The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism. Ed. by Stephen C. Meyer and Kirsten Yri

Abstract

The annually published collection of essays, Studies in Medievalism, begins each edition with a quotation from Lord Acton, stating, with a grandiloquence typical of his nineteenth-century milieu, that 'two great principles divide the world, and contend for the master, antiquity and the middle ages'. 1 Not coincidentally, this quotation appears early on in the history of a movement known as 'medievalism', 2 which is to say, as Kirstin Yri and Stephen C. Meyer only very briefly define it at the start of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, the 'retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives and ideologies of the European Middle Ages' (p. 1). Given what this 'immersion in the Middle Ages' would come to mean in the context of Romanticism and the Gothic Revival, there is a hint (or pre-echo), not unsurprisingly, in Lord Acton's rumination of what Nietzsche would later theorise in his Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic. If antiquity is seen to represent a sealed-off and perfect order to which we, in the West, have historically aspired, it is the ever, and hauntingly, present medieval that is a threatening and temporally destabilising force.