Subaltern Medievalisms
Medievalism 'From Below' in Nineteenth-Century Britain
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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.
David Matthews
David Matthews is lecturer at Bangor University, Wales, and course director for the undergraduate program in health and social care, where he teaches subjects relating to welfare and the relationship between health and society. His previous publications examine the extent to which capitalism shapes the experience of health and wellbeing and influence the provision of social policies.
Michael Sanders
Michael Sanders is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (2009), the co-editor (with Prof. David Matthews) of Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism 'from below' in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2021). Over a 20+ career in Victorian studies he has published; numerous articles across a range of refereed journals including, Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, over a dozen book chapters, and edited the series Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (2001) and The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli Volume One: Vivian Grey (2004). Most of his publications have focused on the intersection between working-class literature and culture and radical politics in the nineteenth century.
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