Medievalism in English Renaissance Literature

Abstract

The term "medieval" is the creation of the nineteenth-century Swiss historian, Jakob Butckhardt, whose argu ment for the Renaissance required a conception of the Middle Ages to define what came before it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the terms "medieval" and "medievalism" appear first in the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, and A. W. N. Pugin, tying them to the nostalgia and aesthetic ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Gothic Revival, and the Arts and Crafts movement. The alternative term for the period is the "Middle Ages," first used by John Foxe, according to the OED, in his work of Protestant martyrology, Actes and Monuments of the English Martyrs (1570). Foxe refers to the pre-Reformation period as "the middle age," which he describes as "the primitive tyme of the church." Foxe is translating a Latin term, medium aevum, devised by Petrarch and other humanists ro denote the period between the ancients and the moderns ro describe England's Catholic past.Medievalism and the idea of the Middle Ages are retrospective inventions, having less to do with the qualities of the period itself than with the agendas of those who seek to describe it. According ro Brian Stock's oft-quoted formulation:The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications "the Middle Ages" thus consti tute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world. (Stock 1990: 69) Whether we regard the period through the nostalgic eyes of a Ruskin or Rossetti or, following Foxe, as a primitive time, our views of the Middle Ages are conditioned by certain value judgments. In Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350-1547, James Simpson argues that prevailing definitions of the Middle Ages are the result of Reformist institutions and policies of Henry VIII that erlacted a contraction and Simplification of the medieval literary culture that preceded it, producing a specific notion of the period and establishing strict boundaries between it and the Renaissance.

Tudor Shakespeare: Taking the Long View

“…A compilation of verse tragedies about historical figures, Mirror for Magistrates has been receiving a fair amount of critical attention as of late, and several recent articles trace the impact of it on the dramaturgy of Shakespeare's history plays (Cavanagh, “Sovereignty”; Lander; Lucas). Deanne Williams' essay on “Tudor medievalism” also takes up the question of how the Tudors represented the past, arguing that Shakespeare's first tetralogy recalls the structure of sin and redemption used in mystery plays; it also suggests that Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen represents the “apotheosis” of the Tudor image of Chaucer (218).…”

The Uses of Medievalism in Early Modern England: Recovery, Temporality, and the “Passionating” of the Past

“…The embodiment of voice in this poetry is precisely what made it seem, to Meres, most "passionate," and most likely to make readers "passionate" in response. Williams (2010) has rightly written of the premodern having a "persistent and provocative presence" in Renaissance English Literature, even as such a chronological phenomenon is also described as a "culture of medievalism, avant-la-lettre," before the necessary chronological and cultural distance that might make that possible (214). Others, focusing on continental European phenomena, have found early modern culture to have "its own variety of medievalism(s)" (Montoya et al 2010, 3).…”