with impurities, and expressed in the language and gesticulations of the lowest farce.”24 Notably, Warton also laments the “many licentious pleasantries [that] were sometimes introduced in these religious representations.”25 For Greswell, too, his deepest concerns seem to cluster around the ludic, playful, or pleasurable potential of drama and pageantry, extending his anxieties beyond conventional anti-Catholic sentiment and towards a broader unease with creative and performative modes. For Greswell, the inherent dangers of the medieval “ludicrous exhibitions” lie in their ability “to attract the vulgar eye” and appeal to the “Fancy,” rather than the intellect, of the spectator.26 These pre-Reformation displays are presented as the antithesis of intellectual illumination and revelation, instead embodying illusion and the “gloom of intellectual night.” In the final stanza of the poem, they are dismissed by the virginal personification of Truth, who commands “Delusion! Cease thy reign: / Error! No longer cloud the mental ray!” Instead, Truth summons true religion to take its rightful place at the abbey, “And Learning haste to build her favourite shrine.”27 Yet, even as true “Learning” is invoked, displacing the illusions and dangers of visual spectacle, Greswell’s poem comes to an abrupt end. Greswell’s attempt to explore Chester’s medieval history through imagined spectacle and tableaux – as well as the scholarly paratext – presents unsus22 23

24

25 26 27

Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 46. See Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire including Chester, ed. Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 142–48 (142). Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1774–91), vol. 2, 373–74. See also discussion in David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and its Whitsun Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 199–200. Warton, The History of English Poetry, vol. 1, 242. Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 46 (notes); 20 (verse). Greswell, The Monastery of St Werburgh, 21.



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tainable tensions that ultimately undermine the work. Greswell pursues his project of imaginative engagement, until it leads him to the very “Interludes and Stages” that he denigrates in late-medieval tradition, with their illusory display and empty appeal to the eye (or “Fancy”) rather than the intellect. As Greswell invokes true “Learning,” the poem itself finishes suddenly: over the page, the scholarly notes begin in their new, very different, register. For Greswell, the substantial paratext appended to his poem seems a necessary exercise in scholarly decorum. Even within the freer, more capacious historiographical traditions of antiquarianism, the lengthy explanatory notes serve to discipline the imaginative verse and to police its creative engagement with the medieval past. Greswell’s work offers a vivid, immediate, and compelling vision of medieval Chester. Yet, finally, it collapses under the weight of his concerns with appropriate scholarly practice and the acceptable idioms of educative, authoritative historiographical material. The third text I will examine in my long-view comparison of imaginative presentations of the medieval past in modern Chester is a major landmark in the city’s tradition of historical pageantry. The Chester Historical Pageant of July 1910 was staged in Eaton Park (part of the Duke of Grosvenor’s estate) and was produced by George Hawtrey, a prolific and important figure in the early twentieth-century historicpageant tradition. A major event, the Chester pageant included 3500 performers and a grandstand capacity of 4000 for each performance.28 The Chester Pageant is one example of the many civic and community historical pageants staged in England in this period, often referred to as “Parkerian” after the influential pageant-master and impresario Louis Napoleon Parker, and growing out of interests in local history and crafts; popular antiquarianism; and reactions against modernity, industrialized urban life, and the concerns of colonialism and empire.29 These pageants promoted “insular and interclass harmony” and avoided more controversial recent history or sources of possible political sectarianism: indeed, Parker prescribed that no pageant scene should stage a historical event later than the mid-seventeenth century.30 Pageants attracted wide audiences but also, as with the Chester example, involved huge numbers of local people as performers, craftspeople, and other volunteers, staging 28 29

30

Paul Readman, “The Place of the Past in English Culture c. 1890–1914,” Past & Present 186 (2005): 147–99 (172). See Jed Esty, Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 67–72. See also Readman, “The Place of the Past,” 168–75 and Mick Wallis, “The Popular Front Pageant: Its Emergence and Decline,” New Theatre Quarterly 11 (1995): 17–32. Esty, Shrinking Island, 70.

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a kind of ideal, democratic civic cohesion and unity of purpose. With their celebration of local historical episodes and traditions, the Edwardian pageants also “embodied the perceived significance of individual localities in the broader tapestry of English history”31 – a distinctive expression of patriotism and English national identity in the period. While the chronological range of the Chester Historical Pageant reaches back into antiquity and stretches up to the mid-seventeenth century, its dominant focus is on the city’s medieval past, and it can be seen as an important step towards the modern revival of Chester’s medieval Whitsun Play tradition.32 Although the 1910 Chester Pageant is not physically sited by the city’s medieval architecture itself, the production makes repeated reference to it and imports the city’s medieval built heritage into the setting of Eaton Park through a range of dramatic devices. In particular, the city’s walls provide an imaginative link to its medieval past. They feature, for example, in the closing choral “Ode to the Ancient City of Chester,” which includes the stanza: We greet thee, noble Chester! We greet thy kingly men, As from the mists of story Once more they rise again. Thy time-scathed walls we honour, Thy crumbled towers revere, Thy sacred aisles, thy hoary piles, That bring the distant near!33 Ingeniously, the opening scene of the pageant (preceding “Episode One,” which goes back to Roman Chester), presents a personification of the city alongside actors representing its Gates, Walls, and Pinnacles.34 These call the drama into action, forging from the outset the imaginative connection between Chester’s medieval architecture and its history. Episodes throughout the pageant include a scene with Agricola in Roman Deva, King Edgar receiving the homage of the tributary kings on the River Dee, Hugh Lupus founding the Abbey of St. Werburgh, Richard II as a prisoner in Chester, 31 32

33 34

Readman, “The Place of the Past,” 177. For a full discussion of the history of the revival of Chester’s Whitsun or Cycle Plays, see Mills, Recycling the Cycle, as well as the articles by the same author, “Reviving the Chester Plays,” Medieval English Theatre 13 (1991): 39–51 and “Replaying the Medieval Past: Revivals of Chester’s Mystery Plays,” in Studies in Medievalism VII: Medievalism in England, ed. Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 181–93. Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Music, ed. Joseph C. Bridge (London: Novello and Co., 1910), Preface, xii, and set to music from 65. Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Words (Chester, 1910), Introduction.



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and, the latest historical episode chronologically, King Charles and the siege of Chester in 1645. Like Greswell’s The Monastery of St Werburgh, the 1910 Chester Historical Pageant materials reflect a concern with authenticity and authority, as well as a self-conscious awareness of the interplay between imagination or creativity and scholarly endeavor. In the Introduction, the personified “Chester” summons a theatrical representation of the River Dee to set the scene, invoking imagination and even “fancy,” seemingly without the pejorative weighting the words carry for Greswell: Call fancy to our aid, call apologue, Invention, allegory, what you will; Then – let imagination do the rest.35 Yet, Robert Withington’s influential study English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, published in the context of the flourishing early twentieth-century pageant tradition, emphasizes “the value of accuracy” and the extent of the detailed “antiquarian research” that informed productions and served to educate both audiences and performers.36 Withington contrasts the modern “educational pageant” with what he regards as the purely “aesthetic pageant” of earlier (including medieval) traditions, arguing that “the emphasis of the older pageantry is on the aim to entertain by means of lavish display, while the purpose of the modern is to instruct by means of entertainment.”37 Withington is clear that imaginative engagement is merely a route to intellectual commitment: a proper pageant “appeals to the intellect of the spectator.”38 Such comments betray a perceived need to justify the use of imagination and visual spectacle in the representation of history, legitimizing aesthetic display as an educational tool and a mechanism to facilitate intellectual engagement. While the Chester Historical Pageant opens with its celebration of “fancy” and “imagination,” it also, in typical Parkerian style, asserts its serious scholarship and rigorous pursuit of historical accuracy as a means of authorizing its creative element. Again, the Chester Historical Pageant achieves its finely calibrated balance between scholarship and creativity through the inclusion of substantial paratextual apparatus alongside the main script and lyrics of the production. Available as part of the Book of Words purchased by pageant-goers, as well 35 36 37 38

Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Words, Introduction. Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–20), vol. 2 (1920), 201. Withington, English Pageantry, xv. Withington, English Pageantry, xvii.

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as the popular Book of Music, these notes offer historical background to the episodes depicted in the pageant, as well as discussion of the sources and editorial practices involved in production of both the pageant text and music. The notes before Episode Three (“Founding of the Abbey of St Werburgh A.D. 1093”) give an account of the dealings of Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester and founder of the abbey, with Anselm of Bec, including quotations from Eadmer of Canterbury.39 George Hawtrey’s Foreword briefly discusses his use of Milton (lines from Comus) in the opening scene, acknowledging his own editorial amendments.40 The Pageant’s Book of Music was edited by Joseph C. Bridge, “Master of the Music” and also organist and choirmaster of Chester Cathedral from 1877 to 1925.41 Bridge, who had also been responsible for the revival of the city’s medieval “Minstrels’ Court” tradition in the late nineteenth century, brought a “dual concern with performance and history” to his work for the pageant,42 and the Preface to the pageant music reflects a serious interest in history, musicology, and, in particular, the concerns of the emerging Early Music revival. Bridge discusses his choices of English and Welsh folk tunes, as well as the historical background of the Chester “waits,” depicted in Episode Seven, and the set of “Chester Recorders” held in the Grosvenor Museum. The recorders themselves were displayed in the pageant, but not played: Bridge’s description of them as “flutes and not reed instruments […], made in sets like viols, of different sizes and therefore of different pitch,”43 reflects the fact the recorder was only just beginning to be rediscovered by figures such as Arnold Dolmetsch at this time.44 A review from August 1910 in The Musical Times picks up on the “choral examples of old English ballad music” and the “quaint and lively old dance measures,” as well as the appearance of the Chester Recorders in the pageant procession.45 Bridge’s settings of the folk melodies are richly textured and often set (for example, in the case of “Come Lasses and Lads”46) in conventional fourpart choral form, reflecting the influence of late-nineteenth-century church music and of composers such as Arthur Sullivan (also represented in the Pageant’s selection of music). Bridge’s setting of the twelfth-century hymn 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Words, Episode Three. Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Words, Foreword. See Mills, Recycling the Cycle, 207. Mills, Recycling the Cycle, 207. Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Music, Preface, vii–viii. The cover image of the Book of Music also depicts the recorders being played, despite the fact that this did not occur in the Pageant itself. For an overview of the Early Music revival in England and beyond, see Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996). “Chester Historical Pageant,” The Musical Times 51 (1910): 530–31 (530). Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Music, 45.



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“Urbs Syon aurea” (“Golden Jerusalem”) as the “Chorus of Monks” that accompanies Episode Four (Archbishop Baldwin preaching the Crusades in Chester in 1189) again adopts the sumptuous idiom of a late-nineteenthcentury choral anthem, rather than any attempt to reconstruct the tonal or textural characteristics of medieval music.47 But there is, nevertheless, a striking antiquarian, scholarly impulse to Bridge’s collection of music (and accompanying texts) and the discussions he offers for the reader. The review of the Chester Historical Pageant in The Musical Times praises the ways in which it “visualised the scenes of long-dead generations with a vividness of historical interest and a semblance of living reality remarkable in conception and splendid in spectacle.”48 The Pageant materials in general seem quite comfortable with their blend of imagination, spectacle, and scholarship, probably drawing confidence and authority from their adherence to the conventions of the established – albeit young – Parkerian pageant tradition. Yet, there are moments when we can detect, again, a need to justify the use of art, creativity, and visual display, and the presence of a higher intellectual or even moral purpose to the Pageant’s aesthetic devices. The “Founder’s Hymn,” with music by Bridge and words by A. Vine, organist of Tewkesbury Abbey, accompanies Hugh Lupus’s foundation of the Abbey of St. Werburgh in Episode Three. The Hymn commemorates centuries of religious tradition at the abbey, looking back over “Week by week the Lord’s Own Service,” “Communion Hymn,” and “Evensong” (a distinctly Anglican liturgy).49 As the Hymn calls into ghostly being those who have worshipped at the abbey in the past, it pauses to comment that “Festive joy can never make us / To forget those lives so dear.” Here, again, there is perhaps a slight Protestant discomfort with the use of visual spectacle – a suspicion of festivity – as a legitimate means to intellectual and moral ends. However, the verse ingeniously reimagines the Pageant as itself a kind of liturgy in which the past is brought into contiguity with the present. The “festive joy” of the pageant nevertheless reminds spectators that: […] they knelt beside us here; And a strange and sweet Communion Whispers that our dead are near.50 Recasting the Pageant performance as a kind of sacramental convergence between past and present is, perhaps, an apt reflection of the liturgical 47 48 49 50

Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Music, 24, and see also discussion in the Preface, vi–vii. “Chester Historical Pageant,” 530. Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Music, 23. Chester Historical Pageant: Book of Music, 23.

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interests and ecclesiastical backgrounds of the Hymn’s authors. Yet it suggests again the need to find legitimate ways to articulate the value and authority of the Pageant’s creative displays in intellectual (and here also spiritual) terms. In this discussion I have brought three quite different artworks into comparative analysis: The Monastery of St Werbugh, with its imagined tableaux of Chester’s medieval past; the ambitious civic performance of 1910; and the visual drama of the Hryre artwork in 2012, which prompted my initial questions about the place of creativity and imagination in scholarly practice. Each of these sources is shaped by its own cultural context and preoccupations: Greswell’s poem reflects the Romantic fascination with ruins, the 1910 Pageant embodies Parkerian civic and nationalist politics, and both of these texts betray Protestant anxieties about visual display as an intellectually valid mode of engagement with history. The Hryre artwork at St. John’s, likewise, represents early twenty-first-century concerns with the public dissemination and value of academic research, the potential for civic art to contribute to urban regeneration programs, and strategies for engaging wider audiences with their heritage. All three of these sources use the figure of the ruin – the material traces of Chester’s medieval past – as the route into their imaginative encounters with history. Sarah Beckwith has written on the use of medieval ruins as a “complex landscape of memory” and site of new imaginative engagements with and transformations of the past. She characterizes ruins as “always synchronous, not diachronic”: spaces in which past and present come into proximity in creative, “perpetually anachronistic” ways.51 The three Chester pieces also negotiate a further kind of productive contagion, as they explore the cross-fertilizations, imbrications, and slippages between imagination and scholarship within their distinctive contexts and idioms. The antiquarian intellectual environments of Greswell’s poem and the 1910 Pageant are, as I have acknowledged, significantly different from the modern formations of professional academic researcher, discipline, and academy within which the Hryre artwork was produced.52 Antiquarianism offers Greswell, Hawtrey, and Bridge a broader vocabulary and repertoire of 51

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Sarah Beckwith, “Preserving, Conserving, Deserving the Past: A Meditation on Ruin as Relic in Postwar Britain,” in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, ed. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 191–210 (205). The audiences to which the three Chester sources address themselves are also distinctive, opening up further questions not just about the producers of scholarship but also its consumers and the varying registers and media appropriate for different constituencies, whether professional academic, learned amateur, or the wider public.



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registers within which to articulate their engagements with Chester’s medieval history. Yet, even in 1823 and 1910, The Monastery of St Werburgh and the Chester Historical Pageant express concerns about imagination, authority, and the limits of scholarship, as well as the methods or discourses through which creative practices may be legitimated or licensed. The long view offered by the three Chester sources brings valuable background and context to current discussions among medievalists (and others within the academy) about paradigms of scholarship and how we might begin to reconsider the relationships between critical practice, creativity, and imagination. In her study How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, Carolyn Dinshaw explores “the sources of scholarly research and knowledge, and the potentials for opening them up beyond the paradigm of professionalism that has rigorously delimited scholarship from any other more explicitly affective enterprise.”53 While Dinshaw focuses on the figure of the non-professional or amateur reader in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their affinities with readers and writers in Middle English (as well as with her own experiences as a scholar), her work opens up broader questions about the limits of scholarship and our definition of what constitutes research. Dinshaw’s own writing tests the boundaries of academic idioms, ranging widely for its sources and interpretative frameworks,54 and folding a personal, affective voice into the heart of scholarly analysis. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Cary Howie have invited a similar reappraisal of the ways in which rigid conventions of scholarship have been reproduced and regulated across generations of researchers, arguing that “critics have too often been content to adopt the voice, citational practices, textual apparatuses, forms, forums and ambits of those who trained them, leading to a great deal of continuity in criticism published over the years.”55 Cohen and Howie’s discussion is located in their Introduction to the 2011 Postmedieval special issue on “New Critical Modes,” which explores alternative critical approaches, registers, and sites of inquiry within Medieval Studies. The collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, The Post-Historical Middle Ages, also offers relevant critical context here, as its contributors carefully dismantle the illusion (and indeed the desirability) of a hermetic, disinterested historicism, cleansed of the scholar’s 53 54 55

Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xii. For example, her use of the title quotation from the song How Soon is Now? by British band The Smiths, which recurs as a touchstone throughout the book. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Cary Howie, “Novelty,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2 (2011): 239–41 (240).

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own affective responses and the concerns and values of his or her historical moment.56 As Federico and Scala review the gradual erosion of a succession of academic “divides” – from “literary / nonliterary” to “textual / critical” as well as, of course, historicism and its alternatives – we might usefully add here the binarism between research and creative practice that has long persisted in formulations of scholarship and its limits. For those working in universities in the United Kingdom – and, increasingly, in other international contexts – we could also add one final “divide,” which has asserted itself only recently and which is particularly pertinent in the case of the Hryre artwork. This is the divide between research and “impact,” as articulated in the language of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) census of scholarship and its public value, which seeks to measure the “social, economic or cultural impact or benefit” of research,57 and which actively maintains a distinction between primary academic research and its more creative or imaginative representation or dissemination.58 The Chester Hryre artwork was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as a “Knowledge Transfer” project, not as primary research, and was similarly evaluated by the REF 2014 within an “Impact Case Study,” rather than as a scholarly project itself. As part of an “Impact Case Study,” Hryre was graded 4*: the highest profile level, indicating “outstanding impacts in terms of their reach and significance.”59 Yet, the REF compartmentalization of “research” and “impact” (or, rather, initiatives designed to lead to and achieve those impacts) as discrete scholarly activities minimizes the value of the Hryre project as a research process in its own right, with its capacity to open new insights such as those relating to the interactions between texts and ruins in Chester from the medieval period to the present – or, indeed, the interplay of scholarship and creativity in modern representations of the city’s past. 56

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The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See in particular the Introduction, 1–12, and the contribution by Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Amorous Dispossessions: Knowledge, Desire, and the Poet’s Dead Body,” 13–36. For further relevant discussion, see Elizabeth Scala, “The Ends of Historicism: Medieval English Literary Study in the New Century,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44/1 (2002): iv. Decisions on Assessing Research Impact, REF 2014 document 01.2011, available at , last accessed January 2015. For an overview and critical discussion of formulations of “impact” in relation to Humanities research in the UK context, see Eleonora Belfiore, “The ‘Rhetoric of Gloom’ v. the Discourse of Impact in the Humanities: Stuck in a Deadlock?” in Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets, ed. Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Upchurch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–43. REF 2014 Assessment criteria and level definitions, , last accessed January 2015.



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These critical discussions and contexts touch, although sometimes in oblique ways, on my central focus here: the concerns of my chosen Chester sources with questions of scholarship, imagination, and authority. They dramatize the dilemma of how to frame a creative element either within or alongside scholarly research: should creativity and imaginative engagement be understood as integral to the scholarly project, or should it be sustained in a parallel discourse, carefully segregated from the conventional registers of research? Just as The Monastery of St Werburgh and the Chester Historical Pageant maintain an uneasy, problematic balance between creative work and authorizing, scholarly paratext, so my own involvement in the collaborative Hryre artwork resulted in both an aesthetic product and an interpretation document (the booklet) that glosses the visual display. Indeed, it is perhaps only through publications such as this present essay – a kind of paratextual supplement to the artwork – that Hryre can make a valid claim to be a scholarly project, rather than purely an exercise in creative dissemination or public engagement. This reinforces the argument advanced by Cohen and Howie, that our definitions and expectations of what constitutes scholarship remain narrow and self-replicating, leaving little space for alternative modes and idioms. My own experience on the Hryre project – creating the most recent in a series of imaginative presentations of Chester’s medieval past – has presented an opportunity to think seriously and critically about this kind of practiceled medievalism, at the intersection of scholarship and creative process. This is a space within which medievalists are increasingly working, at the forefront of an emerging movement within the Humanities to enlarge our definition of scholarship and to experiment with more capacious, diverse critical methodologies and registers.60 Yet our formal structures and discourses for defining research still largely fail to encompass these varied idioms, with implications for their viability as projects that can be pursued within the traditional academy, and for realizing their potential value as scholarly work. These three Chester sources help to sharpen our attention to what is at stake in current debates about scholarship and its limits, bringing into explicit focus our often unspoken concerns about the edges of research, and our self-reflexive work as scholars in policing and regulating its boundaries. Across three centuries of encounters with the medieval past, however, the 60

See, for example, the other examples of “creative medievalism” discussed in this volume; the “Colm Cille’s Spiral” project led by the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London (, last accessed 22 September 2015); or the increasing involvement of “artists in residence” in interpreting medieval sources and their meanings, as in the Lyminge Archaeological Project (, last accessed 22 September 2015).

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Chester pieces also remind us of the relatively short chronological ambit of modern notions of the academy and the professionalized researcher, pointing towards the availability of alternative critical subject positions and registers of scholarship. As Hryre and its antecedents suggest, the intersections between scholarship, creativity, and imagination deserve further interrogation and theorization. Now is a timely moment for Humanities researchers to tackle these questions, and medievalists look set to lead the conversation.

The Anachronic Middle Ages: Public Art, Cultural Memory, and the Medievalist Imagination1 Joshua Davies Memory projects itself toward the future, and it constitutes the presence of the present.2 In 1875 Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown with an idea for a painting. His suggestion was blunt and enthusiastic: “I really think you ought to paint Chaucer beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street.”3 Rossetti explained to Brown that the idea originated from Charles Lamb, who suggested the subject to Benjamin Haydon in 1827. Lamb himself got the idea from Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of the works of Chaucer, and his letter to Haydon quotes Speght’s Life of the poet.4 The records on which Speght based his report, and which he did not claim to have personally seen, are now lost.5 Regrettably, although Chaucer was a favorite subject of many nineteenth-century artists, neither Brown nor Haydon made the painting 1 2

3 4 5

I would like to thank Karl Fugelso, an anonymous reader for Studies in Medievalism, and Sarah Salih for comments on this essay. Jacques Derrida, “The Art of Memories,” in Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 45–88 (57). Ford Madox Ford, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (London: Longman and Co., 1896), 305. Charles Lamb, “Letter 390,” in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume VII: Letters 1821–1834, ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Metheun, 1905), 724–25 (724). See Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 12, and Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 29.

Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016

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and neither Lamb nor Rossetti went into any detail as to exactly why they were attracted to the idea. As Velma Richmond suggests, beyond the “comic potential” of the scene, part of its attraction was surely the contemporary value of presenting Chaucer as an anti-clerical proto-Protestant.6 The idea of Chaucer beating a friar in Fleet Street appealed to Rossetti and Lamb because it transformed the poet into an anachronism. It proved that Chaucer really was a precursor to the moderns, even if he lived in the Middle Ages, as it refashioned the past in the image of the present. The story of Chaucer and the friar on Fleet Street is, as Guy Geltner writes, “probably apocryphal” and likely speaks more eloquently about how sixteenth-century medieval studies intersected with religious and cultural debates than Chaucer’s life.7 But it and the paintings never painted by Brown and Haydon highlight the vicissitudes of modern understandings of medieval culture and how blurred the lines between creative and scholarly practice can become. The historical record is partial, provisional, and situated, and the images of the past it creates are necessarily unstable, shifting according to disciplinary trends, historical discoveries, and creative interventions. As Ruth Evans puts it, “The discipline of medieval studies is not external to the archive of the past that it studies: the ‘Middle Ages’. The past exists in the form it does because it has been archived in a certain way.”8 Medieval studies and medievalism together create the past that is known as the Middle Ages. And street-fighting Chaucer remains part of the history of medieval studies and the archive of the Middle Ages, even if he has been removed from the historical record.9 This Chaucer is both in and out of time, casting his shadow occasionally over scholarly and popular representations of the poet as memory rather than historical fact. This essay is prompted by two works of public art commissioned precisely one hundred years apart, which both enjoy a creative relationship with the historical record and are as interested in modernity as in the Middle Ages. 6

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Velma Bourgeois Richmond, “Ford Madox Brown’s Protestant Medievalism: Chaucer and Wycliffe,” Christianity and Literature 54 (2005): 363–92 (374). As Richmond notes, Brown did paint Chaucer in four paintings, two of which also featured Wyclif (366). G. Geltner, “The Friar,” in Historians on Chaucer: The “General Prologue” to the “Canterbury Tales”, ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with the assistance of Alastair Minnis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 156–69 (161). David Wallace writes that the story “may be apocryphal, but it is not out of keeping with the spirit of his writings,” in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 219. Ruth Evans, “Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and the House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 43–69 (67–68). See, for instance, David R. Carlson, “The Robberies of Chaucer,” English Studies in Canada 35 (2009): 29–54.



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In 1878 the Decorations and Furnishings Sub-Committee of Manchester Town Hall asked Ford Madox Brown to make a series of historical murals for the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall, and Brown worked on them from 1879 until his death in 1893. Four of the twelve completed murals depict scenes from the Middle Ages.10 In 1978 London Transport commissioned David Gentleman to make visual decorations for the Northern Line platforms at Charing Cross London Underground Station. Gentleman chose the construction of the medieval cross at Charing in the late thirteenth century as his subject.11 As Patricia Phillips suggests, public art is public not primarily because of its site, but “because of the kinds of questions it chooses to ask or address.”12 The questions that unite Brown and Gentleman’s projects are to do with time and history. They are concerned with how ideas and events are situated in time and how images of the past might alter the present and determine the future. Although each artist looks to the Middle Ages for signs of historical continuity and reliable, stable origins, they produce medievalist visions that speak to contemporary concerns and employ ideas and tropes that, like the brawling Chaucer, reveal the situatedness of their work. Their work reveals discontinuities as well as continuities in representations of the medieval past. In particular, Brown and Gentleman’s visions are divided by their differing relations to the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. Where Brown sees industrial strength, Gentleman sees weakness; where Gentleman imagines a cosmopolitan England, Brown emphasizes national character. Their Middle Ages are fundamentally relational, and the mutually constitutive interaction between past and present is at the center of each project. This means that the artists’ work is at once precisely located in contemporary discourse and, through their engagement with medieval culture, outside of it. Despite a shared interest in historical process and a shared understanding of time as necessarily linear, their works resist, in Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s words, “anchoring in time.” In their study of the temporal regimes of Renaissance art, Nagel and Wood explain the manner in which many societies organize themselves around apparently “timeless” objects, buildings, and works of art. These “anachronic” works “hesitate” to 10

11 12

The murals are archived at , last accessed 12 September 2015. Thanks to Ed Haygarth for help in Manchester. For some images of the mural, see , last accessed 12 September 2015. Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” in Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context and Controversy, ed. Harriet Senie and Sally Webster (London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 295–304 (298).

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locate themselves in history and therefore remove ideas of national identity, cultural hegemony, and political process from the temporal world.13 While a traditional definition of anachronism might follow Henry Ritter’s sense that it expresses an “awareness that the past differs in fundamental respects to the present,” Nagel and Wood encourage critics to think beyond questions of historical accuracy to examine the ideas of time medievalist works participate in and generate.14 As Jeffrey Tambling writes, “Anachrony starts with a double perception of time.”15 The same could be said of medievalism: the possibility of medievalism relies on the incorrect chronological position of medieval culture. In medievalist works medieval material is always in time, always historically situated, but always out of order.16 The complex temporalities of medievalism are explicated to some degree by Jacques Derrida’s thinking on memory. As Brown and Gentleman’s projects demonstrate, medievalism forms an important part of the cultural memory of the Middle Ages, at once social and personal, objective and subjective.17 For Derrida memory is best understood not as an engagement with the past but as an attempt to fashion the present and future. He writes that, “Memory stays with traces, in order to ‘preserve’ them, but traces of a past that has never been present, traces which themselves occupy the form of presence and always remain, as it were, to come – come from the future, from the to come.”18 For Derrida, then, memory is fundamentally anachronic and, like medievalism, creative rather than representative. Like Chaucer’s fight on Fleet Street, it is of both the past and the present, and in some ways neither. Like the projects of Brown and Gentleman, it creates a past that has never been present. If the murals share a sense of time, they also generate a common sense of place. The Great Hall at Manchester Town Hall and the Northern Line 13

14 15 16

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Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 7. Although Nagel and Wood largely restrict their focus to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is clear, as Jürgen Pieters suggests, that their work resonates across historical periods. See Jürgen Pieters, “The Travels of Fiction: Literature, Distance, and the Representation of the Past,” in Rethinking Historical Distance, ed. Mark Salber Phillips, Barbara Caine, and Julia Adeney Thomas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 45–64 (45–46). Henry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History (London: Greenwood Press, 1986), 9–13 (9). Jeffrey Tambling, On Anachronism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 1. On the critical and creative potential of anachronism, see Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). On memory and medievalism, see Vincent Ferré, “Memory,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 133–40 and the essays collected in Studies in Medievalism XV: Memory and Medievalism, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006). Derrida, “Art of Memory,” 58.



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Platforms at Charing Cross London Underground Station are, however, contrasting locations. One is undoubtedly a destination, the site of civic ritual and ceremony, the other a means of getting somewhere else. For the geographer Doreen Massey, place is best understood as “an ever-shifting constellation of trajectories.”19 These constellations are precisely historically situated, and so place can be defined as an “event,” an outcome of an encounter in space and time. The meanings of places are not stable but continually unfolding. Massey writes: “Here” is where spatial narratives meet up or form configurations, conjunctions of trajectories which have their own temporalities (so “now” is as problematical as “here”). But where the succession of meetings, the accumulations of weavings and encounters build up a history. It’s the returns […] and the very differentiation of temporalities that lend continuity. But the returns are always to a place that has moved on, the layers of our meeting intersecting and affecting each other; weaving a process of space-time.20 The Great Hall and the Northern Line Platforms are rich with competing and often apparently contradictory trajectories. They are defined by the trajectories of modern governance, capital, heritage, and tourism as well as the trajectories of medieval studies and medievalism that the murals produce. The sites are rich in temporalities too, from the rhythms of civic governance and ritual in Manchester to the rushed commuters and languid tourists of Charing Cross, from Brown’s brushstrokes to Gentleman’s digitally enlarged woodblocks. The meanings of the murals depend on the precise comingtogether, and not-coming-togethers, of these trajectories and temporalities. The Middle Ages that the murals produce are reliant on these encounters. But to encounter these murals today is to return to an image of the medieval past that is itself dated. The Middle Ages has moved on. What remains valuable is the ways in which the murals demonstrate the interdependence of creative and critical practice, and how artists have turned towards the Middle Ages to make sense of their own time and generate new understandings of time and history in the process. The trajectories and temporalities these works produce weave together to reveal how medieval culture is threaded through modernity as both familiar and other and, more importantly, how representations of the Middle Ages are conditioned by the indeterminacy, complexity, and fluidity so often read as the essential elements of modernity. 19 20

Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 151. Massey, For Space, 139.

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An Industrial Middle Ages Manchester was granted city status in 1853, and work started on a town hall in 1868. Alfred Waterhouse’s design is one of the great works of municipal Gothic, and it opened in 1877 as a signifier of the city’s standing and aspirations.21 The idea to commission murals for the building was inspired by the competition to produce art for the new Palace of Westminster in the 1840s, but this was not an insular project.22 As Charles Dellheim writes, the Gothic architecture of the Town Hall looked towards the medieval trading cities of Flanders and Germany rather than the new works in London: “The Town Hall demonstrated that Manchester’s middle class was not composed of rootless nouveaux riches lacking culture and tradition. Instead they were heirs of the long and honourable tradition of the merchant princes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”23 The Town Hall and its art are creative and inventive works of cultural memory, medievalist works of civic self-fashioning that look to the future as much as the past. The early stages of Brown’s commission were fraught with controversy. While the project was intended to demonstrate Manchester’s rich and deep history, there was little consensus of what might actually constitute that history. Indeed, as Ford Madox Ford explained in his biography of Brown, it was widely thought that Manchester had “no history of any appreciable antiquity” at all.24 Brown was a committed historicist and believed it necessary “to consult the proper authorities” on questions of dress, architecture, furniture, and so on. Further, he claimed that “it is impossible to conceive a design with any truth, without being acquainted with the character, habits, and appearance, of the people represented.”25 Despite this, as his Manchester 21

22

23

24 25

On Victorian Manchester, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Odhams Press, 1964), 83–135; Gary S. Messinger, Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-Known City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); and Charles Dellheim, The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 163–75. On the architecture of the Town Hall see Clare Hartwell, Manchester, Pevsner Architectural Guides (London: Penguin, 2001), 71–84. See Janet McLean, “Prince Albert and the Fine Arts Commission” and William Vaughan, ‘“God Help the Minister who Meddles in Art’: History Painting in the New Palace of Westminster,” in The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture, ed. Christine Riding and Jacqueline Riding (London: Merrell, 2000), 213–23 and 225–38. Charles Dellheim, “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence S. Boos (London: Garland, 1992), 39–55 (52). See also David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 98. Ford, Ford Madox Brown, 331. Ford Madox Brown, “On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture,” The Germ 1 (1850): 70–73 (70). See also Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Ford Madox Brown and History Painting,” Visual Culture in Britain 15 (2014): 239–57.



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Murals demonstrate, Brown felt no need to cling to the historical record. This creative attitude brought Brown and his commissioners into conflict with the local historian William Axon who submitted various complaints to the council.26 The final program for the murals was arrived at only through collective negotiation and compromise.27 The murals begin in Mancunium, the Roman city, and end with an image of the scientist John Dalton (1766–1844). Given the range and complexity of the images, my discussion will focus on the first five murals that tell a story of Manchester’s premodernity. The first mural is speculatively dated to 80 CE, and in the center of the image a Roman general inspects plans for a fort while glancing over his shoulder, surveying the building works and the efforts of the legionnaires and tattooed British laborers. There is a clear social hierarchy here that Brown confirms in his composition: the Romans stand at the center of the image, above the other actors. The general is accompanied by his wife and child who are served by black slaves, but their assumed authority is subverted by certain details: the architectural plan the general inspects is upside down, and, in the lower right-hand corner, the general’s female slave smiles sardonically, apparently amused at their pretensions. So, this mural introduces three themes that define much of Brown’s project: distrust of authority; fascination with social conflict between classes; and the possibility of indigenous cultural identity. From the Romans, Brown turns his gaze to the Anglo-Saxons. The second mural is titled “The Baptism of Edwin, AD 627” and is intended to speak of the introduction of Christianity to Manchester but depicts a scene known to have taken place in York. The logic behind Brown’s choice was based on his belief that Manchester had formed part of Deira, which Edwin ruled in addition to Northumbria.28 There is little firm evidence to associate Edwin with Manchester, however. Manchester makes few appearances in the early medieval textual record – Bede, for instance, does not mention it – but Brown was keen to include a scene depicting the introduction of Christianity, regardless of the precise historical details.29 Bede does provide a full 26

27 28

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See Julian Treuherz, “Ford Madox Brown in Manchester,” in Ford Madox Brown: PreRaphaelite Pioneer, by Julian Treheurz, with contributions from Angela Thirlwell and Kenneth Bendiner (Manchester: Manchester Art Gallery, 2011), 23–59 (50). See Julie Codell, “Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macaulay, Bakhtin: The Pratfalls and Penultimates of History,” Art History 21 (1998): 324–66 (328–38). Ford Madox Brown, Mural Paintings in the Large Hall, Town Hall, Manchester (Manchester: Manchester Corporation, 1969), 3–4. See also Julian Treuherz, “The Manchester Period,” in Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer, 283–326 (286–87). On early medieval Manchester, see Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 300–1. See Codell, “Ford Madox Brown,” 335.

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account of Edwin’s conversion, but Brown’s notes on the mural make clear that he also drew on a more recent source: Wordsworth’s poem on the priest who guided Edwin’s conversion and conducted the ceremony, Paulinus. Brown’s depiction of Paulinus follows Wordsworth’s description of him as “of shoulders curved, and stature tall, / Black hair, and vivid eye, and meagre cheek, / His prominent feature like an eagle’s beak; / A man whose aspect doth at once appal / And strike with reverence.”30 This is a significant development of Bede’s description, although the influence is clear. Bede, reporting the opinions of Deda, an abbot of Partney, describes Paulinus as follows: “he was tall, with a light stoop, black hair, a thin face, a slender aquiline nose, and at the same time he was both venerable and awe-inspiring in appearance” (quod esset uir longae staturae, paululum incuruus, nigro capillo, facie macilenta, naso aduncto pertenui, uenerabilis simul et terribilis aspectu).31 As with the story of Chaucer and the friar, Brown’s Paulinus is a figure caught between the contemporary and the Middle Ages, and between creative and scholarly practice. Brown returned to Manchester itself in the third mural, but nevertheless occupied shaky historical ground. “The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, AD 910” draws its inspiration from a brief note in the Winchester Manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which records that in 919 Edward the Elder sent a troop to the town. There is nothing in the Chronicle account to support Brown’s vibrant and dynamic scene of a Danish defeat and retreat at the hands of Anglo-Saxon soldiers. The Chronicle merely records that Edward ordered an army to “go to Manchester in Northumbria, and to improve it and to man it” (gefaran Mameceaster on Noþhymbrum 7 hie gebetan 7 gemannian).32 Brown’s inventive reading of the Chronicle relies on the assumption that the fort at Manchester required rebuilding because of damage caused by the Danes, but, again, there is little in the historical record to support this. The fourth mural displays a similarly creative attitude towards the historical record. Under the title “The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, AD 1363” the image imagines a visit to Manchester by Queen Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, apparently in an attempt to provide a royal myth of origin for the city’s 30 31 32

William Wordsworth, “Paulinus,” in Poems: Volume II, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 453. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), ii.16, 192–93. Entry for 919, in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 3: MS A, ed. Janet M. Bately, in The AngloSaxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, gen. ed. David Dumville and Simon Keynes (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), 68. See also Michael Morris, Medieval Manchester: A Regional Study (Manchester: Greater Manchester Archaeological Unit, 1983), 15.



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cotton industry. Axon complained vehemently about this, rightly claiming that weaving in Manchester predated the imagined visit. But, again, Brown and his commissioners were more interested in producing images that would support contemporary ideals than fidelity to the historical record. The fifth mural again leaves Manchester but is the first to represent a bona fide historical event. The image is of the trial of John Wyclif at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in February 1377. This is a verifiable and thoroughly documented occasion, and Brown’s depiction of it succeeds in capturing its drama and latent violence.33 The mural is structured around the figure of John of Gaunt energetically defending Wyclif in front of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William Courtney, Bishop of London. Gaunt is gesturing towards the preacher with his sword while arguing directly with the prelates. As he does this, the Duchess of Lancaster has taken hold of his robes and is dragging him away from confrontation. There is one further figure of importance: just above Gaunt’s left hand a bearded man in a green hood sits at a table taking notes. This is Geoffrey Chaucer, although from Brown’s notes it seems he was aware that Chaucer’s presence in the scene was a creative imposition. He explains, almost apologetically, as if aware that his is engaging in wish-fulfilment, that Chaucer can be found sitting in “the background […] taking notes on his tablets.”34 As with the story of the friar on Fleet Street, this is a proto-Protestant Chaucer, a vision of the poet determined by Brown’s own ideological perspective.35 The other murals record, in turn, “The Proclamation of Regarding Weights and Measures” in 1556; William Crabtree observing the Transit of Venus in November 1639; an image of Humphrey Chetham in 1640 that tells the story of his foundation of Chetham’s School in Manchester; a Civil War scene that depicts the protection of the city from Royalist troops in 1642; the invention of the Fly Shuttle by John Kay in 1753; the opening of the Bridgewater Canal in 1761; and, finally, an undated image of John Dalton’s experiments with gas. As this brief outline demonstrates, Brown pays more attention to the modern than the premodern, and the medieval murals celebrate moments that foreshadow modernity – the adoption of Christianity, the proto-Protestantism of Wyclif, and the beginnings of industrial production in the city. As Julie Codell puts it, “Brown’s Middle Ages are industrial, not chivalric.”36 The image of the Danes does not fit into this taxonomy but should be paired with “Bradshaw’s Defence of the City” as a sign of the true 33 34 35 36

See Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1992), 60–61. Brown, Mural Paintings, 10. See Richmond, “Brown’s Protestant Medievalism.” Codell, “Ford Madox Brown,” 356.

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spirit of the city and the character of the local people, repelling regressive invaders. Like the depiction of Roman Manchester it posits the possibility of a continuous local – and national – identity. Although, as Lucy Rabin suggests, Brown’s complex and energetic compositions “make the historical event look as though it was happening in a few crucial moments,” it is the time of modernity that is vital, energetic, and full of meaning.37 And time passes slowly in modernity. The first six murals tell the story of over 1300 years, while the second six record just under half that span, including events that occurred in 1639, 1640, and 1642. Although the murals draw attention to disorder, the events they depict all exist within a very carefully ordered, progressive, and teleological view of history. For Brown, the medieval trajectories that matter are the ones that lead to modernity. While Brown’s compositions emphasize complexity, chance, and disruption, his historical imagination is defined by a sense of the linear nature of time. They produce a vision of the Middle Ages that answers some contemporary concerns and reveals others. As Julie Codell writes, the murals establish “a narrative of urban industrialism at this moment of Manchester’s revitalized appearance and self-consciousness.”38 A finely wrought sense of the medieval past is at the center of this narrative. The murals also reveal a personal, bodily, experience of time. Brown began the murals in April 1879 and finished them only in March 1893, just over six months before his death. The twelve murals therefore tell the story of his final years. The murals offer a corporate view of history but also record a personal history of illness and old age. For instance, the right-handed Brown painted much of the ninth mural, “Bradshaw’s defence of Manchester,” the last to be completed, with his left hand after he experienced a stroke in 1892.39 The composition is clearly, necessarily, simplified. The brush strokes are labored, their touch heavier than in the other murals. The fifth mural, “The Trial of Wyclif,” completed in 1886, is arguably the finest of the group and his last great work. Brown figured his personal experiences into the images in a more deliberate manner, too, as he included portraits of friends and family in the murals. Among many examples, a portrait of the artist Frederic Shields is included in the congregation watching the baptism of Edwin,40 Brown used his wife Emma as a model for Queen Phillipa,41 Shields appeared again in the fifth mural as Wyclif, and Chaucer was given Dante 37 38 39 40 41

Lucy Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History Picture (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), 34 Codell, “Ford Madox Brown,” 326. Treheurz, “The Manchester Period,” 300. Treheurz, “The Manchester Period,” 287. Treheurz, “The Manchester Period,” 291.



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Gabriel Rossetti’s features.42 There are other playful touches, too. As Julie Codell points out, in the mural depicting the Danish defeat Brown “quotes” a figure from Daniel Maclise’s 1832 painting Alfred, the Saxon King Disguised as a Minstrel in the Tent of Guthrum the Dane,43 and the “Baptism of Edwin” recalls 1847 William Dyce’s The Baptism of St. Ethelbert in the House of Lords.44 Intentionally and unintentionally, Brown’s murals reveal the precise personal and cultural contexts of his work. Indeed, Paul Barlow has argued that Brown’s murals express a decidedly modern sensibility. He writes that they “constitute a series of local and particular moments which preclude access to the central and the general. This is at the expense of ‘Manchester’ itself as a consolidated and distinct identity […] for Brown the unarticulated character of the scheme, its collapse into the local, is defined by the absence of the present.”45 However, while Barlow suggests that this lack of resolution is a “condition for the representation of modern social experience,” it could equally be claimed to be a condition of the medievalist imagination.46 As Brown’s creative freedoms make clear, the meanings of the Middle Ages are up for grabs, its meanings in flux and open for reinterpretation. The Middle Ages are unfinished. Further, although Barlow reads the fascination with the past as an absence of the present, returning to Derrida’s thinking on the temporalities of memory, it should instead be read as suggesting that, for Brown and for his commissioners, the past constitutes “the presence of the present.”

A Post-industrial Middle Ages At the center of David Gentleman’s mural at Charing Cross London Underground Station, a short passage of text tells the story of the construction of the medieval cross, under the title “Building the first Charing Cross”: The original Charing Cross was built in 1291–1294 by Edward I in memory of his wife, Queen Eleanor of Castile. It was the most splendid of the twelve Eleanor Crosses erected to mark the successive places where her body rested on its way from Lincoln to Westminster 42 43 44 45

46

Treheurz, “The Manchester Period,” 292–93. Codell, “Ford Madox Brown,” 343. Trehuerz, “The Manchester Period,” 287. Paul Barlow, “Local Disturbances: Ford Madox Brown and the Problem of the Manchester Murals,” in Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Ellen Harding (Aldershot: Scholar, 1996), 81–97 (88). Barlow, “Local Disturbances,” 89.

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Abbey, and it stood near here until it was destroyed in 1647. Richard of Crundale and Roger of Crundale were the master masons. The stone came from Corfe in Dorset and Caen in Normandy; Richard of Corfe and John of Corfe cut the English stone. Alexander of Abingdon and William of Ireland carved the statues of Queen Eleanor which stood halfway up the Cross, and Ralph of Chichester carved some of the decoration. Many others whose names are forgotten took part in the work: quarrymen, rough-hewers, masons, morterers, layers, setters, carpenters, thatchers, scaffolders, labourers, falcon or crane-men, apprentices, hodmen, drivers, horsemen. These pictures of them are by David Gentleman. This description of the mural is instructive as it highlights Gentleman’s egalitarian urge. While the thirteenth-century monuments were a celebration of royal majesty, Gentleman’s text and images draw attention to the laborers and artisans who created the crosses. This focus on creativity allows Gentleman to identify a transtemporal community of makers, in which the viewer is invited to include Gentleman himself, too. Like Brown’s, then, Gentleman’s medievalism is defined by a desire for communality across time. The mural is divided into five roughly equal sections that tell the story of the construction of the cross. This narrative is plotted from left to right on each platform, so it progresses from south to north on the south platform and from north to south on the north platform. This means that the mural is, like Brown’s paintings, conditioned by an idea of linear narrative progression. And, again as in Brown’s work, the narrative never reaches a conclusion: Gentleman refrained from including an image of the completed cross. The only image of the whole design is found in a maquette held by one of the stonemasons in section three. The first section of the mural depicts the stone being quarried and transported to London. Stonemasons measure and cut the stone, and carpenters construct a scaffold to enable work at Charing. The next section is largely given over to a display of travel information and is decorated with small illustrations of animals and clouds. The third section begins with images of laborers and masons transporting lime to the building site with wheel barrows and on horseback before presenting images of the construction of the early stages of the cross. The fourth section is dominated by an almostlife-size image of the queen’s statue. A mason is pictured working on the statue while Edward and his children watch. Section five tells the story of the erection of the queen’s statue, while the final section illustrates the process of placing the terminal cross at the top of the statue. Raphael Samuel describes Gentleman’s mural as a “modernist pastiche,” but it is clear that, like Brown,



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Gentleman thoroughly researched his topics.47 Perhaps the most powerful echo between Gentleman’s mural and the thirteenth-century crosses is their shared treatment of Eleanor as a symbol rather than a complex, historically situated human being. Charing Cross was one of twelve monumental stone crosses raised by Edward to mark the death of Eleanor in November 1290. Eleanor died in Harby near Lincoln, and the route of the journey by which her body was returned to London took in stops at twelve sites of political, royal, or religious significance. Eleanor’s body stopped overnight in Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St. Albans, Waltham, and finally St. Paul’s and Charing in London.48 Crosses were erected in public spaces near each of these places – junctions, squares, highways – in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in what Nicola Coldstream has called “the most magnificent funerary display ever accorded an English monarch”49 and what John Carmi Parsons describes as “the first instance of an English royal funeral deliberately exploited to enhance monarchy.”50 Three of the original crosses remain standing, in various states of ruin and restoration at Northampton, Geddington, and Waltham, and in 1865 E. M. Barry built a lavish replacement cross in the courtyard of the newly opened Charing Cross station.51 While there are significant differences between each surviving medieval work, their similarities suggest they were executed according to an overarching scheme. Within a tripartite structure, the lower sections of each surviving cross are dominated by the arms of Castile, England, Leon, and Ponthieu. Multiple statues of Eleanor rise above the arms in niches decorated with foliage, located between the arms below and the architectural detailing and crosses above, meaning that the queen is framed by images of sacred and secular authority. Eleanor’s head in the statues is bowed and crowned, her hair hangs loose, and she holds a scepter 47 48

49 50

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Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 2012), 30. For an overview of the medieval crosses, see R. Allen Brown, H. M. Colvin, and A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works: Vols. 1 and 2, The Middle Ages (London: Ministry of Public Building and Works, 1963), 479–85 and Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), 361–64. Nicola Coldstream, “The Commissioning and Design of the Eleanor Crosses,” in Eleanor of Castile 1290–1990, ed. David Parsons (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1991), 55–67 (55). John Carmi Parsons, “Ritual and Symbol in English Medieval Queenship to 1500,” in Women and Sovereignty, ed. Louise O. Fradenburg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 60–77 (68). On Barry’s Charing Cross, see , last accessed 12 September 2015.

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in her right hand. These statues draw on Marian imagery to present Eleanor as submissive and graceful and share their visual language with the queen’s tombs at Lincoln and Westminster.52 Eleanor’s power and identity in these representations is contingent on her ancestry and the performance history of the rituals embedded within these images. In their representation of the rituals of queenship, the crosses insist on the co-presence of the two key moments in Eleanor’s life: her crowning as queen and her death as consort. The Eleanor Crosses set bodies in motion. Not only did they become local landmarks, but the design of the crosses invited dynamic interaction. Writing about medieval tombs, Elizabeth Valdez Del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast note: Memory is praxis, an active, even an interactive, process. Monuments designed for the purpose of commemoration utilize many devices to trigger memory: vivid images that are both marvellous and active; strategically placed figurations or inscriptions which contextualize the site; and a kinetic relationship between the funerary monument and its visitors, often manifested in ritual acts involving movement around or in the monument.53 The value of Alamo and Prendergast’s insight is demonstrated clearly by the crosses. All three of the surviving crosses include elements that invite the participation of the spectator. The surviving cross at Northampton, for instance, is decorated with open books. The books were no doubt an allusion to Eleanor’s own learning, and it is likely that they, like all the other decorations on the crosses, were once painted, perhaps even with text. So, as well as dominating the local landscape, providing a meeting point, and possibly even a place of pilgrimage, the Northampton cross was designed to draw people into close proximity, to examine and read the books. The crosses also, of course, acted as calls to prayer, encouraging visitors to remember Eleanor and pray for her salvation. Gentleman manages to capture this sense of motion and dynamic interaction in his mural. Because of their site, in the midst of a busy London Underground terminal, the murals had to incorporate functional aspects into their design. Sections one and two are divided by a display of travel information, and postage boxes and bins also disrupt the visual language of Gentleman’s designs. Most striking, however, is how Gentleman incor52 53

For a succinct and detailed description of Eleanor’s memorials, see Age of Chivalry, 361–66. Elizabeth Valdez Del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast, “Introduction,” in Memory and the Medieval Tomb, ed. Elizabeth Valdez Del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast (Brookfield: Ashgate, 2000), 1–15 (1).



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porates the platform benches into his work. Across the full length of the platform the figures depicted in the mural use the benches to rest, as a workbench, or as a means to climb a ladder. This generates a sense of shared motion across past and present that speaks powerfully to the histories and meanings of the medieval crosses. Despite this rich invocation of communality, Gentleman imagined the history of the Eleanor Crosses to be out of reach to the majority of people who pass through the station. In a book published to mark the unveiling of his commission, Gentleman writes: Charing Cross to most Londoners means only a hazily-defined area somewhere between Trafalgar Square and the Thames, with a hotel, a hospital (now moved to Hammersmith), and a number of stations with until recently a confusing variety of names. But long ago it meant something much more tangible and precise. For three and a half centuries, a real solid Charing Cross stood where the statue of Charles I stands now, one of the great sights of London, as familiar in its time as the nearby Nelson’s Column is in ours: the tall and splendid monument which had been built in Charing village to remind Londoners of their resourceful and faithful Queen, Eleanor of Castile.54 For Gentleman the cross opens up a meditation on relations between past and present but also prompts him to reflect upon and critique modern and medieval social relations. He continues: even for those to whom it had meant hard work each soaring cross with its swaying sculptures of Queen Eleanor must have been a source of great wonder. Charing Cross lives on only as a familiar London name; but it stood for 350 years as a reminder not only of Queen Eleanor the Faithful, but of the skill and imagination of all the people who in building it stretched their own capacities to the utmost.55 For Gentleman, this is a cross that speaks eloquently of medieval culture. It is a synecdoche that reveals revered traditions of craftsmanship, patronage, and chivalry that stand in opposition to the flaws of modernity. It is a testament to pre-capitalist production. Gentleman writes that the modern is “confusing,” while meanings in the past were “much more tangible and precise,” “real,” and “solid.” The contemporary is defined by anomie, the 54 55

David Gentleman, A Cross for Queen Eleanor (London: London Transport, 1979), 4. Gentleman, A Cross, 60.

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Middle Ages by convivial community. In his description of the “self-confidence and stability” and “vigour and enterprise” of Edward’s reign, there is an implicit and melancholy judgment on the divided and economically unstable Britain of the late 1970s, a time of economic decline and industrial dispute that came to a head in the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978–79 just as the murals were installed.56 Gentleman’s nostalgia is, in Svetlana Boym’s terms, both restorative and reflective. To use Boym’s language, even as he “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction” of the monument and its history, Gentleman “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging.”57 While he fetishizes elements of medieval culture, he seems to suggest that return is impossible. It is striking that Gentleman chose woodcut to make his illustrations, a technique that dances on the boundaries between the Middle Ages and the early modern in Europe, having been introduced from Asia in the fifteenth century, well after the construction of the crosses.58 As Brian Webb explains, the murals brought this traditional technique into contact with modern technologies of reproduction: “Gentleman’s wood engravings were photographed, enlarged twenty times and screenprinted onto impregnated paper which was then laminated and fixed to a curved former.”59 His mural is therefore a piece of creative anachronism in which the past looks passed but not unfamiliar as it is rendered in a technique that may be archaic but has not fallen from use. To return to Derrida’s language, Gentleman produces an image of a past that was never present. Despite this, Gentleman is apparently uneasy with the creativity of earlier medievalist engagements with the crosses. He seems suspicious of Barry’s cross, which he describes as “not a restoration or even an accurate reconstruction,” and he refrains from naming Barry as the architect of the cross: Gentleman merely writes that it was “built by the railway company.”60 It seems that for Gentleman there is a “real” and “solid” past to be accessed beyond Barry’s cross, but even as he attempts to draw a clear distinction between his work and Barry’s medievalist “work of the imagination,”61 Gentleman’s reading of the crosses and Eleanor’s life is defined by Victorian traditions. 56 57 58 59 60 61

Gentleman, A Cross, 10. On the economic and social history of Britain in the 1970s, see Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber, 2010). Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii. See Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, with a detailed survey of work done in the fifteenth century, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1935). Brian Webb, David Gentleman Design (Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 2009), 77. Gentleman, A Cross, 10. Gentleman, A Cross, 10.



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Barry’s cross was commissioned near the peak of the Gothic Revival, during the final decade of the building of Palace of Westminster, which was designed by his father Charles Barry with the assistance of A. W. N. Pugin. The renewed interest in Eleanor and her crosses is partly explained by the general nineteenth-century interest in the medieval period and partly by the unprecedented interest in queenship prompted by Queen Victoria’s reign. This new fascination with queens was capitalized on by Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland’s monumental work Lives of the Queens of England. Their compendium of biographies, first published in 1840, just three years after Victoria came to the throne, was both thoroughly researched and wildly popular.62 The Stricklands’ portrait of Eleanor is at once historically rigorous and romantic. For instance, they discount the legend that Eleanor saved Edward’s life by sucking poison from a wound caused by “a Moor with a poyson’d sword” in Acre while they were on Crusade, which had found wide acceptance in historical works following Camden’s account of it in Britannia,63 but suggest that Eleanor “must have been a model of feminine beauty” in order to “have inspired in the heart of her renowned lord an attachment so deep and true.”64 As this suggests, moreover, like Gentleman, the Stricklands used the crosses as evidence of Eleanor’s character. So, Barry’s new Charing Cross of 1865 was built at a high-point in Eleanor’s public image. The medieval crosses, however, were not so much a celebration of Eleanor as an attempt to salvage her reputation. Contemporary records of her death reveal decidedly cool feelings towards her. The chronicler of Dunstable Abbey, for instance, summed up the queen’s life in the briefest of notes: “A Spaniard by birth,” he wrote, “she acquired many fine estates” (Hyspana genere, quæ plura et optima maneria adquisivit).65 Walter of Guisborough’s chronicle, written in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, records a rhyme that paints a similarly suspicious attitude towards her and 62

63

64 65

See Rosemary Mitchell, “Strickland, Agnes (1796–1874),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), , last accessed 9 July 2015. William Camden, Camden’s Britannia, 1695: A Facsimile of the 1695 edition published by Edmund Gibson [translated from the Latin], with an introduction by Stuart Piggott and a bibliographical note by Gwyn Walters, 320. For an account of the transmission of this legend, see John Carmi Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1994), 223–24. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest (Philadelphia, PA: Blanchard and Lea, 1852), 445. “Annales Prioratus de Dunstaplia, 1–1297, from MS Cotton Tiberius A. x.,” in Annales Monastici Vol 3: Annales Prioratus de Dunstaplia and Annales Monasterii de Bermundeseia, ed. Henry Richards Luard (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 362.

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her husband: “The king would like to get our gold, / The queen, our manors fair to hold” (Le roy cuuayte nos deneres, / e la rayne nos beau maners).66 The exact nature of Eleanor’s problems is spelled out in two letters written by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham, in the 1280s. In 1283 Pecham wrote to Eleanor herself to advise her that “when you receive land or manor acquired by usury of Jews, take heed that usury is a mortal sin to those who take the usury and support it, and those who have a share in it” (quant vus recevez terre ou manoir, encuru par usure de Juis, pernez vus garde ke usure est peche mortel a ceus qui funt la usure, e ceus qui les meintenent, e ceus qui part en unt).67 He suggested that she should make amends to those whose lands she had acquired through her dealings with Jews. Three years later, Pecham wrote to Geoffrey de Aspale, keeper of Eleanor’s wardrobe, to express his continuing displeasure at the Queen’s conduct: A rumour is waxing strong through the kingdom of England, and much scandal is thereby generated, because it is said that the illustrious lady queen of England, whom you serve, is occupying many manors, lands and other possessions of nobles, and has made them her own property, lands which the Jews extorted with usury from Christians under the protection of the royal court. It is said that day by day the said lady continues to acquire plunder and the possessions of others by this means, with the assistance (though we ourselves do not believe it) of certain clerks who are of the tribes of the devil and not of Christ. There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England. Wherefore, as gain of this sort is illicit and damnable, we beg you, and firmly command and enjoin you as our clerk, that when you see an opportunity you will be pleased humbly to beseech the said lady on our behalf, that she bid her people entirely to abstain from the aforesaid practices, and restore what has been seized in this way, or at any rate make satisfaction to those Christians who have been wickedly robbed by usury. (Per regnum Angliæ clamor validus invalescit et scandalum inde plurimum generatur, super eo quod dicitur dominam reginam Angliæ illustrem, cui assistitis, plura maneria nobilium, terras et possessiones 66

67

Walter of Guisborough, “De Gestis Regum Anglie,” in The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough: Previously Edited as the Chronicle of Walter of Hemingford or Hemingburgh, ed. Harry Rothwell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1957), 1–398 (216). See also Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, 120. John Peckham, “CCCCLXXXIV: To Queen Eleanor,” in Registrum epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham, Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, 3 vols., ed. C. T. Martin (London: Longman, 1882–85), 2, 619–20 (619). Translated by Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, 120.



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alias occupare, et in suum peculiam reduxisse, quæ Judæi a Christicolis extorserunt; et adhuc de die in diem dicitur prædicta domina nancisci prædia et possessiones alias per hunc modum; quibusdam etiam clericis de sorte Diaboli et non Christi, sibi, ut dicitur quod non credimus, ministrantibus in hac parte; et de hoc est in omni latere Angliæ publica vox et fama. Quia igitur lucrum tale est illicitum et damnatum, vos rogamus et vobis sicut clerico nostro firmiter et districte præcipiendo mandamus, quatenus cum opportunitatem vidieritis, velitis ex parte nostra prædicte dominæ nostræ humiliter supplicare, ut a prædictis suos jubeat penitus abstinere, et ablata restituat in hac forma, vel saltem satisfaciat Christicolis, usuraria nequitia spoliatis.)68 The apparent prompt of Pecham’s letters was Eleanor’s dealings with Jews, but Eleanor’s difficult relationship with the English elite can be traced back to her crowning as queen. As soon as she took the throne Eleanor began a program of land acquisition that, although condoned and supported by Edward, made her deeply unpopular with the landed classes. As John Carmi Parsons notes, “the traditional sources of an English Queen-consort’s income were manifestly inadequate” at this time; so, Eleanor’s accumulation of land should not be seen as a symptom of acquisitiveness but rather as a necessity.69 As Pecham’s letters make clear, however, that was not how some of her contemporaries saw it. It is likely that the perceived murkiness of the Queen’s dealings was deepened by the very fact of Eleanor’s own foreignness. Eleanor did have personal relationships with Jews, but so did Edward. Indeed, Jews lived in England as the direct subjects of the king and enjoyed his protection in the conduct of their business. The letters from Pecham need to be read in light of Edward’s 1275 Statute of the Jewry, which undermined the Jews’ way of life in England and placed restrictions on their conduct, dress, and occupation.70 Even after the Statute, Eleanor continued her business dealings with Jews and in 1281 petitioned for Cok Hagin, also known as Hagin son of (Deule) Cresse, to be appointed presbyter of the Jews.71 The statesanctioned anti-Semitism of the 1275 Statute was followed by Edward’s expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. The Edict of Expulsion was 68 69 70 71

John Peckham, “DCLXXIV: To Geoffrey de Aspal,” in Registrum epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham, ed. Martin, 3, 937–38. Translated by Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, 120–21. Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, 122. Paul Brand, “Jews and the Law in England, 1275–90,” English Historical Review 115 (2000): 1138–58. See Joe and Caroline Hillaby, The Palgrave Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 189–94.

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passed in July 1290, less than six months before Eleanor’s death. Surely Eleanor’s association with these other aliens qualified and confirmed her status as an outsider within the English court?72 If so, then her monuments were as interested in forgetting as remembering. The success of Edward’s scheme is confirmed by chronicles written in the decades following Eleanor’s death. The power the crosses exerted over cultural memory is demonstrated by the record of Eleanor’s life made by a historian writing in 1308 at St. Albans. Surely influenced by the queen’s lavish monuments, he praised Eleanor as an ideal queen and suggested that she could be seen as a “pillar” (columna) of the kingdom: In the year of our lord’s incarnation 1290, which is the nineteenth year of King Edward’s reign, the Lady Eleanor the younger, queen of England, left this world at the vill of Harby, near Lincoln; whose soul God keep. Seeing that I have said a little of her excellent qualities, on account of grief at her death and the sorrow of my heart, I have thought it fitting to add her genealogy briefly and truthfully, so that when a diligent investigator shall examine the uprightness of her forefathers, how virtue shone forth and how piety was resplendent in them, he may recognise how natural it may be to abound in riches, to blossom with virtues, to be made famous by victories, and what is more than all these, to shine in the Christian faith and the prerogative of justice. For to know oneself to come from the best of those whose nobility of blood accords with merit, is the greatest incentive to preserve the best qualities. It ever shames a noble spirit to be found degenerate in its posterity, and it is against the nature of things that bad fruit should sprout from a good root. Howbeit she did not lose a kingdom but changed it, abandoning the temporal and attaining the eternal, her passing was tearfully mourned by not a few. For she was a pillar of all England, by sex a woman but in spirit and virtue more like a man. In her days, foreigners troubled England but little.73 (Anno ab Incarnatione Domini, millesimo ducentesimo nonagesimo, qui est annus regni Regis Edwardi Tertii decimus-nonus, Domina Alienora Secunda, Regina Angliæ, migravit de hoc sæculo, in villa de 72 73

Parsons makes a similar point, Eleanor of Castile, 154. “Opus Chronicorum (MS Cotton Claudius D vi),” in Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde, Monachorum S. Albani, Necnon Quorundam Anonymorum Chronica et Annales, Regnantibus Henrico Tertio, Edwardo Primo, Edwardo Secundo, Ricardo Secundo, et Henrico Quarto, ed. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 3–62 (49–50). Translated by Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, 216–17.



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Herdebi, juxta Lincolnian; cujus animæ propitietur Deus. Quoniam de optimis moribus ejus pauca quædam lamentando descripsi, ob mortis ejus dolorem, et cordis mei amaritudinem, dignum enim duxi genealogian ejus breviter veraciterque subtexere; ut cum diligens indagator progenitorum suorum probitates rimatur, qualis in eis virtus enituerit, qualis pietas splenduerit, agnoscat quam naturale sit abundare divitiis, florere virtutibus, victoriis illustrari, et, quod hiis omnibus præstat, Christiana religione et justitiæ prærogativa fulgere. Est enim ad optimos mores obtinendos maximum incentivum, scire se ab optimis quibusque nobilitatem sanguinis meruisse; cum ingenuum animum semper pudeat ingloriosa progenie degenerem inveniri; et contra rerum sit naturam, de bona radice fructus malos pullulare. Licet igitur regnum non amittens sed mutans, temporale deserens et adipiscens æternum, tamen ejus transmigrationem nonnulli lacrymabiliter pianxerunt. Erat enim quasi columna totius Angliæ, sexu quidem fœmina, sed animo atque virtute plus viro; quum temporibus suis Angliam alienigenæ minime gravabant.) As this passage demonstrates, the complications of Eleanor’s life were lost and replaced by an idealized (and misogynistic) vision of femininity and queenship: the memories fabricated by the crosses superseded the historical reality. The crosses were and are simultaneously of and out of their time. They are embedded in historical process, but at the same time stand outside it, initiating rather than reflecting ways of understanding her life, creative rather than representative. Gentleman quotes the chronicle’s description of Eleanor as a “pillar” of England in his account of his project and, like the Stricklands, he refers to her as “Eleanor the Faithful.” The Eleanor of his murals is the Eleanor of the medieval crosses, which were designed to promote and secure royal rule, as well as the Eleanor of Victorian scholarship. Thus, even as he presents images of convivial and cosmopolitan making, Gentleman’s work is bound up in national fantasies that served to perpetuate the social hierarchies his images appear to challenge. There is more than a touch of what Paul Gilroy describes as “postcolonial melancholia” to Gentleman’s nostalgia. Gilroy argues that the culture of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain is defined by the loss of empire that has resulted in an “unstable edifice of increasingly brittle and empty national identity,”74 which is often compensated for by engagement in the “morbidity of heritage.”75 This is demonstrated by Gentleman’s simul74 75

Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), 116. Gilroy, After Empire, 109.

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taneous denial of, and retreat to, the Victorian, and while Brown executed his medievalist visions with confidence and enthusiasm, Gentleman seems unsure whether to embrace or reject the medieval and modern histories of the crosses. What his work expresses instead is what Gilroy describes as “a loss of certainty as to who one is and where one fits.”76 Whereas Brown’s murals conjure a future in which the messy temporalities of the present and past will be resolved, Gentleman seems unsure that that future will ever arrive, just as the workers in his mural never complete their project to construct their cross.

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Medievalisms of Moral Panic: Borrowing the Past to Frame Fear in the Present1 James L. Smith This essay argues that understanding both the process by which medievalist tropes feature in the formation of moral panics and the manner in which medievalists are drawn into the debate reveals much about the imagination of the medieval in the shaping of the modern, and also some salient points relating to the role of scholars in public discourse. It would be glib and unhelpful to promote the message that medievalists are making moral-panic medievalisms worse, nor would it be true. The power to analyze and critique the circumstances by which medievalisms become intertwined with the symbolism of moral-panic phenomena is valuable indeed. Nor is any scholarly call for historical accuracy ever in vain. Academic contributions to the debate serve to encourage greater recognition of the essential normality and humanity of many seemingly alien behaviors. Just as there is a struggle to recognize the inherent sociocultural inequalities that fuel displays of social unrest in the present, so too must we struggle to promote a message that medieval peoples are not wholly alien, irrational, or Other – although different and often confrontational – and cannot be unscrupulously bent to twenty-firstcentury ends. We live in a time in which unprecedented globalization, cultural change, and fluidity of ideas have created much anxiety and uncertainty about the present and the future. In the face of new fears, it is common 1

This essay was wholly written before the tragic events that took place in Paris on 13 November 2015. The author would like to pay tribute to those who lost their lives, and acknowledge the limitations of this essay in the rapidly changing discourse surrounding its publication.

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to shape discourse by reaching into the past for sense-making tropes and idioms. It is within this context that culturally specific and complex moral panics take place. These panics require fuel, and the queerly atemporal imagined Middle Ages has repeatedly been added to the fire.2 The results are often erratic and internally inconsistent: as Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl have argued, “medievalism in political discourse fluctuates in its effects, and contemporary medievalisms in politics exemplify these disjointed strategies.”3 A particularly complex and politically germane manifestation occurs when a phenomenon that I will term “moral-panic medievalism” appears. In his seminal monograph Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen defines the moral panic as “a condition, episode, person or group of persons [who] become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”4 The notion of the folk devil is rooted in the interpretation of the pre-modern, drawing inspiration from the imagery of Puritan witch hunts, the actions of the Spanish Inquisition, and incidents of popular fear of dualist heresies such as Catharism or Bogomilism. In Cohen’s formulation, fear in the present must always be influenced by “folk devils of the past, to whom current horrors can be compared.”5 When the putative stability of the body politic is threatened, an immune reaction seeks out the imagined origin of disruption. The phenomenon of moral panic is as diverse as the cultural contexts in which it is expressed, and is framed by the mores of those involved.6 The intriguing reality of this process is that the historical accuracy of comparison becomes distorted, troubling medievalists with popular perceptions that are not amenable to traditional scholarly arguments.

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For a thorough treatment of the queerness of medieval time, see Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, “Political Medievalisms: The Darkness of the Dark Ages,” in Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), 140–57 (146). See 144–46 for an illustrative discussion of Sarah Palin’s 2008 use of the term “blood libel,” its backfire, and the ensuing discourse. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers (London: Routledge, 1987, 3rd edn), 9. A great deal of Cohen’s folk-devil thesis is based on Kai T. Erikson’s book Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), a study of deviance through the seventeenth-century Puritan Settlement of Massachusetts. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3. It is also a concept with a rich history that I have attempted to give justice to in this essay. For a survey, see Chas Critcher, “Moral Panic Analysis: Past, Present and Future,” Sociology Compass 2/4 (2008): 1127–44.



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The Formation of Moral Panic Sometimes the object of the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society itself conceives itself.7 Stanley Cohen Before progressing further, a description of moral panic is in order. Erich Goode has argued that a moral panic is not a “theory,” but a sociological phenomenon. The most crucial aspect in the study of it, according to Goode, is the extent to which such phenomena can be understood to have real-world referents, and the extent to which these referents manifest “interesting and revealing patterns in social life.”8 They follow a distinct series of phases, a chain reaction from threat to discourse. Moral panic is contagious, potent, and an expression of a fundamental human societal drive. To my mind, it represents a societal immune response to putative or actual threat or contamination. Just like the human immune system, this process is often subverted, and lacks discrimination. When two of what Chas Critcher describes as the “five Ps” – Politicians, Pressure groups, Police, Press, and Public – unite behind a moral panic, it gains momentum.9 The power, and the danger, of moral panic stem from its collective vehemence, and its pre-hermeneutic motivations. Once the members of Critcher’s five Ps have shaped rhetoric against moral danger, the process unfolds in stages. Erich Goodman and Nachman Ben-Yehuda have defined the stages of the phenomenon as: Concern that there will be a negative effect on society; Hostility towards “folk devils,” a new Other; Consensus that the group in question poses a very real threat to society; Disproportionality the action taken is disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the accused group; and

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Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1. Erich Goode, “No Need to Panic?: A Bumper Crop of Books on Moral Panics,” Sociological Forum 15/3 (2000): 543–52 (551). Chas Critcher, “Introduction: More Questions than Answers,” in Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the Media, ed. Chas Critcher (Maidenhead: Open University Press [2006], 2010), 10–11.

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Volatility – moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared due to a waning in public interest or news reports changing to another topic.10 When taken together, these aspects of moral panic can create an intense outburst of media coverage coupled with a governmental and public debate about the nature of the perceived disruption and its putative solutions. The emergence of social media has vastly intensified the white heat of such explosions.11 The study of medievalisms of moral panic is doubly germane, for it taps into not only the real-world expression of fear, but also the historical vocabulary upon which it is based. Moral panic is a concept or abstraction that allows us “to trace similarities between otherwise apparently very different phenomena,” as Critcher has put it.12 It is a phenomenon dependent entirely on sociocultural context, and thus its expression reveals much about the culture that created it. Cohen spoke of differential reactions, the many forms that moral panic and the reaction to moral panic took. Based on a variety of demographic factors, there are many panics and many responses.13 Medievalists have their own differential reaction. To risk simplification, this reaction is “how dare they do this to the Middle Ages?” By engaging in this reaction, medievalists become part of the process. It would be erroneous to claim that the scholarly response is itself a moral panic: Critcher proposes that “the moral panic classification does not imply rational appraisal, considered reaction or appropriate remedies.”14 It is clear, however, that the act of engaging with a moral panic on scholarly terms shifts the debate towards a form of argumentation that may seem frustrating and circular. By attempting to remedy flaws in the characterization of the past, medievalists often seem to be speaking in a language that falls upon deaf ears. In pursuing this process, there is a risk of intellectual rigidity and dogmatism. As M. J. Toswell warns us, pursuing authenticity (or historicity) with zeal is a risky endeavor: “Under the guise of being historically accurate, deeply conservative ideas about human behavior can justify themselves as a pretence, a recreation of earlier times. In other words, recreating a ‘true medieval’ experience […] 10 11 12 13 14

Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 37–41. But also, one might say, shortened their duration and increased the rapidity of the public’s “moral panic fatigue” along with the increased speed of media dissemination. Critcher, “Introduction,” in Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the Media, 2. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 49–56. Critcher, Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the Media, 3.



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is a highly dubious ethical endeavor.”15 Pugh and Weisl describe the new medieval-esque creation of a “true” medieval as something that defeats our analysis: any recourse to the “real” past will fail to explain it.16 If medievalism is “the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages,” as Leslie Workman describes it, then the influence of the Middle Ages on moralpanic phenomena is itself the influence of modernity upon our perception of the medieval.17 When these tendencies feed into already volatile popular phenomena, the results can be incendiary. The life blood of moral panics is powerful and pervasive tropes and idioms, many of them medievalisms. Tropes, as Toswell has described them, “offer ways in which someone engaged in recreating the Middle Ages can do so with a kind of useful shorthand, or can engage in extensive and deliberate research so as to reach for authenticity.”18 They are the building blocks of medievalisms, and the tropes discussed below are so pervasive within popular imagination that they have passed from the realm of history into generic standard.19 Cohen’s notion of the folk devil folds all of pre-modernity into a mixed “medieval” past that bears little resemblance to the world that medievalists study. By reducing history into emotive tropes lacking a concrete medieval or early modern foundation, they eschew notions of accuracy or inaccuracy, and yet still remain powerful. They should collapse under the weight of their inherent ridiculousness – to paraphrase Pugh and Weisl discussing the nostalgic “magic” of the Middle Ages – and yet they endure.20 In the field of studies in medievalism, we have witnessed an unprecedented variety of social anxieties exorcised through the lens of pre-modernity – its putative qualities and relationship to modernity serving as grist for the mill. When developing the initial research for this essay in 2013, 15

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M. J. Toswell, “The Dangers of the Search for Authenticity?: The Ethics of Hallowe’en,” in Studies in Medievalism XXIII: Ethics and Medievalism, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 1–10 (9). Argued in the context of the Iraq war. To cite further, “within the wider cultural imaginary, this sense of the medieval, although very much a reduction of a complex history, takes a baggy historical period loosely defined by geography and with as many diversions as similarities, and turns it into a single entity, a signifier of irrational, violent darkness.” Pugh and Weisl, “Political Medievalisms,” 147. Leslie J. Workman, Preface to Studies in Medievalism VIII: Medievalism in Europe II, ed. Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 1–2. M. J. Toswell, “The Tropes of Medievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism XVII: Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 68–76 (70). Many of these tropes serve as critical terms, as demonstrated by the recent volume edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz: Medievalism: Key Critical Terms (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pugh and Weisl, “Medievalisms: The Magic of the Middle Ages,” in Medievalisms, 1–11 (1).

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there was no way that I could have anticipated the events leaving a swathe of violence across 2014 and 2015. The Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS, ISIL, IS, or Daesh) emerged, proclaiming a caliphate and provoking a firestorm of reactions and counter-reactions in which the word “medieval” played a key role.21 Claims by the organization to a historically legitimate caliphate were met with accusations of brutal atavistic behavior reminiscent of “medieval” savagery. Claims of “medieval” savagery have been counteracted by medievalists with the argument that medieval Islam was enlightened and cosmopolitan, and that the Islamic State are thoroughly modern terrorists. As Clare Monagle and Louise D’Arcens argued in a September 2014 article for The Conversation, “when politicians, commentators and indeed terrorists try to get political mileage from using the term ‘medieval’ they should understand that this idea does not align with historical fact. Instead, it is an idea that bears and perpetuates an ideology of othering.”22 This terminology describes the process of a moral panic within political and media discourse, the distortion of the past to remedy moral confusion in the present. On The Public Medievalist blog, Amy S. Kaufman adds to this debate by highlighting the medievalisms shaped by “Islamic State” themselves, whose “dark dream of medievalism, constructed half by history and half by desire, thrives in our collective imagination and threatens to cast a long shadow over our future.”23 The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo magazine were gunned down in Paris by Islamic extremists while exercising an anticlerical attitude, and key pundits suggested that Islam was in need of a “reformation” or an “enlightenment,”24 implying that the Muslim world exists in a time before modernity, before

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This essay recognizes that the title of the organization used in the media is contested, and that this is in itself a struggle within the moral panic discourse surrounding it. Clare Monagle and Louise D’Arcens, “‘Medieval’ makes a comeback in modern politics: what’s going on?” The Conversation (22 September 2014), , last accessed 22 June 2015. Amy S. Kaufman, “Dark Revivals: Medievalism and ISIS,” The Public Medievalist (16 October 2014), , last accessed 15 June 2015. For an early form of this oft-repeated argument in the British press, see Allan Massey, “When will we see an Islamic Enlightenment?,” The Telegraph (21 March 2012), , last accessed 15 June 2015. For a powerful refutation in the wake of Charlie Hebdo, see Christopher de Bellaigue, “Stop calling for a Muslim Enlightenment,” The Guardian (19 February 2015), , last accessed 12 June 2015.



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the cultural changes that made the West “better.”25 The attack on free speech attached itself to images of a time before reason when books were burned, the heterodox were censured or killed, and religion was unassailable. Public figures stoked the fires – a prominent example being Salman Rushdie, who claimed that “Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms,” and that Islamic State was a “deadly mutation” at the heart of Islam.26 This phenomenon has greatly worried not only the Muslim community, but also the medievalists who find their area of expertise bent to new and unpalatable ends. Through intense debates that fill our public consciousness, we can ascertain a strong and continuous theme: order is threatened, an explanation is required, and medievalism is a key ingredient at work. The initial impulse resembles what anthropologist Johannes Fabian has termed the “denial of coevalness,” a discursive strategy for placing an object of study in a realm outside of the epoch, sequence of events, and intellectual framework of the present: Sooner or later, thinking about memory gets us to consider identity, individual as well as collective, psychological as well as cultural. Not only that, if it is true that recognizing others also means remembering them then we should see relations between Self and other as a struggle for recognition, interpersonal as well as political.27 As Fabian argues, denial of coevalness is a denial of legitimacy, and the process of thinking through the problem allows for remediation to take place. Failure to do so allows unscrupulous members of the five Ps to use the past to frame fear in the present. This was the case in 2011, when latent imaginings of mob unreason combined with current affairs to shift a popular discourse and medievalize an already potent moral panic.

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The Guardian’s Giles Fraser aptly describes this idea as a “secular salvation myth.” See “Our secular salvation myth distances us from reality,” The Guardian (21 November 2014), , last accessed 24 February 2015. Reported by English Pen on 7 January 2015, , last accessed 15 June 2015. Introduced in Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, [1983] 2014), 177.

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The 2011 London Riots: The “Medieval” Mentality of the Crowd When studied in historical context, popular unrest has a human face. When sensationalized and converted into a form of popular entertainment, it is a ghoulish spectacle. Take, for example, the 1381 London Peasants’ revolt. When studied within the framework of historical analysis, the revolt is a story of post-plague labor shortage, taxation grievance, the popular demagoguery of Wat Tyler and John Balle, and the disquiet of a ruling elite caught in a complex social change. It was not a mindless orgy of violence, but the expression of a radical political agenda that anticipated the French Revolution by four centuries, and would have fundamentally changed the country had it succeeded.28 The result is a dramatic series of violent acts culminating in an ambiguous compromise for peasantry and nobility alike. The same could be said of other incidents of popular unrest from within the medieval peasantry: dramatic, but rooted in political grievance and social unrest. However, the story transforms into a tale laden with moral panic undertones when the drama of the events of 1381 enter the realms of popular history. Take for example this extract from Dan Jones’s tellingly entitled Summer of Blood: “A revell, A revell!” No one could forget the noise when Wat Tyler led his ragtag army of roofers and farmers, bakers, millers, ale-tasters and parish priests into the City of London on a crusade of bloodthirsty justice. […] It was as if, thought one observer, all the devils in hell had found some dark portal and flooded into the City.29 This description, lurid and yet still historicist, represents the gateway through which history becomes trope, and social grievance becomes moral disruption and deviance. A distortion occurs when history of the revolt relies on the accounts of its contemporary chroniclers, all clergymen and nearly all monastics with little or no sympathy for or understanding of the rebels. Their views were a contemporary moral panic based on fear of a book-burning, bestial, and illiterate mob and anger at a perceived breach of divine order, and yet they are often read as transparent fact.30 They have provided fuel for sensational historical writing, which in turn provides the core tropes and idioms for modern panics. Within the metamorphosis of academic history 28 29 30

Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), ix. Dan Jones, Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 1. Barker, 1381, x.



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into popular and purple prose, the events of 1381 found themselves bonded to another very different series of events taking place within the City of London centuries later. The political value of their conflation was not lost on shrewd media pundits. The Daily Mail published a 30 September 2011 article entitled “The London Riots 1381: The Blood-soaked Uprising which Changed the Face of England forever.”31 While one could take this article at face value – a discussion of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt as revealed by the accomplished photo tableaux artist Red Saunders – the article appears to fit into an altogether more cynical thread of representation by the newspaper. The mob that threatened King Richard II of England in the fourteenth century is revealed in “realistic” detail by Saunders and narrated engagingly by John Gillingham.32 By publishing an article on this topic so close to the London riots, the right-wing Daily Mail links the brutal and blood-soaked mob of the photo tableaux to the crude and apolitical mob of popular imagination. A superstitious “medieval” mentality emerges in media analysis, and the tabloid papers fold 1381 into 2011. The timing of the piece was powerful: the sixth and the eighth of August 2011 saw London rocked by an outbreak of civil unrest that spread through its boroughs, and through towns across England. The initial stimulus was the shooting of 29-year-old black man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham by the Metropolitan Police. Following a protest by Duggan’s friends and family and fueled by racial tension and poverty, subsequent copycat events spiraled far beyond the initial stimulus, moving from a civil-rights protest to a riot in a short amount of time. For many, the looting and damage to property was inexplicable and fear-inducing, a sign of “broken Britain.”33 In the heat of a full-blown moral panic, elements of Critcher’s five Ps defined a discourse based on the vilification of a folk devil, the criminal and feckless underclass. Rather than raise difficult and pressing questions about police treatment of black Britons, public perceptions took a rapid and medievalism-laden turn. The process follows many of the clarifications

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John Gillingham, “The London Riots 1381: The blood-soaked uprising which changed the face of England forever,” The Daily Mail (Mail Online) (30 September 2011), , last accessed 30 July 2015. Although, as Kenneth Thompson has argued, it is problematic to read cynical and manipulative motives into media reports of moral-panic phenomena – the reporters may very well believe what they write. See Moral Panics: Key Ideas (London: Routledge, 1998), 9. A term originally coined and propagated in approximately 2007 by the British tabloid The Sun and repeated by the British Conservative Party. The more left-wing paper The Guardian has frequently attempted to counter this narrative.

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on the process of moral theory outlined by Yvonne Jewkes in her 2004 criminological analysis of moral panics: • Moral panics occur when the media turn a reasonably ordinary event and present it as extraordinary; • The media, in particular, set in motion a deviance amplification spiral, through which the subjects of the panic are viewed as a source of moral decline and social disintegration; • Moral panics clarify the moral boundaries of the society in which they occur; • Moral panics occur during periods of rapid social change and anxiety; and • Young people are the usual target of moral panics, and their behaviour is “regarded as a barometer to test the health or the sickness of a society.”34 In the climate of a Britain shaped by Tony Blair and New Labour’s 1990s message of middle-class aspiration, the vilification of the disadvantaged found fertile ground.35 The deviance amplification spiral of discourse was rapid, painting the young and disenfranchised acting in a comprehensible and yet disruptive manner as a symptom of social malaise. Police, politicians, press, and public united around a shared vision of what Chloe Peacock has described as “a ‘sick’ (or, in then-Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s words, ‘feral’) underclass characterized by greed, irresponsibility, worklessness, laziness, welfare dependence and poor parenting.”36 By reshaping the working class from “salt of the earth” into “scum of the earth,” the popular imagination placed the behavior of the rioters outside of the realm of political action, outside the normal, legitimate, or comprehensible.37 It painted a picture of degeneracy and behavioral atavism in need of extreme remedies. It pushed the discussion into a space in which we come face to face with medievalism: the brutal realm of the “medieval” mob. The notion of the “medieval” mob – from pitchfork-wielding villagers in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to its 34 35 36

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Yvonne Jewkes, Media and Crime: Key Approaches to Criminology (London: Sage, 2004), 67. This process is narrated in columnist and activist Owen Jones’ 2012 book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso Books, 2nd edn), esp. 110–39. Chloe Peacock, “Remembering the Riots: Citizenship and ‘Social Cleansing’ After the London Riots of 2011,” Unpublished Dissertation, University of Sussex (2013), 4. Having won the 2014 Sunley Prize awarded by the Howard League for Penal Reform, the dissertation is published online at , last accessed 3 June 2015. Peacock’s dissertation follows the media reaction to the riots in detail. An apt phrase from Jones, Chavs, blurb and passim.



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comedic portrayal as a trope of mob rule in The Simpsons – offers a shorthand for understanding a potentially traumatic disruption of a self-imagined orderly society.38 This stereotyping of mobs as something anterior to and outside of modernity has a history that is rooted in the understanding of medieval people.39 In the shaping of popular imagination of mob violence, a popular belief prevails. There is something atavistic, something dehumanizing, about membership of a crowd or mob. We lose our reason, and descend into something that predates the concept of the individual, and the notion of the enlightened political actors that those in liberal democracies believe themselves to be. Television and Hollywood propagate this belief: any post-apocalyptic landscape is filled with the sound of man becoming the wolf of man, as the classical adage goes. Much of this is owed to the nineteenth-century text The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, a study of the phenomenon by the French sociologist Gustave le Bon. The book argues that “[b]y the very fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs on the ladder of civilisation,” that “[i]solated, he may be a cultivated individual; [but] in a crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct.”40 Gustave le Bon took his inspiration in this analysis from the French Revolution, a phenomenon fueled by the Enlightenment and yet the incubator of explosive mob violence. We see the seed of the “medieval” mob trope in the same work, for Le Bon characterizes the era that came before the Age of Revolutions as a space of unreflexive moral panic: “The Middle Ages and the Renaissance possessed many enlightened men, but not a single man who attained by reasoning an appreciation of the childish side of his superstitions, or who promulgated even a slight doubt as to the misdeeds of the devil or the necessity of burning sorcerers.”41 Although the popular imagination of moral panic and of the Middle Ages has moved on, this notion has endured. Gustave le Bon and others of his milieu proposed many ideas that are popularly rejected (or contested) in the twenty-first century – male supremacism, racial profiling, discredited science – and yet the theory of the crowd that he and his contemporaries developed endures. Like the spector of Washington Irving’s Christopher Columbus and his flat world, the trope of a crowd caught in a time before 38 39

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The mob appears in The Simpsons Movie (2007), but is a recurring trope in the show. The depiction became even more potent when combined with an existing moral panic about “Hoodies,” feckless and violent youths acting out against society as a symptom of a wider social malaise. For a discussion of the “Hoodie” moral panic, see Ian Marsh and Gaynor Melville, “Moral Panics and the British Media – A Look at Some Contemporary ‘Folk Devils’,” Internet Journal of Criminology (2011), 1–21. Gustave le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 13. Le Bon, The Crowd, 115.

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reason continues to haunt popular discourse. The typecasting of the medieval mind as superstitious and lacking in reason makes the mob fit comfortably in a time before Voltaire or Rousseau, making the incongruity of modern mob violence make sense. It is not a breach in modern society, but simply an anachronism. When human minds participate in a mob, they abandon modernity. They return to the age before reason, the “Dark Ages” of popular imagination. Free from guilt, the putative “medieval” mob mentality exists in an age before self-reflexivity and critical thought. Consequently, the trope follows, we must ask ourselves why this unwholesome medievalism continues to plague us. By converting the discourse on the riots into a medievalism, the other complexities of the event are merged into an adversarial narrative in which the reasonable and sophisticated population are horrified and repelled by the brutal mob mentality of a group determined to eschew societal norms. Thus, when the current (at the time of writing) London Mayor Boris Johnson recently expressed his opinion on the future response to rioters, we hear echoes of 1381 when he advocated that “[y]ou get medieval immediately on these people and you come down much harder, and you don’t allow a mentality to arise of sheer wanton criminality.”42 When Johnson – a member of the English social elite – opined that the government should “get medieval” on those who had threatened his vision of an orderly society, he slipped into the role of feudal overlord punishing his social inferiors. Instead of military backlash, Johnson proposed water cannons and expensive riot gear. By characterizing the motivation of the riots as “sheer wanton criminality,” the ruling elite demonstrate the use of medievalism to provide a clear foe and coherent solution in response to moral panic. The subsequent actions of Critcher’s five Ps followed a similar pattern. The politicians spread a narrative of social degeneracy, and proposed a harsher response in future; the police were authorized (or encouraged) to decisively and aggressively quell future riots; certain elements of the press entered into a narrative of vilification and highlighted the selfless cohesion of the “good” Britons who helped to clean up after the riots; and the public were polarized by fear of social disorder and the desire to see future outbreaks curtailed.43 The attention of the moral panic was firmly fixed on Johnson’s wanton criminals, and the methods by which their “problem” could be “solved.” It is significant and important to note that seemingly similar-stimulus events can often have vastly different results. Moral panics require a unique 42

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David Barrett, “‘Get medieval’ on rioters, says Boris Johnson,” The Telegraph (29 January 2014), , last accessed 23 July 2015. For further details, see Peacock, “Remembering the Riots.”



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combination of factors in order to grow, and many factors can influence their outcome. A panic can fizzle out if there is no clearly identified and commonly agreed folk-devil figure or group, if there is no clear reactive course of action to be taken, or if the public does not engage with the message created by media, interest groups, police, or government. Twentyfirst-century social-media spaces allow powerful counter-narratives to emerge, challenging hegemonic messages, and rapidly transforming moralpanic discourses. An example of the heterogeneity of scenarios appears in the case of the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri. Rather than transforming into a process of social vilification, the unique sociocultural environment of a seemingly similar scenario led to a different public debate.44 The message that many took from the events surrounding Michael Brown’s death was not fear of mob violence, but that of collective self-reflection on the relationship between African Americans and law enforcement officers. The famous Twitter hashtag of #BlackLivesMatter could easily have been applied to the events of 2011 in London, and yet a moral panic took a different turn entirely.45 By linking a “history-ish” understanding of the relationship between mob behavior and social development, the medievalizing of moral panics allows the discourse to eject the object of distrust from modernity, to place it back in the past. As Fabian has argued, denying coevality to imagined folk devils strips them of the legitimacy of articulate modern voices. Popular discontent – often as extreme as civil unrest – over poverty, inequality, or injustice is a threat to the established order when framed within the cultural context of the present. The disconcerting revelations about racial inequality and police brutality revealed by the 2011 death of Mark Duggan were obscured when the media and government message shifted to a vision of the atavistic mob mentality of those trapped outside of mainstream ideologies, a group no different from their fourteenth-century “antecedents.” When caught up in such a debate, the use and abuse of tropes cherry-picked from our understanding of the past convert medievalisms into patches placed on ragged holes in a Western society’s positive image of itself. The case-study example of the “medieval” mob mentality is but one of a vast array of related tropes. 44

45

Compare this discourse to that of the 1981 Brixton riots, in which the public debate and subsequent Scarman Report focused on the social inequality and poverty of the AfroCaribbean community, who were subsequently found to be disproportionately affected by the recession of the early 1980s and by inner-city decline. A sign of how marked the difference in discourse became in the case of Ferguson can be seen in Darlena Cunha’s article for Time magazine, which argued that “Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society” (“Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting” [25 November 2014], , last accessed 13 June 2015).

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Think of the headlines of papers: “witch hunt,” “medieval torture,” “superstition,” and so on. The effects of moral-panic medievalism go beyond the media and permeate the very foundations of popular culture. In 2013, for example, an extremely critical review of Ben Affleck’s film Argo revealed that an image of a mob on our screens can never be apolitical. Set during the turmoil of the 1979 Iranian revolution, the film narrates a plot to extract a group of US embassy staff from Tehran using the cover of a film crew in the country to create the eponymous and fictitious science-fiction film. In the film, there are repeated images of revolutionary Iranian mobs, vast crowds of angry people reduced to a rapacious and inhuman swarm by the film’s narrative. Slate critic Kevin Lee pointed out the disturbing effects of this portrayal: Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of revolutionary Iran, the film settles into a retrograde “white Americans in peril” storyline. It recasts those oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde, the same dark-faced demons from countless other movies – still a surefire dramatic device for instilling fear in an American audience.46 The film’s depiction of the mob besieging the US embassy in Tehran is disturbingly similar to a George Romero zombie film. A mindless mob united only by their hatred of America paw at the fences, seeking to form a breach through which they can enter the compound and sate their collective rage. This image, produced almost subconsciously, demonstrates the disturbing conflation of mob violence with social insecurity and cultural distrust. By eschewing politics in favor of racially charged monster-film tropes, the film demonstrates the deep-seated fear of mobs within the popular imagination. They exist at the margins of ordered thought and reasoned society, destroying local, national, or international order. These fears move beyond shaping audience reactions to films, feeding into largescale reactions to public disorder. Within this context, it is unnerving to observe real-life monsters being created out of the massed bodies of rioters. Ejected from the present and sanctioned from reason, these figures attract tropes, grow in putative and disproportionate threat, and emerge as a fully mature Folk Devil born from historical, sociocultural, and xenophobic anxieties. 46

Kevin B. Lee, “Argo, F--k Yourself: This Year’s Worst Best Picture Nominee,” Slate (25 February 2013), , last accessed 23 June 2015.



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The reaction of medievalists to moral-panic medievalism can be extremely problematic, and solutions can be tortuous. Experts, disturbed by the abuse of their knowledge, lash out at misconceptions. This reaction, although spirited and erudite, can have little effect on public discourse. Understanding the moral-panic phenomenon explains why. The very comparison of premodernity to a Bad Thing (violence, dogmatism, superstition, intolerance) is often invalid. The medievalism has been born regardless of accuracy, and the public will run with it when the circumstances are right. Just like a fire, a moral panic needs fuel to grow and the right climate to spread. Medievalists are not fire fighters, but we can offer the tools for a different discourse. Work such as that of Louise D’Arcens and Clare Monagle demonstrate the power of a new reframing of narrative. By denying the frame of reference (unfamiliar = medieval; medieval = atavistic) that grafts medievalism to moral panic, we can play a role in the public discourse. Moral panics deploying medievalisms are virulent and repetitive. They are impossible to refute, because they are not amenable to expert counterargument. That is to say, a medievalist intervening and saying that “the Middle Ages was not like that” only strengthens the link by giving it credence. Fear thrives, and the fearful place a medieval face on their fears. We fear the public and the media misappropriating our subject matter and abusing it, and so we create a new Other. As Julia Kristeva put it, “To each ego its object, to each superego its abject.”47 The ethical dimension of the mind forms an image of something unethical, the arbitration of good moral behavior creates an immoral counter-example. The cycle of moral panic is caught up in the cycle of abjection. Only by engaging in a process of meta-cognitive analysis can we apprehend the cycle. As the Peasants’ Revolt example demonstrates, concepts that flourish unchallenged in the present will shape the future of fear, often for centuries to come.

47

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 1–31 (2).

Extra-Temporal Place Attachment and Adaptive Reuse: The Afterlives of Medieval English Anchorholds Michelle M. Sauer Stephanie Trigg, in an essay on tourism and medieval cathedrals, suggests that the “institutions and practices of contemporary medieval tourism and heritage culture raise powerful questions for medievalists about the uses and significance of the medieval past.”1 In my quest to examine the modern remains of medieval spaces, I have been searching out extant anchorholds for the last fifteen years. Because these spaces are attached to working churches with a parish life, they have only rarely been preserved in their unadorned medieval state. Instead, the majority of anchorholds in Britain have been adaptively reused to fit the fabric of current parish life. Adaptive reuse allows culturally and historically important buildings to be redeveloped and repurposed instead of demolished. The practice considers and adapts the internal and external structure so that the character of the old influences the format of the new. In this way, both old and new become part of the fabric of cultural heritage. On a smaller scale, this is true of anchorholds as well. Over the course of my various journeys, I have come across several consistent reuses of medieval anchoritic spaces, all of which correspond to the main contributions of medieval anchorites to their parish communities: spiritual, social, and financial. In turn, each of these contributions can be connected with the manners in which churches – or in these cases anchorholds – are commonly adaptively reused: religious, community/multi-purpose/education, music/ theatre, exhibition, commercial, and residential. How these contributions

1

Stephanie Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals: Medieval Tourism and the Authenticity of Place,” New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 9–33 (9).

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are reflected in the various types of adaptations provides us with a unique perspective on the continuing importance of medieval heritage spaces. Anchorholds were important spaces in medieval England, providing status for parish and community as well as housing for the religious practitioner inside.2 An anchorhold was often a small cell, sometimes attached to a church building, in which an anchoress or anchorite (an individual who lived a life of extreme vocational withdrawal) resided. Traditionally, they were assumed to have been built on the north side of the church, which was the coldest and most exposed to evil elements; however, my explorations of extant cells has indicated that was not always the case.3 Commonly cells were fairly small in size, with just enough room to live and pray.4 Although not every anchorhold was attached to the actual church building, for the purposes of this essay I will address only extant ones that were. In today’s world, these chambers, while no longer a central focus of parish life, are still integral parts of the parish churches to which they are attached. In this essay, I will explore modern usages of medieval anchoritic spaces in England. Relying on the architectural concept of adaptive reuse, and the accompanying theories of place attachment and heritage conservation, I submit that the contributions of anchorites to the parish community in the Middle Ages are matched in contemporary society through the adaptive reuse of the physical cells. Overall, then, I am proposing three main ways that anchorites contributed to the parish community in the late Middle Ages, and in a parallel way, suggest these are the same three ways anchorholds and the anchoritic legacy still contribute to today’s parish communities. I have classified these as spiritual contributions, social contributions, and financial contributions. In other words, repurposed anchorholds in England fulfill each of these categories, albeit in different manners than in the past. 2

3

4

The anchoritic life was well known, if not exactly commonplace, in the Patristic and medieval Western Church. Beginning with the Desert Fathers in early Egypt (c. third century CE), and continuing through the Reformation, the life of vocational withdrawal peaked in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although there was also an upsurge in the ninth century. The majority of English anchorites were women. See especially Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) for an overview. See Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London: Methuen, 1914), 73–84; Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 77; Paulette L’Hermite-Leclercq, “La femme, la recluse et la mort,” in Muerte, Religiosidas y Cultura Popular Siglos XIII–XVIII, ed. Eliseo Serrano Martin (Zaragoza: Institucion Fernando el Catolico, 1994), 151–62, esp. 154. I have found a number of extant two-story cells, although usually each story was still quite small. A few were larger, and some records indicate some cells had small, enclosed gardens attached to them. Cells were supposed to be sparsely furnished with just the basics: a bed, a fireplace, religious objects, base necessities, and reading materials.



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Merging the importance of anchorholds to parish life with the principles of adaptive reuse gives us a glimpse of the importance of these spaces throughout time. Most central to an exploration of space and topography as it relates to anchoritism is the central location of the cells themselves. Many cells were attached to a church so that the anchoress could “participate” in mass through the squint (a small window between the cell and the church). However, the medieval church was not only a spiritual center; it was a social center, too. For instance, “some porticos and porches [of churches] were used as law courts or for storage of documents and books. The Romanesque basilica […] often had nooks and corners set apart from its main functions for treasuries and other purposes.”5 Further, one preacher’s exemplum (tentatively attributed to Jacques de Vitry, d. 1240) laments the common use of dark corners in churches and cathedrals for secret lovers’ trysts. Besides these purely secular endeavors, there were some “semi-sacred” uses of church space such as an impromptu gathering to listen to an itinerant preacher for mid-week entertainment. Another of these not-quite-secular events was liturgical drama, which was acted within the church or near the churchyard or nave, two other common places for anchorholds to be built. Finally, as Katherine French, among others, has explored, financial support and money raising were central to late medieval parish life – and often the province of women.6 While many anchorholds were built attached to church walls, some were constructed in other locations significant to parish life. Some were built into more public areas, such as castles, while others were attached to convents, monasteries, or hospitals. A few were free-standing structures in churchyards. Since spatial order, as a social creation, is not fixed, by constructing an anchorage in a publicly configured space, a place for community rituals, the anchor/ess inscribed a religious significance onto a space previously designated as secular – just as holding a trial at the church door created a semi-secular feel within a designated sacred area. Anchorholds were also sometimes attached to chapels near bridges and at gates, although this was more common for hermitages. Conceptually, though these areas are public, they are also boundaries: between land and water, and between city and country. The anchorholds at gateways can be seen as forming an axis of this transitional state, marking the teleological movement from wilderness (spiritual deprivation) to civilization (spiritual satisfaction).7 Significantly, 5 6

7

Christopher and Rosalind Brooke, Popular Religion in the Middle Ages (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), 88. See both The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Michelle M. Sauer, “Anchoritism, Liminality, and the Boundaries of Vocational Withdrawal,” Journal of Medieval Religious Culture 42.1 (2016): iv–xi (v).

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anchorites signaled an existence between life and death, dwelling in a public location but shut away from the world, and physically existing though declared dead to the world.8 In short, the medieval space of an anchorhold was at once both intensely private and pointedly public, just as the adapted spaces are today.

Terminology: Space, Place Attachment, and Adaptive Reuse In general, adaptive reuse refers to the process of giving a building a new existence and function when it is no longer used or suitable for use in its original function.9 It is a process of change and requires a certain amount of flexibility. Moreover, adaptive reuse requires a different mindset than “redevelopment” or “adjustment,” both of which imply progressively improving something, rather than simply changing function or purpose. What this means is that adaptive reuse “has [been] extended from the realm of developers and architects into a broader, more public arena.”10 This shift in perspective is particularly important when dealing with buildings, such as churches, that are central to the community. Numerous scholars have demonstrated that churches serve as cultural and heritage symbols and thus act as a center of individual and community life. Churches are rooted in the collective memories of the members of a society and become a source of identity, places that carry strong emotional bonds; consequently, the public becomes concerned with keeping the integrity of these buildings and maintaining their cultural heritage symbols. Yet, churches, like other buildings, can outlive their original purpose and design. Adaptive reuse of an anchorhold can be seen as a small-scale version of adaptive reuse of a church after redundancy, a common practice within the Church of England.11 The main emphasis is on finding suitable alternative uses for listed buildings or those within conservation areas in order to preserve 8

9

10 11

Before entering their anchorhold, whereupon they would have been sealed in permanently, anchorites participated in a requiem mass, which, in effect, rendered them the “living dead.” For more background on adaptive reuse and its architectural principles, see, among other sources, Fons Asselbergs, “Strategische keuzes voor de toekomst,” in Monumentenzorg. Dynamiek in behoud, ed. E. van Brederode, N. Nelissen, B. Verfurden, and A. Welgraven (The Hague: Sdu, 1996), 278–93. Kirsten Velthuis and Dirk H. R. Spennemann, “The Future of Defunct Religious Buildings: Dutch Approaches to Their Adaptive Re-use,” Cultural Trends
16/1 (2007): 43–66 (45). According to ChurchofEngland.org, around twenty Church of England buildings are closed to worship each year. Pastoral Measure 1983 sets out the provisions and procedures for settling the future of these buildings.



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important parts of national heritage. However, it is only recently that society has begun to consider what adaptive reuse means for the crossover between secular and sacred, and also what it means for connections between the past and the present. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush suggest that heritage is cultural property, and that claims on such are part of identity construction in the modern world, particularly in the production of group identity.12 The importance of places and spaces within them is also central to understanding the production of cultural values also, which is a crucial aspect of the active process of producing identity. The emphasis on producing identity, and the shift from remodeling to adaptive reuse, stems, in part, from the phenomenological concept of “place attachment.” Place attachment and meaning are underlying human experiences that shape civic development and community building. Human attachment to setting often focuses on a specific area with an extensive history. Where place identity is high, people are more inclined to support expenditures directed toward preservation and restoration. In this case, the interconnectedness of the medieval and the modern creates a “sense of place” that moves beyond temporal confines to a unique type of social capital. This is particularly important to note with ancient structures, since “most medieval buildings do not survive unmodified as medieval buildings, of course; they have distinctive histories of discontinuity, disruption, and violent destruction.”13 Cultural heritage studies asks us to consider the multiple meanings of a particular place and its accompanying spaces in the context of a society outside of time constraints – what makes a place worthy of preservation today is generally a reflection of its importance in the past. More specifically, the cultural value of architecture is a premise shared by many fields, and studying the interpretation of it can be summarized into two general trends: one that sees the cultural symbolic value of architecture as originating mainly from its relationship with social values representing a particular time period, and another that derives value from the relationship between built environments and the daily lives of its inhabitants. The first viewpoint reflects broad contextual changes in a society, but also tends towards “elite” representations, whereas the second viewpoint reveals human perceptions and activities within their environments, and generally prioritizes vernacular architecture. In other words, the human experience of the environment is the basis for the cultural value of architecture. This interaction between perception and conception can also be framed as phenomeno12

13

See Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, “Introduction,” in Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 1–15. Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals,” 12.

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logical embodiment and neuroembodiment, and is a valuable tool to use in categorizing human experience, rendering a shared culture that reflects the community’s values from a built environment.14 As adaptive reuse also conserves architectural, social, cultural, and historical values, some have suggested that it is essentially a form of heritage conservation.15 Heritage buildings form an integral part of a community’s social and symbolic capital, and, therefore, conserving heritage buildings provides significant economic, cultural, and social benefits. Such buildings lend atmosphere to communities, and, if conserved for future generations, provide a valuable glimpse of the past while offering a cross-temporal connection along the timeline. When adaptive reuse is applied to heritage buildings, it not only retains the building, but also conserves the effort, skill, and dedication of the original builders.16 People also feel a stronger sense of connection with their local surroundings through heritage buildings, which are often cultural icons and provide a sense of social sustainability. In particular, “difficult” buildings (sometimes termed “white elephant buildings”), such as churches and monuments – two edifices commonly linked with cultural heritage – require multifaceted approaches to their preservation and adaptation, and, as a result, their repurposing tends to reflect larger community goals: An important characteristic of efforts to preserve white elephant buildings is a strong level of community involvement and public–private partnership. More often than not, projects involving white elephant buildings require an enormous amount of persistence and cooperation among all parties involved. […] These cooperative efforts often result in buildings with more community-oriented uses [that reflect] the level of public involvement in the effort to redefine these buildings.17

14 15

16

17

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), esp. 28–30. See R. D. F. Bromley, A. R. Tallon, and C. J. Thomas, “City Centre Regeneration through Residential Development: Contributing to Sustainability,” Urban Studies 42/13 (2005): 2407–29. For more on this perspective, see Peter A. Bullen and Peter E. D. Love, “Adaptive Reuse of Heritage Buildings,” Structural Survey 29/5 (2011): 411–21; Robert W. Burchell and David Listokin, The Adaptive Reuse Handbook (Piscataway, NJ: The Center for Urban Policy Research, 1981); Derek Latham, Creative Re-use of Buildings (Shaftesbury: Donhead, 2000). National Trust for Historic Preservation, “New Life for White Elephants: Adapting Historic Buildings for New Uses,” in Preservation Information: One in a Series of Historic Preservation Information Booklets (Washington, DC: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1996).



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Communities especially become involved with cultural preservation when the end result is their ability to interact with the built environment. Churches were originally built to encourage community participation; it stands to reason that adaptive reuse of church properties also promises benefit to the parish community. A tangible benefit beyond preservation of cultural heritage is particularly welcome. However, “the conservation of cultural heritage is by no means restricted to practical and technical considerations, but also involves complex questions of authority, ownership, and cultural identity in the present.”18 Monuments, buildings, and other artifacts (anchorholds) facilitate the negotiation of identity and the expression of identity. People often define who and what they are by where they live and the artifacts within that locale.

Anchoritic Place Attachment Anchoritically speaking, an excellent example of the intersection of cultural heritage, place attachment, and architectural adaptation is Julian of Norwich’s famous cell. Almost everything in the church dates only to 1953, when it was rebuilt after being bombed during a WWII air-raid. Although the church stands on the medieval site and contains some medieval traces, little remains beyond scraps of history. Julian’s cell has been completely reconstructed and reconceived of as a chapel on the south side of the church. As such, it is unlikely even to have been built on the location of her actual dwelling, since many anchorholds were built on the north side. Nevertheless, the chapel/ cell is a popular destination for tourists and pilgrims alike. Julian is the most famous anchoress of medieval Britain, a celebrated author, and a saint in the Anglican Church. The industry surrounding her is brisk. The bookstore next door sells a great many Julian-themed items, including a book about her cat as well as key chains, candles, rosaries, and so on. The Julian created by these images and the volunteers, as well as the industry surrounding both, is a woman who was deeply involved in parish life. Indeed, Julian is envisioned as crucial to the parish: dispensing advice, talking with troubled individuals, petting her cat, reading and writing prayers, even hearing confessions after a fashion. As a site of cultural heritage, the cell becomes a focal point for remembering medieval Britain, making it come alive and preserving that inheritance for future generations. 18

Siân Jones, “‘That stone was born here and that’s where it belongs’: Hilton of Cadboll and the Negotiation of Identity, Ownership and Belonging,” in Able Minds and Practised Hands: Scotland’s Early Medieval Sculpture in the 21st Century, ed. S. Foster and M. Cross, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 23 (2005): 37–53 (38).

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I have been able to experience such heritage preservation myself. In the summer of 2005, I went to Chester-le-Street in County Durham to see the fairly well-known anchoritic cell at the parish Church of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert. I found the way marked easily enough, even with a side street marked “anchorage,” and entered the church and, within it, the Ankers House Museum (commonly billed as the smallest museum in Britain). There I was greeted by volunteers who enthusiastically told me all about anchorites. Much of their information was at least passably correct, but I did a double-take when I heard that “the anchoress” was also the local doctor, and that sick people would come to her as a sort of dispensary to receive herbs, advice, and remedies. The anchoress was an important member of the parish community, the volunteers told me. She would hold “office hours” of sorts, speaking to everyone through her window. I was rather surprised by this insistence, but went on my way to examine the cell. It has been slightly modified over the years, but the squints are still intact, so I could see what “she” saw. As an anchoritic scholar, I was happy to take the step back in time to experience the space for myself; however, I could not help but be amused by the misinformation. The anchorites who lived at Chester-le-Street were male priests, not female herbalists.19 It is also rather unlikely that an anchoress would have also served as the community doctor. My assumption, as someone who has studied this vocation for most of my career, was that the Ankers House Museum was attempting to capitalize on the reputation of Julian of Norwich, the most famous anchoress of medieval Britain, and around whom a brisk tourist and commercial trade exists. Although Ankers House does not have a gift shop or other ephemera, it is clear by the creation of the “smallest museum” and the false backstory of the saintly anchoress/wise woman that the people at Chester-le-Street are attempting to create an image similar to that of “Mother Julian.” While at Ankers House, I felt a personal connection with both the space and the place. Entering the cell, and thinking about the lives of the anchorites who dwelled within the walls, I was caught up in a moment of extra-temporal place attachment. The connection I felt stretched across time, across distance, across vocation, and across national boundaries. It was a moment both outside time and inside space. To better understand this sensation, which is a side effect of place attachment, we might consider the sociological work of Henri Lefebvre, whose position is that the construction of space involves three categories (social space, physical space, and mental space), alongside the lived synergism of place discussed by Maurice 19

See Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, 82.



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Merleau-Ponty in his theory of the body-subject, which refers to the precognitive, normally unnoticed facility of the lived body to smoothly integrate its actions with the world at hand.20 Place attachment is part of a broader, lived synergy in which the various human and environmental dimensions of place reciprocally impel and sustain each other.21 Complex bodily routines and ensembles extending over time and space contribute to the lived dimensions of place, including attachment grounded in habitual regularity. Phenomenologically, then, place can be defined as any environmental locus in and through which individual or group actions, experiences, intentions, and meanings are drawn together spatially, regardless of temporal congruency. In studies about place attachment, a place is not a physical environment separate from people associated with it, but, rather, the indivisible, normally unnoticed phenomenon of person-or-people-experiencing-place. Doreen Massey has argued that places are processes created by the connections between peoples and their bigger geographies, so places are made through use and imagination.22 She imagines space as a simultaneity of “stories-so-far,” while places might be characterized as “collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”23 Combining cultural cues with dynamism, we are left with a set of frameworks to help examine historical places, their contexts, and community reactions to them – both medieval and modern. 20

21

22 23

See Henri Lefebvre, The Social Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992; orig. 1958); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; orig. 1945). Place attachment has multi-disciplinary foundations, and while it is particularly important to environmental design, it also features heavily in architecture, leisure assessment, and other such fields. Place attachment is sometimes synonymous with terms such as community attachment, place identity, or even sense of place. See, among others, Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Harold M. Proshansky, Abbe K. Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff, “Place-identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 3/1 (1983): 57–83; Setha M. Low and Irwin Altman, “Place Attachment: A Conceptual Inquiry,” Human Behavior & Environment: Advances in Theory & Research 12 (1992): 1–12; M. Carmen Hidalgo and Bernardo Hernandez, “Place Attachment: Conceptual and Empirical Questions,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 21/3 (2001): 273–81; M. Carmen Hidalgo and Bernardo Hernandez, “Attachment to the Physical Dimension of Places,” Psychological Reports 91/3 (2002): 1177–82; Gerard T. Kyle, A. J. Mowen, and M. Tarrant, “Linking Place Preferences with Place Meaning: An Examination of the Relationship between Place Motivation and Place Attachment,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 24/4 (2004): 439–54; Chia-Chin Lin and Michael Lockwood, “Forms and Sources of Place Attachment: Evidence from Two Protected Areas,” Geoforum 53 (2014): 74–81. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005). Massey, For Space, 130.

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I am confining this discussion to the built environment (architecture) – that is, the physical anchorholds themselves, not the literature about them. Thus, in turn, only the spaces of religious and spiritual practice will factor into consideration.24 Sacred space can be seen as extremely fluid: spatial radiations of holiness might emanate outwards from a holy site such as a monastery or anchorhold, rendering the division between sacred and profane confused. This perception is markedly demonstrated by Julian’s cell. As I noted previously, her cell is now a combination of shrine, museum, and chapel; however, there are also a gift shop and a lending library run by the Friends of Julian of Norwich. These are housed in an adaptively reused parish hall on the corner. The gift shop runs a lively business in Julian baubles, such as jewelry, plaques, mugs, books, and even hazelnut necklaces, many of which feature her famous saying, “All shall be well.” In a modern-day version of the medieval relic-trade, this passion for all things Julian has spread beyond the shrine’s borders, indeed beyond the borders of religion. Etsy, a popular website that sells handmade arts and crafts, has an entire Julian of Norwich category.25 In a sense, this speaks to Julian’s reclamation of a digital social space. Aside from kitsch-y modern relics, however, the adaptive reuse of the physical quasi-religious space of Julian’s cell is made all the more poignant by the current urban context of Norwich. Barely thirty steps from the entrance to her shrine, I once found some graffiti defacing a wall that read, “When do we get to do the hazelnuts?” This area of town used to border the red-light district, seamlessly blending urban squalor, sexual deviance, and pious pilgrimage into one landscape, with two adaptively reused medieval structures as the fulcrum tipping the balance in favor of cultural heritage.26

Anchorites, the Parish Community, and Adaptive Reuse As an anchoritic scholar, I knew, without knowing, that anchorites were an important part of everyday parish life. Still, I had a difficult time thinking 24

25 26

This approach resembles Roberta Gilchrist’s work on the Norwich Cathedral Close. Gilchrist’s careful articulation of the types of sacred space within the cathedral and its precinct offers a fruitful paradigm for other studies of sacred space, and amply illustrates the disciplinary interplay among archaeology, history, architecture, and literature used to explore the social and economic functions of the Cathedral. See Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), esp. 11–12. See “Julian of Norwich” at . Stock changes daily. The area is now being renovated as part of an urban renewal project, thus altering the city landscape once again.



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of them in as carefree a manner as modern “tour directors,” like the volunteers at Ankers House Museum, had portrayed. Anneke Mulder-Baker, however, has fewer qualms: “living in their anchorholds in the midst of their fellow citizens, anchoresses did not lead an isolated existence. […] Instead, they were strong, self-assured believers who chose to live at the heart of the community and to serve God in a way that included service to their fellow human beings.”27 While this might be overstating the case somewhat, I do think a great deal of anchoritic life consisted of service to humanity, and as contributing members of the parish. Solitude was, as I have argued, a constructed concept anyway, making anchorites as important to the community as other religious figures.28 And of course the original anchorites, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, were important on both spiritual and material levels to their communities. As Benedicta Ward notes, “the monk, especially the hermit, […] [was] a focus of spiritual power for his neighbours.”29 Having a perceived special relationship with God made the recluse a powerful intercessor. Moreover, the Historia Monachorum reports that these solitaries also provided food and gold from their own carefully hoarded stores during lean times, giving back to the parish community that supported them and their contemplative endeavors. Thus, from the inception of the vocation, recluses, despite their solitary lives, have been integral to the parish. This tradition is carried through in anchoritic literature as well. The best-known anchoritic rule, the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), states that the anchoress “should be of so holy a life that […] Christian people can lean upon them and trust them, while they hold her up with their holiness of life and their blessed prayers.”30 Clearly anchoresses were expected to develop some sort of public reputation – for healing, for counseling, or for prophecy. Similarly, Aelred, in his twelfth-century De Institutione Inclusarum  (Rule for a Recluse), counsels his sister to allow the virtues of chastity, humility, and charity to blend together in order to create

27

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Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 13. See Michelle M. Sauer, “Privacy, Exile, and the Rhetoric of Solitude in the Middle English Anchoritic Tradition,” in The Rhetorics of Anchoritism, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 96–110. Benedicta Ward, “Introduction,” The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, trans. Norman Russell (London and Oxford: Mowbray; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1980), 12. Ancrene Wisse, Part III, ed. and trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 101.

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proper charitable love for her neighbors.31 Grimlaic of Metz, a ninth-century priest and scholar who wrote Regula solitariorum (Rule for Solitaries), also confirms edification through exemplarity as the foremost concern of the solitary: “we who aspire to lead the solitary life must devote our energy always to doing what will build others up […] let us show ourselves to be the kind of people who are an example of light for everyone.”32 The Speculum Inclusorum (Mirror of Recluses), a fourteenth-century rule, for instance, states that anchorites live a life of penance on behalf of all people.33 By assuming the difficult life of isolation and constant prayer, the anchorite also assumed responsibility for his or her fellow parishioner. As one of God’s favored, he or she had a responsibility to pray for others. The main anchoritic spiritual contributions to the parish were, therefore, serving as a holy example as well as offering prayers and tangible charity. Some anchorites continue that work, guiding the faithful of the parish, even today. In some ways, anchoritic spirituality influences many people without them realizing it. Julian of Norwich recognized that her book(s) were not written for her, but for others: “I was lerned to take it to alle min evenchristen, alle in generalle and nothing in specialle.”34 Felicity Riddy points out that “writing the book entailed remembering the original inchoate experience, finding meaning in it, organizing it and shaping it into a text, designed for those fellow-Christians on whose behalf she believed the visions had been given to her.”35 This mission, to help educate her fellow Christians, 31

32 33

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See Aelredi Abbatis Rievallensis Opera Omnia I. Opera Ascetica, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), and Aelred of Rievaulx, “Rule of Life for a Recluse,” Aelred of Rievaulx: Treatises & Pastoral Prayer, ed. and trans. Mary Paul Macpherson (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 41–102. Grimlaicus, Rule for Solitaries, trans. Andrew Thornton (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), 69. See Speculum Inclusorum – A Mirror for Recluses: A Late Medieval Guide for Anchorites and its Middle English Translation, ed. and trans. E. A. Jones (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). At the age of thirty-three, Julian became gravely ill, and during this period of sickness, she experienced visions of Christ, among others. She recorded these visions, known collectively as the Revelations of Divine Love, in two versions, a Short Text that records primarily the contents of the visions, and a Long Text that is a theological treatise interconnecting the subject matter of the visions with theological musings. See The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), where the editors Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins suggest using the terminology A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman for the Short Text and A Revelation of Love for the Long Text. Although they make a strong case for the new system, it has yet to catch on widely. A Revelation, 37.5–6, p. 235. Felicity Riddy, “‘Publication’ Before Print: The Case of Julian of Norwich,” in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–49 (44).



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continues today: “Julian’s texts have had a more robustly continuous life than those of any other Middle English mystic. Their history […] is virtually unbroken since the fifteenth century.”36 Academics, theologians, and lay enthusiasts alike are consumers of Julian goods, ranging from scholarly editions and interpretations to general devotionals to hazelnut necklaces. Many of the popular devotional works interweave Julian’s writing with modern reflections or even exercises designed to elicit particular responses. Thus, even in the twenty-first century, Julian continues to guide her fellow parishioners in prayer.37 A more physical version of this guidance even after death is found in St. Mary of Charity in Faversham (Kent). A brass plate near the high altar commemorates the priest-anchorite William Thornbury, who lived in a cell in the churchyard. It reads, in part: “O you, passing pilgrim, in youth, in adulthood, or in age, pour out, for my sake, a prayer of yours that hope of pardon for all may be mine.” Thus, anyone who reads the plaque, or even walks over it, prays both for Thornbury and for his parishioners even today in the twenty-first century.38 Phenomenologically, those who participate today in furthering Thornbury’s medieval goal of helping his parish community also share in an extra-temporal occurrence, and become part of the sacred space of the anchoritic experience. Although Thornbury left behind only a plaque, and not an entire cell, those architectural remnants often reflect a similar spiritual contribution. The most popular form of adaptive reuse of churches is religious repurposing. On a church level this usually means selling the building to another denomination (e.g., the Anglicans selling to the Methodists). On an anchorhold level, this could mean converting the anchorhold into a chapel, vestry, or a Sunday school room. In All Saints, King’s Lynn (Norfolk), the anchorhold has become a chapel. The anchorhold itself was rebuilt during the Victorian era. The entire space has been enlarged, but, and perhaps more significantly, 36

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Alexandra Barratt, “How Many Children had Julian of Norwich? Editions, Translations and Versions of her Revelations,” in Vox Mystica: Essays for Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Ann Clark Bartlett, Thomas Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William F. Pollard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 27–39 (27). Despite the popularity of all things Julian, it is clear that a real understanding of the anchoritic life is not widespread among Julian fans. The stories and gifts focus on her interactions with other people (or her cat) and how she dealt with people of the parish, rather than on the long stretches of time she spent alone in her cell in contemplation. Thornbury was enclosed the last eight years of his life. In his will, he left funds for perpetual annuities for the repose of his soul, as well as separate bequests for the anchoress enclosed in the cell attached to the church and her maid, and, finally, ongoing bequests for the anchoresses who were supposedly going to dwell in the cell in the future. See Anon., “Anchorites in Faversham Churchyard,” Archaeologia Cantiana 11 (1877): 24–39.

1. Brass plate commemorating William Thornbury, St. Mary of Charity, Faversham, Kent (photo: author)



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the squint has also been enlarged, and although it still looks out towards the main altar, it no longer prevents the viewing of the occupant of the chapelcum-cell. In another church, St. Michael’s, Warmington (Warwickshire), the squint has been blocked and the space is more or less untouched, although it has been repurposed as a chapel. It is a large and empty stone space, with a direct view of the altar. The space is now, as it was in the Middle Ages, a quiet room for contemplation and prayer. Moreover, these parishes have extended the spiritual contributions of the former occupants – whoever prays in these chapels prays with the anchorites, who are likely buried under the cell floor, just as visitors still pray with William Thornbury when they read his brass. Aside from chapels or other spaces of prayer, a number of anchorholds have become vestries. Vestries are quasi-sacred spaces used to keep vestments and sometimes liturgical objects, and are usually positioned near the altar. This type of adaptation makes sense on a religious and economic level – the space is still technically sacred, and the cells are, for the most part, conveniently located. Almost every cell I found in Suffolk had been adapted into a vestry. Other examples include cells found in Newcastle-on-Tyne (Tyne and Wear), Staindrop (County Durham), and Milton Regis (Kent). With startling frequency, the cells used for vestries are also two-story cells. Aside from spiritual assistance and guidance, however, anchorites also contributed to the social fabric of the community. In architectural terms, educational repurposing of anchoritic space bridges the expanse between spiritual and social, while furthering the sense of extra-temporal place attachment. For example, in St. Andrew’s, Saxthorpe (Norfolk), the Venerable Cicely’s cell has become a Sunday-school room. The squint in Saxthorpe has even been blocked up to use as a cupboard for “holy things,” in a parody of the anchoress’ cupboard. Not only does this adaptive reuse resonate with the place attachment of the individual parish, but also it hearkens back to the medieval form of the vocation. While there was a certain amount of resistance to anchorites serving as teachers – Aelred of Rievaulx in particular warned against the anchoress becoming a schoolmistress because he feared her contact with the outside world and a disruption of prayer, as well as the possibility of lesbian desire – the number of warnings against anchoresses becoming schoolteachers likely indicates that a number of them were such. For instance, Jutta, Hildegard of Bingen’s mentor, ran a school that was praised for the education imparted to the young women, and supported by the local parishes.39 Lame Margaret of Magdeburg considered teaching to be her specific vocation. She insisted she 39

Jutta of Spanheim (1091–1136 CE), daughter of Count Stephen of Spanheim, was an anchoress in the Rhineland-Palatinate.

2. Sunday-school room, St. Andrew’s, Saxthorpe, Norfolk (photo: author)



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“had to provide instruction for her fellow believers and teach them the basic tenets of Christian doctrine.”40 In her mystical conversations with Christ, Margaret begged him to “send me people whom I can instruct and teach, so that they can arrive at knowledge of the true love for You.” Christ’s response was not only to send her candidates, but also to reaffirm her vocation, saying, “[Margaret], I created you [to be] a teacher of love.” Grimlaic’s rule is even more direct: “solitaries ought to be teachers,” he writes, “not people who need to be taught, and they ought also to be wise and learned.”41 Today, in Saxthorpe, in Cicely’s cell, the youth of the parish learn about God and God’s love in the same space as His Bride lived. Also bridging the spiritual–social gap is the relatively large number of anchorholds that have been turned into rooms that serve other parish needs. These reuses reflect the common adaptations of music/theatre and exhibition spaces. For example, the cell off the entryway at St. Michael and All Angels in Hartlip (Kent) is a choir dressing-room. Still others are now garden sheds and catch-all storage closets, and almost every parish church has at least some community exhibition in place at all times. Another common version of adaptive reuse is commercial adaptation, with a number of redundant churches being turned into nightclubs, garden shops, or tearooms. Anchoritic adaptations to the commercial exist only tangentially; however, this sort of alteration ties directly into the anchoritic financial contribution to the medieval (and subsequently the modern) parish. For instance, the Ankers House Museum at Chester-le-Street provides an educational experience as well as a small income. Similarly, the gift shop near Julian’s cell generates enough income to be self-sustaining, while also providing educational materials. In the medieval world, financial contributions were a reality for anchorites. They were often a source of revenue, a concern at the heart of every parish then and now, and as Eamon Duffy has pointed out, “the 15th century was especially marked by unprecedented lay investment in the parish, and it has been rightly said that in England, there is no period at which money was lavished so freely on parish churches.”42 Wills from the laity are full of bequests for parish adornments as well as for the support and upkeep of 40

41 42

Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 153, and following. Margaret “the Lame” of Magdeburg (1210–50 CE) was an anchoress who lived in a cell attached to St. Albans Church in Magdeburg for the first portion of her life of seclusion, but was eventually moved to Saint-Agnes convent in the nearby community of Neustadt where she remained until her death. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 65. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 133.

3. Choir dressing room, St. Michael and All Angels, Hartlip, Kent (photo: author)



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hermits and anchorites. As well, there were a substantial number of bequests that included funds for pilgrimages to specific anchorite cells, either to fulfill a vow made during the testator’s lifetime or as an additional “good work.” Warren notes a specific preponderance of members of the Drapers’ Guild in anchoritic bequests, who often simultaneously left money both to the recluse(s) and to any “newly poor” member of the parish, with the anchorite occasionally being named guardian of the newly poor’s goods. This highlights a specific connection between anchorites and works of charity.43 Once incarcerated, the anchoress became dependent upon her saved financial resources, money from her family, gifts from spiritual children, and the largesse of the community as a whole.44 Therefore, it was within the community’s best interest that the anchorite be self-sufficient.45 Yet, the anchoress was not expected – or intended – to be completely independent; in fact, she was a means of offering a charitable outlet for the community, who could provide everything from food to clothing if needed. These donated goods, however, lay at the heart of the anchorite’s financial contributions. Just as the Desert Fathers contributed hoarded gold and food to their former neighbors during lean times, hermits contributed to late medieval parishes in tangible ways, through repairing roads and bridges, and contributions of food and gold.46 Here, the anchorite takes on the role of supplier, savior of the parish, and viable contributor. Grimlaic specifically states that before entering the cell, all worldly possessions should be sold and the proceeds distributed to the anchorite’s new parish home. Further, any alms offered to him by the faithful were to be turned over to the priest for use as he saw fit. Simon the Anchorite, author of the Fruit of Redemption (printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1514), contributed a great deal to the parish of All Hallows on London Wall. According to the churchwardens’ account book, Simon was a liberal donor both towards regular expenses and towards extraordinary necessities. In 1512, he held twenty-five shillings for the church; in 1513, he 43 44 45

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Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, esp. 231–33. Records indicate that it was fairly common for people to bequeath amounts to local anchorites, presumably in return for the holy person’s continued prayers. For instance, in the thirteenth century, a woman named Alice de Falketon asked permission from Archbishop Walter Giffard to become an anchoress in the churchyard of St. Nicholas. Before consenting to her request, the Archbishop ordered his investigator, the Archbishop of East Riding, to inquire into de Falketon’s finances. Further, the Archdeacon was charged with determining whether or not allowing de Falketon would benefit the spiritual environment of the parish. See the Registers of W. Giffard and H. Bowett, ed. T. S. Holmes (London: Harrison & Sons, for the Somerset Record Society, 1899). See Michelle M. Sauer, “The Function of Spiritual and Material Roads in the English Reclusive Tradition,” in Medieval Roads, ed. Valerie J. Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 201-24.

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donated a stand of ale to the parish house and four shillings to the coffers; in 1514, he gave forty-two shillings during Lent; and, in 1522, he contributed a silver pax and chalice to the parish treasury.47 Aside from donating hoarded gold, anchorites contributed financially to parishes through tourism. Anchorholds became a medieval tourist-trap of sorts, with local pilgrims stopping by to visit. Once there, these visitors bought food, paid for lodgings, and generally contributed to the economy. Anchorites were also a draw during village fairs for the same reasons. Social contributions of anchorites overlapped with the spiritual and the financial, with the idea of tourism being a merger of spiritual leadership, social modeling, and financial responsibility. Interestingly enough, this same contribution still exists in today’s world. A number of parish churches in Britain have websites on which they boast about their anchorholds, inviting interested parties to visit (and, hopefully, donate money). Some have even gone so far as to highlight a false or at least questionable anchorhold simply because they cannot bear to give up their unique feature. The church of St. Mary and All Saints in Willingham (Cambridgeshire) is one such parish, dedicating several pages to making its case and inviting interested parties to visit, even though the historical and visual evidence points to the structure being a chantry chapel instead of an anchorhold.48 Both Chester-le-Street and Julian of Norwich’s cell are examples of modern-day tourism, as I mentioned earlier. All Saints North, in York, too, invites tourists to see their Pricke of Conscience window as well as its anchorhold.49 Other common forms of adaptive reuse for church buildings include multi-purpose or sports-related buildings. Although these are less likely to 47

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See the Will of Simon Appulby, in Mary C. Erler’s Reading and Writing during the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns 1530–1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148–49; also chap. 1 “Looking Backward? London’s Last Anchorite, Simon Appulby,” 14–31. Most sources agree that the small structure with an acute pointed roof is the chantry chapel that belonged to the manor of Willingham. See, for instance, the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Volumes 11–12; Cambridge Antiquarian Society (Cambridge, 1907), 291, and “Willingham: Church,” in A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 9, Chesterton, Northstowe, and Papworth Hundreds, ed. A. P. M. Wright and C. P. Lewis (London: Victoria County History, 1989), 409–11, , accessed 14 August 2015. The Pricke of Conscience is an early fourteenth-century Middle English apocalyptic poem concerning the last fifteen days of earthly existence and encourages penitential reflection. The poem was obviously widely read, as over 130 manuscript copies survive. The Pricke of Conscience window, which dates to c. 1410–20 CE, is unique in Europe. Each panel depicts one of the final fifteen days, with both an image and a selection of text from the poem.



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show up in anchorholds, there is at least one example of an anchorhold being used as a gardening closet. Other forms of adaptive reuse for churches include music, theater, or exhibition space. In this vein, the cell in Hartlip, which is located, rather oddly, at the entryway of the church, has become a choir robe and changing room. The view from the squint of a cell at St. Anne’s (St. Mary Westout) in Lewes, East Sussex, has been sacrificed in favor of organ pipes. The cell itself is barely accessible, as the area is used for extra candlesticks, crucifixes, and paperwork. In a nod to the original purpose of the cell, the parish once commissioned a painting of an “anchoress” reading, which is now hung nearby the entrance to the cell. The woman is shown seated at a table with a book, water jug, and beam of sunshine, enjoying a rather non-anchoritic experience. Finally, the central tenet of parish life is just that – life – and the act of living within the parish community is the embodiment of the spiritual, social, and financial responsibilities. Metaphorically extending this to architectural space is the final type of common adaptive reuse for church buildings, that is, residential reuse. In England, immediately after the Reformation, residential reuse of religious buildings was popular, especially for decommissioned abbeys and monasteries. Residential repurposing is a little trickier in regard to anchorholds. If we extend residential reuse to the idea of social housing, which arguably better fits with the idea of church as a community, we might consider, once again, the cell at Chester-le-Street.50 After the Reformation, it became an almshouse, and in the seventeenth century a number of poor widows resided there. More on point is the reconstructed cell at All Saints North Street in York. This cell was refurbished in the 1920s when an Anglican anchoress resided in the cell. It is built on the site of a house occupied by a fifteenth-century anchoress, Emma Rawton, who had visions of the Virgin Mary.51 Although originally reused as a residence (a religious residence, no less), today, between the cell, which is closed to the public, and the Pricke of Conscience windows, the church has a definite tourist presence.

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Derek Latham suggests that this use preserves some of the humanistic principles enshrined in ecclesiastical building and for others the meaning of the word “church” as a place of sanctuary. See Latham, Creative Re-use of Buildings. The anchorhold at All Saints, North Street had two stories and was in the churchyard adjoining the west end of the church’s north aisle, and one of the squints, or small windows she used to witness mass, can still be seen. The anchoress here in the early fifteenth century, Emma Roughton (Rawgton or Rawghton), claimed to have been shown a prophetic vision by Our Lady in 1421 concerning the future monarch, Henry VI (6 December 1421–21 May 1471), and Richard de Beauchamp (23 January 1382–30 April 1439).

4. Painting of an anchoress, St. Anne’s (St. Mary Westout) Lewes, East Sussex (photo: author)



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Why Adaptive Reuse? Adaptive reuse makes sense on many practical levels: it is environmentally conscious; it is economical; it is creative, and so on. However, on a more emotional level, it allows space to be used as a way of anchoring memory, a method of reviving people and practices of the past. Although adapted, these spaces become historic monuments of sorts. “The purpose of the [historic] monument,” writes Françoise Choay, “is to bring to life a past engulfed by time.”52 In the case of urban patrimony, the past always exists in a contingent state. The adaptive reuse of urban architecture thus provides one means for the “patrimonialization” of structures not initially conceived as monuments, whose life spans may never have been intended to be eternal, although in this case they may also have been meant to represent eternity. Choay also says that urban space is “semantically charged” in the same way that sacred spaces were invested with a range of meanings. Thus it makes natural sense for urban space and sacred space to merge. Since community identity is no longer interwoven only or especially with sacred sites, we no longer need to struggle to maintain a distinction between sacred landscapes and secular ones. Everyone can collectively commemorate both religious and national history. In fact, as Timothy Insoll says, “the same landscape can mean different things to different people, and can be one and the same, and thus lack any arbitrary division.”53 Therefore, instead of accepting a simple dichotomy between secular and sacred, we should argue instead for a focus on the overall context of spaces. This will force us to emphasize fluidity between boundaries, such as those between the sacred and secular, and allow us to see sacred spaces as part of the community identity, rather than a community outside the community. Creating secular relics of anchoritic spaces is such a fluidity. Several churches – Chipping Ongar (Essex), Shoreham-by-Sea (West Sussex), Bengeo (Hertfordshire), and Skipton (North Yorkshire), among others – preserve the squint for no apparent reason, yet will happily show it off if asked. These churches engage with the complex interplay between secularization of archaeological heritage and the politics of religious reform and revival, albeit unwittingly so. This distinction was clearer in the Middle Ages, but the secular world could, and often did, penetrate the church building itself. For instance, many churches contained rooms in which the church officers and sacristans slept and ate. Other churches contained rooms for pilgrims or sick postulants to

52 53

Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren O’Connell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13. Timothy Insoll, Archaeology, Ritual, Religion (London: Routledge, 2004), 88.

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sleep overnight near the sanctuary or a saint’s shrine.54 Similarly, anchorholds merge the secular and sacred in one space. The anchoress prayed, worked, and contemplated in the same space in which she ate, slept, and evacuated.55 Now, we traipse through her space as tourists, looking for connections to the past, or to buy a souvenir hazelnut. The parishes that reuse anchorholds in some manner, although vexing to scholars who want clear pictures of the medieval remnants, are really participating in an extra-temporal continuum of charity and prayer, assuring the recluse that in death, he or she is still caring for the community that supported them in life.

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Paul Binski suggests these sacred sleepovers recalled “incubation rites” associated with preChristian healing cults. See Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 14. Separating the secular and sacred spaces within the church itself became more and more important as the Middle Ages wore on. The clergy made increasing efforts to define their sacred spaces from their more profane surroundings by erecting barriers around the high altar and installing roodscreens and choir screens. On the other hand, I suspect that twostory cells allowed for the separation of functional activities (e.g., eating) from vocational activities (e.g., contemplation).

Here Be Dragons: Mapping Space and Time, Medieval and Modern Paddy Molloy I was invited to contribute to the Medievalist Visions exhibition as an artist rather than a scholar.1 I was commissioned to produce a piece of work that responded to the themes of the exhibition and to think through how my interests might intersect with medieval culture, medieval studies, and medievalism studies. My own practice resides predominately in the field of illustration, a discipline that addresses image-making as a tool to articulate and disseminate ideas. Usually published as counterpoint to text, my images have been used in various printed forms, from newspapers and journals to book covers and posters. Much of my work now centers on the collaborative possibilities of the discipline, however, particularly through involvement with theater companies and in education, and is defined by my interest in the communicative possibilities of the image. I am fascinated by the importance of environment and display in the meaning-making process, and, so, was intrigued to work in a museological context alongside items from disparate collections. This essay plots the path of my research and thinking, and elucidates the connections and disconnections I found between my practice and my medievalist subject matter. At the beginning of the Medievalist Visions project, I was struck by the close etymological ties between illustration and illumination. This made me think about the possibilities of shared practice across time and how I might draw a connection between the medieval illuminator and my practice as a modern illustrator. I was interested in how the term “medievalist vision” invited the possibility of seeing across and through as well as in time, but I was also aware of the cultural baggage the term “medieval” carries. As 1

Medievalist Visions, King’s College London, January–May 2013.

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an age that is widely defined against the apparent artistic watershed of the Renaissance and the scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages appeared to me as a site of great cultural potential in which mythology, science, and art interacted in productive and potentially surprising ways. My knowledge of the Middle Ages was not well-developed; I brought my own preconceptions to the project, which were challenged or confirmed in discussions with the curators. One of my starting points was to think about the use of images in the Middle Ages. Then, as now, images were commonly employed as a prompt to narrative, most publicly in the stained-glass windows of chapels, churches, and cathedrals. These backlit illuminations (with the word here suggesting a more literal, double meaning) brought stories to life in vivid color, with their power augmented by the architecture that framed them. In a similar manner to these windows, much of my practice revolves around the interaction and interdependence of image, narrative, and space. I often work in theatrical contexts, producing illustrated projections viewed in constructed spaces that interact with performers. So, I began to see the theatrical spectacles of the churches and cathedrals of the Middle Ages as offering another valuable meeting point between my work and medieval culture. The contemporary artist and author Alan Moore expresses the crossdisciplinary potential of medieval culture when he writes of “mixed-media procedures in contemporary high-church ceremonies with their stained glass window light shows, smouldering incense, sonorous incantations, fancy costumes and reverberant organ music.”2 As a comic-book author, Moore employs a multidisciplinary approach to narrative and storytelling. His observation offered me another example of how medieval and modern artistic and cultural practices might be brought into contact, which proved to be a valuable insight as my work progressed. In this essay I will track how my work on the project developed, before describing the piece I produced for the exhibition. This was not a purely scholarly project, and my method of working did not follow established academic practice. I was keen, however, to find a starting point for my work in medieval culture and interested to see how my creative practice might be informed by academic work. This essay begins, then, with an account of my exploration of the cultural possibilities of map making before moving on to describe a more personal form of research that took place in the city where I live. Together, the material collected in this essay tells the story of how I found my way to thinking about the cultures of the medieval past, what that past might mean, and how it might be imagined and represented today. 2

Alan Moore, “Mixed Signals,” Arc: The Journal of The Royal College of Art 15 (2011): 40–43 (41).



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Thinking with and about Maps As my preliminary work developed for Medievalist Visions, my interest turned to a form of image and narrative that represented, rather than occupied, space. I began thinking about the possibility of cartography as an illustrative language that had the power to tell stories about space and time. Jorge Luis Borges takes up the dramatic and mythological potential of maps in his short story “On Exactitude in Science.” Borges describes a fictional empire in which “the Art of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the Map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.”3 This process progresses until the society eventually creates a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, which coincided point for point with it.”4 However, the obsession is doomed by its own absurdity, and Borges writes: The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their forebears had been, saw that the vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map; inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.5 In this brief story, the representation becomes reality as the community eventually places more faith in their maps than the landscape they depict. The map is eventually viewed as folly, rejected and forgotten by a new ideology. Borges creates a fascinating allegory that explores not only the ambiguous power of cartography, but also how ideas and obsessions do not necessarily transcend culture and time. It encouraged me to think about how the medieval has been mapped in modernity, in scholarship and art, and how these visions might speak with, or against, medieval culture. The cultural geographer Doreen Massey writes that medieval maps “integrated time and space. They told stories.”6 Their role was not limited to spatial ordering for the purposes of navigation but incorporated philosophical or historical knowledge too. Stories were folded into these renderings of the world. World maps, or mappaemundi, were made throughout the 3 4 5 6

Jorge Louis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999), 325. Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 325. Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 325. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 107.

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Middle Ages. These maps were traditionally oriented to the east, with Asia occupying the top of the map, and Europe and Africa occupying the lower left and right quadrants, respectively. Jerusalem was often pictured at the center of the map. One such surviving map is known as the Cotton Map and has been dated to the mid-eleventh century. This map forms part of a manuscript that also features: secular and religious texts, including accounts of popes, emperors, and bishops; the itinerary of a religious pilgrimage to Rome by Archbishop Sigeric; translations of the Greek poet Aratus; and the exploratory narrative known as The Marvels of the East, an Old English prose piece that speaks of the strange, wild, and magical creatures that occupy the seldom-explored lands of the east.7 This context illustrates the map’s interest in the exploration of the known and unknown, in both geography and culture. Perhaps the most celebrated surviving map from the Middle Ages is the Hereford Mappamundi. As well as displaying the same eastern orientation as the Cotton Map, it, too, is a source of historical and spiritual narrative as well as geographical information. As the custodians of the map at Hereford Cathedral explain: Superimposed on to the continents are drawings of the history of humankind and the marvels of the natural world. These five hundred or so drawings include around four hundred and twenty cities and towns, fifteen biblical events, thirty-three plants, animals, birds and strange creatures, thirty-two images of the peoples of the world and eight pictures from classical mythology.8 The Hereford map presents a way of seeing the world. Its combination of text and image felt very familiar to me, even as the ideas expressed felt very unfamiliar. The contemporary artist Grayson Perry has explored the modern resonances and dissonances of the Hereford Mappamundi in his work “Map of Nowhere,” which appropriates the form of the map to reveal a biography of the artist.9 Perry’s work offered a useful precedent for my project, and as I continued my research I became fascinated by how these maps were at 7

8

9

See Patrick McGurk, “Contents of the Manuscript,” in An Eleventh-Century Anglo-Saxon Illustrated Miscellany: British Library Cotton Tiberius B.V, Part 1, ed. Patrick McGurk, D. N. Dumville, Malcolm R. Godden, and Anne Knock (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Badger, 1983), 15–24. See , last accessed 28 July 2015. See also Naomi Reed Klein, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001). See , last accessed 4 August 2015.



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once representations of the world made in the Middle Ages and yet acted as representations of the medieval world in modernity. As I was thinking about these maps the phrase “Here be dragons” came to me. I was interested to discover that although it is popularly associated with the Middle Ages, no surviving mappaemundi actually use the phrase. While the Hereford map includes illustrations of dragons in its depiction of India, and the Cotton Map warns that “hic abundant leones” (here lions abound) in the extreme north-east of its world,10 the earliest attestation of the phrase is found on the Hunt-Lennox Globe. Made around 1510, it bears the Latin phrase “HIC SVNT DRACONES” around the east coast of Asia.11 Although it is impossible to be certain exactly what the phrase means, it has come to be understood as perhaps articulating areas of the uncharted, the uninhabited, or the dangerous. The phrase and its illustrations represented the unrepresentable. I realized that modern perceptions of medieval maps, and medieval culture more broadly, enacted a similar dialogue between the known and the unknown that often depended on preconceptions and prejudice. I began to see the medieval map as a creative document that offered as much in the way of storytelling and cultural knowledge as it did geographical understanding for navigational or administrative purposes. However useful these maps might be for exploring the concerns of the medieval mind, they offer little reliable information with regard to the topography of the world. Although they delineate geographical forms with some degree of what the modern viewer would recognize as accuracy, they were not designed solely to enable accurate navigation. In the sixteenth century, mathematical approaches that endeavored to transpose a curved world onto a flat sheet in order to ensure safe passage across the world developed and gained popularity. The most enduring of these is the Mercator Projection. Developed by Flemish cartographer Gerhardus Kramer in the sixteenth century, its success lay in the representation of directions of the compass as straight lines. This map was born out of, and indeed aided, the rise of European imperialism – not least because, as well as ensuring accurate movement across the world, the projection’s inevitable distortion of the globe was skewed very much in favor of the European colonists who created and used the map. The result was that Europe was represented as a much larger, dominant feature of the world’s surface than it actually is. Jeremy Black argues that “The Mercator projection highlighted the imperial world of Portugal and Spain, and was an appropriate pre-figuring of the Spanish 10

11

Peter Barber, “Medieval Maps of the World,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 1–44 (5). See also McGurk, Contents of the Manuscript. See , last accessed 31 July 2015.

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success under Phillip II in creating the first global empire.”12 Indeed, these mathematical inventions, with their apparent ability to quantify objectively the natural environment, have come to dominate the European relationship with cartography over the last 500 years. Tim Ingold explains that, as the discipline of cartography developed, maps dealt less and less with the lives and stories of people: “Lines drawn across the surface of the cartographic map [signified] occupation, not habitation.”13 But even apparently objective representations of the world carry cultural meanings. Doreen Massey argues that maps in the contemporary Western world tend now to deal with “Space as the completed product. As a coherent closed system.”14 While medieval maps left room for the unknown and the unknowable, we are perhaps so used to using maps that they may appear to us to be absolute. A completed product suggests being closed to change over time, as well as in space. Like mappaemundi, modern maps are creative representations of perceptions of the world. As Alfred Korzybski famously put it, “the map is not the territory.”15 Though maps present a “system,” our recognition of their being “closed” is evidence of this sense of finality and fact that can cloud our interpretation of these documents. While maps do offer a sense of order to space they also, Massey argues, have the power to “set [us] dreaming, let [our] imagination run,”16 thus dissolving order and creating new systems. Maps always present a world we cannot inhabit, an elsewhere distinct from our lived experience. These two approaches to reading maps – objective and subjective – do not need to be mutually exclusive. Maps can remind one of a journey or prompt a narrative. They can be folded, edited, and shared. They might take on a meaning and use far beyond the intention of the original cartographer. As the Cotton Map and the Hereford Mappamundi demonstrate, they can become icons in their own right and assume new mythical or cultural status. This threshold between seemingly objective renderings of the world at large and the creative internal universes of the reader offers a way to understand medieval mapmaking today. Sylvia Tomasch writes that, “until very recently, maps have been treated by historians of cartography as transparent objects, mediums for the transmission of information, texts needing interpretation 12

13 14 15 16

Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (London: Reaktion, 2000), 30. See also Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man who Mapped the World (London: Phoenix, 2003) and Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. David Fausett (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 85. Massey, For Space, 106. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 2nd edn (Lancaster, PA: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co., 1941), 58. Massey, For Space, 106.



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but in themselves innocent of creative function.”17 Through my research into medieval and modern cartography, I realized that this limited understanding of maps as unquestioning, objective renderings of the world had to be broadened in order to understand maps as a tool for cultural imagination as well as geographical definition. Each map, medieval or modern, needs to be understood as an expression of cultural perspective located in a specific context; moreover, maps have the power to define how the world is understood, even if they claim to merely represent it. Indeed, the Mercator projection, with its Eurocentric rendering of the world, offers the same level of subjective cultural awareness and creativity as the eastern-dominated and Jerusalem-centered mappaemundi of the Middle Ages. Tomasch continues to suggest that “all maps, medieval as well as our own are a means of cultural inscription; maps are declarations that the universe as presented is just what and as we say it is.”18 In this sense, these documents are all creative forms presenting the world as a very human, politically and culturally particular projection, and therefore their meanings are unstable and depend on historical context. I found this focus on creativity a useful point of contact between the otherwise distinct practices of medieval and modern map-making. In her poem “Lunch with Giambattista Nolli,” Dolores Hayden imagines the intentions of the famous cartographer as he attempts to market (with little success) his map of Rome. Nolli’s map was printed in 1748 and is now recognized as the first modern city-map and an important document in the study of cartography. Hayden writes: No one has ever drawn a map like mine, or understood its mathematic power, or counted up its thousand uses – taxing, policing, buying, selling, spying, wooing – that’s not to mention ordinary viewing.19 While the Cotton Map and the Hereford Mappamundi were elite productions, visible to a small number of people, Hayden offers the origins of the map as a commercial product, at once part of people’s day-to-day lives and evocative of meanings beyond their functionality. Maps continue to have 17

18 19

Sylvia Tomasch, “Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Geography of Power, the Technology of Control,” in Literature and Technology, ed. Mark Greenberg and Lance Schachterle (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1992), 66–98 (66). Tomasch, “Mappae Mundi,” 67. Dolores Hayden, “Maps (1), Lunch with Giambattista Nolli,” in City A–Z, ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2000), 143.

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significant roles not only in how we move through a space but also how we relate to that space, how we imagine our place in the world. They are prevalent in all parts of our lives today. Some are so iconic they have been embraced and bestowed with a strong cultural identity and importance by their readers. Perhaps the most significant contribution to modern map-making in Britain is the Ordnance Survey. The Ordnance Survey began life as the Board of Ordnance in 1791 as part of what is now the Ministry of Defence.20 It was a military institution that set out to make detailed maps of British terrain for the purposes of attack and defence. Although the early maps produced by Ordnance Survey were not available to the public at large, they are now used predominantly by navigators of hills and roads in their pursuit of leisure. The OS map has been embraced and has taken on an iconic identity. In the 1930s, Phyllis Pearsall did for the inner city what the OS had done for the British landscape. Through walking and plotting accurate drawings she compiled a useable, modern, London street atlas now known as the A–Z.21 Designed with the public in mind, it allows anybody to use the map for his or her own purposes, making their way through heavily built and populated areas. Together, the OS and the A–Z democratized maps in modern Britain. Personal navigation of space is where most of us come into contact with mapping today. We all make maps to some extent. We plot journeys on the backs of envelopes and draw perhaps unrecognizable paths between one landmark and another. We point with our fingers and recount the many lefts and rights it will take to reach a particular destination. This vernacular form of cartography is what Tim Ingold describes as “sketch maps.”22 These are maps with a human voice and acutely specific function. I began to wonder what a “sketch map” of the Middle Ages would look like, or how a “sketch map” might incorporate elements of a mappamundi. In the 1980s, vernacular cartography moved even closer to the medieval notions of maps as documents of discovery and dissemination of narrative. As part of the rise of the home computer and video-game technology, mapping became a key feature of visualizing new, digital worlds and piecing together the stories they contained. In this early age of the computer game, video graphics were limited, at best, if they even extended beyond written text. It was therefore 20 21

22

On the history of the Ordnance Survey, see Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2011). See Anne Pimlott Baker, “Pearsall, Phyllis Isobel (1906–1996),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, September 2012, , last accessed 5 August 2015. Ingold, Lines, 84.



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common practice at this time for the gamers themselves to draw the worlds they were moving through and mark on those maps key moments of story and action that were pertinent.23 Following my research on medieval mapmaking I see these maps, which unite narrative and geography, as a kind of post-modern mappaemundi. In twenty-first-century Britain, the most common forms of map-making find their way to us through our computers. Launched in 2005, Google Maps offers a form that addresses new uses of cartography with an everbroadening degree of interactive possibilities. It is multi-faceted interface that is led by user agency. Maps can be personalized and shared by dropping pins and planning routes. Specific locations and itineraries can be packaged into these maps to create unique accounts of our engagement with the world. This could be seen as a contemporary development of the map as a conduit for cultural storytelling. This system of maps might also remind us of the map as the political expression of power and control. As with the imperialist maps of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, this map presents a certain dominance through its absolute coverage of the planet. Its use of satellite imaging, graphic renderings, and street imaging at ground level presents a sense of benign omnipotence. Despite public availability and a sense of agency within the map, these maps are never truly democratic. Obviously, Google owns Google Maps, just as OS maps and the A–Z are protected by copyright. It is not an open-source project, and, although it is free and has multiple applications for use, it is only possible to do what Google allows. Even with a feature such as Google Map Maker, which is intended to give more power to the user to amend and adapt the maps, Google has been known to edit and remove things it deems inappropriate. The most celebrated example of this is the insertion of a graphic illustration into the Google Map representation of Pakistan.24 This form of democratized cartography does therefore have clear weaknesses. Maps continue to present an image of the world from a single cultural perspective or address pathways covered by a single maker. This representation is reductive and does not reflect the world’s real complexities or the political tensions in map-making. I was interested to think about how cartography or illustration could begin to address this, and I thought about how a sense of time is politically charged. Returning to Doreen Massey’s work, I found her description of “space as the sphere of a dynamic simul23 24

See , last accessed 8 July 2015. See , last accessed 28 July 2015.

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taneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined […] by the construction of new relations. It is always being made and therefore unfinished.”25 I wondered how I might create a project that looked backwards and forwards in time as well as space in order to map multiple temporalities.

Mapping Space and Time in the Modern City Mapping temporal as well as geographical location is indeed an issue for the cartographer, particularly when addressing the unknown elements of locations in flux. This may be easy to picture if one were to consider, inspired by Borges’s story, the landscape itself as a constructed document, a rendering of itself at a 1:1 scale. We might be able to view the space around us as a representation of time and multiple stories as one. Much of this is clearly visible in the City of London, and, as I began working on my contribution to the Medievalist Visions exhibition, I turned to the environment in which I work to think about how time might be visible or invisible in the city itself. As the work of writers and artists such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller, as well as cartographers such as Phyllis Pearsall, demonstrates, the act of walking can be a way of knowing, reimagining, and remaking the city.26 Movement through space can aid the development of ideas and provide valuable insights into structures of thought as well as inhabitation. In this section of the essay I present some of the research I developed as I turned my gaze from the representations of cartography to the material evidence of the lived city. London, where I live and work, is a city built on a largely medieval plan but created and amended over many hundreds of years; so, it has become something of a patchwork. Bombing during the Second World War devastated huge swathes of the landscape, and redevelopment erased evidence of earlier patterns of inhabitation. One such area of redevelopment is the area known as Barbican, situated to the north of the City, just beyond the Roman city wall. The Barbican was originally a Roman fort; then it became part of the heavily populated ward of Cripplegate; and now it is the iconic and desirable Brutalist vision of the architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bonn.27 The history of the Barbican allowed me to develop the ideas on the experience of space and time prompted by medieval maps. 25 26 27

Massey, For Space, 107. See Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002), and Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train (London: Verso, 2013). See David Heathcote, Barbican: Penthouse over the City (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).



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Within the redeveloped Barbican complex lie two lost streets. The first, Red Cross Street, part of a Roman road, was heavily bombed and subsequently built over as part of the redevelopment. The second, Redcross Street Bridge, appears only in the 1959 Barbican plan as an attempt to retrace the original street. This bridge was never, however, constructed. Here, then, we have two lost streets, erased by time; one that was, and one that never was. Red Cross Street and Redcross Street Bridge provided me with the means to think through the absent and unknowable histories that are present in many contemporary environments and that are very rarely mapped. As I developed my proposal I became increasingly interested in how maps of this area failed to represent this complex and fascinating history. I walked and read around this environment in order to find a way of retracing these missing streets. The journeys formed a kind of active field-study as I passed through the area and used my observations to guide my progress, all the time thinking through the questions around cartography that were presented by my early research. In Barbican, the historic and the contemporary sit in uneasy companionship. Golden Lane, a route that approaches Barbican from the north, is abruptly terminated by the dominating concrete structures of the postwar development. The lane, which was once a pedestrian walkway, is bisected by Beech Street, now a dual carriageway that passes beneath one of the multi-story residential blocks, although prior to the Second World War it was a small road that marked the boundary where Golden Lane became Red Cross Street. As I attempt to navigate the path of this extinct thoroughfare my route is immediately blocked by a thick concrete wall that drives a small side road off to the right and down into a car parking space. In order to relocate the line of Red Cross Street, it is necessary to walk up a pedestrian ramp to the upper level of Ben Johnson Place. This is not a transparent place; there is not even a trace of the medieval street plan. While the proposed Redcross Street Bridge would have maintained a form of connection to earlier configurations of the streets, it is now impossible to map the past through the present. These experiences of urban walking relate to Guy Debord’s thinking on map-making and the experience of the city. In his “Introduction to A Critique of Urban Geography,” Debord dismisses “the path[s] of least resistance that [are] automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which [have] no relation to the physical contour of the terrain).”28 Debord argues for “a renovated cartography,” and claims that “the production of 28

Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harold Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Columbia, Canada: Praxis (e) Press, 2008), 23–27 (25).

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psychogeographical maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but total insubordination to habitual influences.”29 He promotes navigation through instinct, desire, and chance rather than the structures given by town planners. His thoughts, quoted here, gloss his theory of the “dérive” (often translated as “drift”), which attempted to conceptualize how an individual might move through a city directed by the urban environment rather than their own will.30 To dérive is to move through the city without preconceptions of direction and without mapping meaning onto the city. Doreen Massey explores the value of Debord’s work and writes that, “while still attempting to picture the universe,” Situationist cartographies “map the universe as one that is not a single order.” Using maps to disorientate and “provoke a view from an unaccustomed angle,” they “sought to expose the incoherences and fragmentation of the spatial itself.”31 Work developed by Yoko Ono in 1962 speaks to some of these concerns. Ono’s “Map Piece” is a set of instructions that invites its audience to draw a map from their imagination and “go walking on an actual street according to [their] map.” It advises that “if there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside.”32 These maps could be shared and reused in any city. Actions such as these, create, through the intervention of chance and desire, maps of spatial and temporal multiplicity, perhaps successfully charting Massey’s definition of space as “dynamic simultaneity.”33 The exterior and interior spaces within the Barbican complex lend themselves perfectly to these exercises. Navigating the multi levels, maze-like paths, and large open piazzas of a large landscape has the power totally to remove the walker from their previous experience of the streets traversed to arrive here. For instance, the walker at one moment navigates a dark, claustrophobic, covered passageway before being thrust into the open amphitheater at the heart of Frobisher Crescent. A moment later the walker might find themselves dwarfed by Cromwell Tower, which can be a disarming, alienating experience. It is very easy here to become fully immersed in the environment and forget previous modes of movement through the land29 30 31 32 33

Debord, “Introduction,” 26. See Tom McDonagh, “Situationist Space,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonagh (London: The MIT Press, 2002), 241–65. Massey, For Space, 109. See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966 to 1972 (Oakland: University of California Press, 1973), 178. Massey, For Space, 107.



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scape. It is, in short, easy to get lost. David Heathcote articulates a possible reason why this occurs in the Barbican when he writes that “The interior and exterior centre, through their exterior invisibility and interior complexity, combine to defy subject expectations of legibility.”34 To allow intuition to guide one through the unfamiliarity of this environment requires new, necessarily open readings of space. I found a useful corollary to Heathcote’s idea in Henri Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics. Bergson explains that there are two ways to know a thing: The first implies going all around it, the second entering into it. The first depends on the viewpoint chosen and the symbols employed, while the second is taken from no viewpoint and rests on no symbol. Of the first kind of knowledge we shall say that it stops at the relative; of the second that, wherever possible it attains the absolute.35 Together, Heathcote and Bergson offered me a way to reflect on my experiences of navigating the Barbican, and highlighted the importance of the experiential possibilities of the environment. However, I was aware that to explore space in this way is a luxury. If one is unfamiliar with the space and has to navigate it in order to be at a certain place by a certain time, a Debordian drifting through the Barbican is not practical. It is a leisurely rather than functional activity. A broader, discursive understanding of this space, which allows for its history to matter, is also necessary for a full understanding of the site. Guy Debord’s path of least resistance will not allow us to locate Red Cross Street or Redcross Street Bridge. The Barbican physically obstructs these re-enactments. When there are no walls diverting my path in lateral directions, steps, high walks, and elevated piazzas force the walker to navigate the space vertically. It is necessary to look up or down in order to relocate the continuation of this speculative road and have no sense of a navigable ground plan. When constructed, not only was the street plan erased, the entire sense of lateral ordering in the Barbican was disrupted. Deep foundations were dug to house a new railway network, parking, and a theater. The Barbican bore itself into the ground while at the same time it threw up some of the tallest residential towers in Europe. Even at ground level, it is impossible to traverse the space without having to ascend or descend ramps and steps at almost every turn. This structure seems to take on an almost Uluru-like megalithic invasion of the wider landscape. To retrace these lost streets faithfully it would be neces34 35

Heathcote, Barbican, 195. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Citadel, 2002), 159.

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sary to draw a straight line from Golden Lane to St. Giles’s Church within the Barbican and physically climb across this structure. Similar demands on navigating the landscape were imposed by the Italian collective Stalker during their collaboration with studio.eu in 2006. Their project Wall(k) explored the 155-kilometer-long corridor that separated east and west Berlin. In doing so, they had to navigate both the redeveloped and unmapped areas, negotiating obstructions in order to stay true to the path they had drawn.36 This exercise queries the idea of the ordered city and explores the voids between spaces that are often ignored. As Daria Ricchi writes in her profile of the Stalker project, “The voids represent the ‘background’ against which to read the shape and form of the city, that would otherwise appear homogeneous, deprived of a complex evolutionary dynamic and therefore of life itself.”37 In recognizing this space as a void it is possible to apply new rules of engagement to a single space or impose new narratives that affect how we relate to a sense of place. Through this we may be able to read it with greater complexity; we might even be able to plot a walk that incorporates both Red Cross Street and Redcross Street Bridge. This may be through an intuitive drift or the enforcement of unwavering geometrical paths. Through these parallel experiences, it is possible to occupy, or at least imagine, the multiple temporalities of a space, move through the landscape, and create a palimpsest through re-enactment. In this sense the walker can connect temporal as well as geographical positions, perhaps making it possible to locate and chart multiple possibilities within this space despite the physical absence of its past. Adrian Forty suggests that environment can be understood as a prompt to memory, arguing that “memories formed in the mind can be transferred to solid material objects.”38 He presents the idea that through psychogeography the dynamic of the past exists in people rather than stones, or rather in the interaction between the two.39 Similarly, these walks will not physically reveal the lost paths, but in the mind of the walker a sense of these alternate thoroughfares might be generated. These walks and this research proved very useful to me as I came to the end of my project and began to think about how I might make a piece of work that represented the unrepresentability of a concept and a culture that is at once present and absent in modernity – the medieval. 36 37 38 39

See , last accessed 5 August 2015. , last accessed 5 August 2015. Adrian Forty, “Introduction,” in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 1–18 (2). See also Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2007), 16.



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Illustrating Medieval Culture My contribution to the exhibition Medievalist Visions is entitled Here Be Dragons. It is a representation of a Google Maps screen-grab rendered in imitation gold leaf and screen print on glass. The map itself is incomplete. It is caught in the process of loading and as such is only partially rendered. A significant portion of the map – approximately two thirds – is therefore absent against the transparent glass. Instead of a representation of street plans, the image displays an annotation from Google that reads: “We are sorry, but we don’t have imagery at this zoom level for this region. Try zooming out for a broader look.” This phrase offers a twenty-first-century counterpoint to the talismanic phrase that I use as the piece’s title. As with the premodern note, Google’s apology is at once restrained and mysterious. It does not explain why imagery is not available, which might prompt questions about the map’s reliability or political or social imperatives. The phrase also shifts the responsibility of producing the map from Google to the viewer. It is assertive, yet polite, as it suggests limits of knowledge or capability. Through the display of a present absence in the rendering of the map, my piece addresses notions of the incomplete, of artifacts and information redacted or compromised by time. This is a common feature of tangible records of the past. Material is lost, damaged, or discarded by shifting values surrounding the preservation and control of information, or simply by the fragility of their own material limitations. How best to compensate for, describe, or fill these voids has long been a preoccupation of historians and critics. I found a useful example of such a document in the Forma urbis Romae, which was a large map depicting the ground plan of every architectural feature in ancient Rome and covered a wall in the Templum Pacis. It was carved from marble around the years 203–211 CE and measured 18.10 m by 13 m. At some point in its history it fell from its mount, was destroyed, and subsequently abandoned. Very little of this map presently survives. The remaining ten to fifteen percent of the original map exists in 1186 pieces, with a further eighty-seven known only from Renaissance drawings.40 Reproduced images of this map printed in La pianta marmorea di Roma antica present it in three distinct states. Original remaining sections of the marble artifact are photographed and laid out in their exact previous locations. Drawn lines extend from what is left of the architectural plan speculating the continuation of missing elements. Beyond this, the rest of the city is notably absent, depicted as voids between islands of speculative restoration and that which 40

See , last accessed 20 June 2015.

1. Here Be Dragons, Paddy Molloy (2013), glass, ink, and gold leaf (photo: author)



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is present. It is these voids that are of particular interest to me, and I find the manner in which these images have become maps of maps intellectually and imaginatively suggestive too. I also examined another map, produced in London in 1945, which shows similar absences as those seen in the reconstructed images of the Forma urbis Romae. Drawn up to show bomb damage, this map also communicates various stages of construction and destruction. Damage beyond salvage is colored purple and indicates absence, while the other colors represent damage of varying severity where information survived and restoration was possible.41 Just as with the map of Rome, the undamaged sections of London are represented on equal terms with the absences. This communicates a dynamic vision of the simultaneous possibilities of the urban landscape. In the top right of this map is the Ward of Cripplegate, where Barbican is now to be found. Just as with my walk in search of Red Cross Street and Redcross Street Bridge, this map does not just serve the purpose of tracing physical locations, but also traces the traumatic histories that have reshaped the space and provide not only geographical but also temporal indicators. Through invitation to study the absent present, we can view the unknown as part of a whole within an active document, rather than a flawed and incomplete work from the past. In a chapter investigating the acceptability of textile restoration at the British Museum, Mary Brooks, Caroline Clark, Dinah Eastop, and Carla Petschek suggest that “the notion of incompleteness may be a culturally defined concept. Some cultures appear more willing to accept either a continual re-creation of the piece or missing areas.”42 This is a useful analogy when considering the representation of unknown or missing areas on a map. There is a productive overlap between a medieval act of completion through narrative and cultural storytelling and the modern practice of restoring documents and piecing together the unknown through historical and academic rigor. This is an idea that is perhaps hard to come to terms with in the contemporary age of mass information, an age of digital archives seemingly preserved intact and satellite mapping that renders the world as a discovered, known, and complete entity without errors or gaps. However, my piece suggests that the nature of the unknown, incomplete, or compromised is still very much a feature of the digital realm. It argues that there is still opportunity for wonder to be found in the time it takes for a search engine to find 41 42

See Bevan, Destruction of Memory, 176. Mary Brooks, Caroline Clark, Dinah Eastop, and Carla Petschek, “Restoration and Conservation – Issues for Conservators: A Textile Conservation Perspective,” in Restoration: Is it Acceptable?, ed. Andrew Oddy (London: British Museum, 1994), 103–22 (109).

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that new page. It speaks of new voyages of discovery and fresh speculation surrounding the uncharted. The choice of the image represented for this piece was important. It was found through the navigation of my home city of London using Google Maps, a form of digital wandering reminiscent of the walk taken in Barbican. This online service that uses satellites and street-level cameras to map and piece together an extensive image of the globe from both an internal and external perspective is an act of astonishing cartographic ambition that is at once an execution and display of power and a democratization of it through its dissemination for individual use online. Engaging with these total maps on the Internet can, however, offer a glimpse into new cartographic renderings if experienced through slow connection speeds and loading times on computers. It reveals the cracks in what we think of as powerful technology. My piece intended to take advantage of this feature of an unreliable and intermittent Internet service. I wanted to explore how this transfer of information acts out new journeys of discovery as the map reveals itself. Gray blocks of un-rendered information on the screen become occupied territories transferring to fully populated squares as intrepid pioneers lay claim to a new world and the page loads. By taking screen grabs of this process of loading occurred, I was able to pause this moment of discovery. Here we might find a modern counterpoint to the works of great geographical discovery by medieval Europeans. The annotation offered from Google, that they “don’t have imagery at this zoom level,” resonates with the desire of medieval cartographers to plot the unknown and represent, as image, the absent. Here Be Dragons freezes that moment and perpetuates it in its projection onto a glass panel; a material that at once references the computer screen and the illustrative stained glass of medieval church windows. This medium is shared ground, a space in which this allegory could be best explored and where medieval and contemporary minds interrogate ideas and narratives of great cultural value.

Contributors

EDWARD BREEN is a lecturer at City Lit College. His teaching and research interests include the early music revival of the 1960s and 1970s, the history of sound recordings and the influence of folk music on early music performance. He is author of a new biography of Thurston Dart (King’s College London, 2015) and gained his Ph.D. from King’s College London in 2014 for a dissertation entitled “The Performance Practice of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London.” He was supervised by Professors Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Emma Dillon. . KATHERINE A. BROWN is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Williams College. Her research focuses on the relationship between Old French and Italian narrative, and the intersection of modernity and medieval culture. In addition to articles on the Old French fabliaux, the medieval encyclopedic tradition, and the chanson de geste, she is the author of Boccaccio’s Fabliaux (2014). She is also co-editor of a forthcoming volume that examines interpretive categories for the Decameron. CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE is Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Southampton. Her publications include the monographs Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 (2006) and Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (2012), as well as digital research projects and edited volumes on medieval Chester and Swansea. She is interested in questions of place, power, and identity, and the ways in which public interpretation, collaborative approaches, and creative practice can fold back into research. LOUISE D’ARCENS is Professor in the English Department of Macquarie University, Sydney, and holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Her publications include the books Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016

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Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–1910 (2011), Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (2014), and the edited volumes International Medievalism and Popular Culture (2014), Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars (2004), and the Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (forthcoming 2016). She has also published numerous chapters on medievalism as well as articles in journals such as Representations, Screening the Past, Parergon, Studies in Medievalism, and Postmedieval.​ JOSHUA DAVIES is Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the English Department at King’s College London. His recent publications include a study of environment and memory in the legend of St. Mildrith and an exploration of industrial Gothic architecture in the United States. He is currently finishing his first book, provisionally entitled “Visions and Ruins: Medieval Texts, Modern Readers and the Production of the Past,” a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. JOHN LANCE GRIFFITH is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture at National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan. His research interests include Chaucer, anger in the Middle Ages, medieval aesthetics, and medievalism in Asia. He has published essays on The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Western medievalism in Japanese manga and anime. MIKE HORSWELL is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He completed his interdisciplinary M.A. in Medieval Studies at the University of York focusing on constructions of identity in the chronicle accounts of the First Crusade. His current research is exploring crusader medievalism in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of Victorian medievalism, chivalry, militarism, and two world wars. He is a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Crusades and has an enduring interest in the uses of the past, particularly the Crusades, in identity formation, politics, and national memory. PEDRO MARTINS is a Ph.D. student at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and an Integrated Researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea of the same university. He completed a master’s degree in Contemporary History, with a thesis on the history of Portuguese seaside tourism. His Ph.D. dissertation will look at the contrasting narratives on the medieval past and national decadence in Portugal during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.



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PADDY MOLLOY is an illustrator based in London. He has worked extensively in theater and print. Selected projection design for theater credits include “The Secret Agent” (Theatre O/Young Vic), “Qudz” (the Yard), “The Snow Queen” (Polka), “And Then the Room Fell Silent” (MAP/Barbican), “Origins” (Pentabus), “A History of Falling Things” (Theatr Clwyd), and “Delirium” (Theatre O/Barbican Bite/Abbey Theatre). Selected print-based illustration clients include the Guardian, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, Time Out, BBC Worldwide, Delta Airlines, the Hermitage (Russia), HHMI, and Random House. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Illustration Animation at Kingston University. LISA NALBONE is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Central Florida. Her research subjects include the literature of Spain from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a focus on women’s narrative and poetry. She is the author of The Novels of Carmen Conde: Toward an Expression of Feminine Subjectivity (2012) and “Conjuros, seducción y tribulaciones en La última fada de Pardo Bazán,” in De Britania a Britonia: La leyenda artúrica en tierras de Iberia: cultura, literatura y traducción, Cuaderno de Bretoña (2014). She has also translated The Last Fairy from the original Spanish of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La última fada, De Britania a Britonia: La leyenda artúrica en tierras de Iberia: cultura, literatura y traducción (2014). She is a member of the Spain-based research group Cultura, Literatura y Traducción Iber-Artúrica (CLYTIAR). SARAH SALIH is Senior Lecturer in English at King’s College London. She is the author of Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (2001) and co-editor of five collections of essays, including Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception (2009). She is the editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. She is currently working on a study of late medieval images of paganity. MICHELLE M. SAUER is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks). She specializes in Middle English language and literature, especially women’s devotional literature and monastic texts, and publishes regularly on anchoritism, mysticism, hagiography, queer/gender theory, monasticism, and Church history. Her publications include the books Gender in Medieval Culture (2015), The Lesbian Premodern (2011, with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney), How to Write about Chaucer (2009), and The Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry (2008), as well as numerous articles.

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JAMES L. SMITH is a research associate of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. His 2014 doctoral thesis at the University of Western Australia, entitled “Water as Medieval Intellectual Entity: Case Studies in Twelfth-Century Western Monasticism,” is currently under preparation in monograph form. In addition to interests in medieval intellectual and environmental history, and cartography with an emphasis on water history, he has a strong interest in political science-influenced medievalism and the medievalism of the Lovecraft Circle. He is currently beginning a project mapping the spiritual water history of England’s North East, and a new project on environmental medievalisms.

Previously published volumes Details of earlier titles are available from the publisher XIV. Correspondences: Medievalism in Scholarship and the Arts Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2005 XV. Memory and Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2006 XVI. Medievalism in Technology Old and New Edited by Karl Fugelso with Carol L. Robinson. 2007 XVII. Defining Medievalism(s) Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2009 XVIII. Defining Medievalism(s) II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2010 XIX. Defining Neomedievalism(s) Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2010 XX. Defining Neomedievalism(s) II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2011 XXI. Corporate Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2012 XXII. Corporate Medievalism II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2013 XXIII. Ethics and Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2014 XXIV. Medievalism on the Margins Edited by Karl Fugelso with Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya. 2015

FUGELSO (ed.)

Medievalism and Modernity

Studies in Medievalism XXV

The question of how modernity has influenced medievalism and how medievalism has influenced modernity is the theme of this volume. The opening essays examine the 2001 film Just Visiting’s comments on modern anxieties via medievalism; conflations of modernity with both medievalism and the Middle Ages in rewriting sources; the emergence of modernity amid the post-World War I movement The Most Noble Order of Crusaders; António Sardinha’s promotion of medievalism as an antidote to modernity; and Mercedes Rubio’s medievalism in her feminist commentary on modernity. The eight subsequent articles build on this foundation while discussing remnants of medieval London amid its modern descendant; Michel Houellebecq's critique of medievalism through his 2011 novel La Carte et le territoire; historical authenticity in Michael Morrow's approach to performing medieval music; contemporary concerns in Ford Madox Brown and David Gentleman’s murals; medieval Chester in Catherine A.M. Clarke and Nayan Kulkarni’s Hryre (2012); medieval influences on the formation of and debate about modern moral panics; medievalist considerations in modern repurposings of medieval anchorholds; and medieval sources for Paddy Molloy’s Here Be Dragons (2013). The articles thus test the essays’ methods and conclusions, even as the essays offer fresh perspectives on the articles.

Editor: KARL FUGELSO with Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih

KARL FUGELSO is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: EDWARD BREEN, KATHERINE A. BROWN, CATHERINE A.M. CLARKE, LOUISE D’ARCENS, JOSHUA DAVIES, JOHN LANCE GRIFFITH, MIKE HORSWELL, PEDRO MARTINS, PADDY MOLLOY, LISA NALBONE, SARAH SALIH, MICHELLE M. SAUER, JAMES L. SMITH

Studies in Medievalism XXV an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Medievalism and Modernity