1st Edition

Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages

Edited By Clare A. Simmons Copyright 2001
    176 Pages
    by Routledge

    174 Pages
    by Routledge

    Medievalism, the later reception of the Middle Ages, has been used by many writers, not just during the Victorian period but from the Renaissance to the present, as a means of commenting on their own societies and systems of values. Until recently, this self-interest was used to distinguish between Medievalism, a selective, often romanticised, view of the past, and medieval studies, with its quest for an authentic Middle Ages. The essays in this collection suggest that the search for knowledge of a "real" Middle Ages has always been a problematic one, and that the vitality of the vision of Medievalism is demonstrated by its constant adaption to current concerns.

    Introduction, Clare A. Simmons; Chapter 1 Samuel Daniel’s Defense of Medievalism, Kelly A. Quinn; Chapter 2 Chivalry and Romance in the Eighteenth Century: Richard Hurd and the Disenchantment of The Faerie Queene, Kristine Louise Haugen; Chapter 3 Waging Battle: Ashford v. Thornton, Ivanhoe, and Legal Violence, Mark Schoenfield; Chapter 4 Marianne: Mystic or Madwoman? Representations of Jeanne d’Arc on the Parisian Stage in the 1820s, Sarah Hibberd; Chapter 5 The “Truth” About the Middle Ages: La Revue des Deux Mondes and Late Nineteenth-Century French Medievalism, Elizabeth Emery; Chapter 6 Medieval Religion, Victorian Homosexualities, Frederick S. Roden; Chapter 7 Heraldry and Red Hats: Linguistic Skepticism and Chesterton’s Revision of Ruskinian Medievalism, Chene Heady; Chapter 8 The Return of the King: Medievalism and the Politics of Nostalgia in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, Susan Aronstein;

    Biography

    Clare A. Simmons