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