Studies in Medievalism
Founded by Leslie J. Workman Medievalism and Modernity
Recently published volumes are listed at the back of this book
Edited by Karl Fugelso with Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih
Studies in Medievalism XXV 2016
Cambridge D. S. Brewer © Smdies in Medievalism 2016 • All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation Studies lll no pan of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner Medievalism
Founding Editor Leslie J. Workman First published 2016 Editor Karl Fugelso D. S. Brewer, Cambridge Advisory Board Marrin Arnold (Hull) ISBN 978-1-84384-437-2 Geraldine Barnes (Sydney) Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Leiden) ISSN 0738-7164 William Calin (Florida) A. E. Christa Canitz (New Brunswick, Canada) Philip Cardew (Leeds Beckett) Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State) David Matthews (Manchester) Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State) Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen) D. S. Brewer is an imprim of Boydell & Brewer Ltd Tom Shippey (Saint Louis) PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Ciare A. Simmons (Ohio State) and of Boydell & Brewer Inc, Paul Szarmach (Western Michigan) 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio) website: www.boydellandbrewer.com Jane Toswell (Western Üntario) Richard Utz (Georgia Institute ofTechnology) Kathleen Verduin (Hope College, Michigan) A CIP catalogue record for this book is available Andrew Wawn (Leeds) from the British Library Studies in Medievalism provides an imerdisciplinary medium of exchange for scholars in ali fields, including the visual and other arts, concerned with any aspect of the post-medieval idea The publisher has no responsibiliry for the continued existence or and study of the Middle Ages and the influence, both scholarly and popular, of this study on accuracy of URLs for externa! or third-parry imernet websites referred to Western sociery after 1500. in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, Studies in Medievalism is published by Boydell & Brewer, Ltd., P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK; Boydell & Brewer, Inc., 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA. Orders and inquiries about back issues should be addressed to Boydell & Brewer at che appropriate office. This publication is primed on acid-free paper For a copy of the sryle sheet and for inquiries about Studics fü Medievalism, please contact che editor, Karl Fugelso, at che Dept. of An+Design, Art History, and Are Education, Towson Typeset by www.thewordservice.com Universiry, 3103 Center for che Ares, 8000 York Rd, Towson, MD 21252-0001, USA, tel. 410-704-2805, fax 410-704-2810 ATTN: Fugelso, e-mail d
Sarah Salih
The objects of the past stand before us, but the worlds from which they come are long gone. What should we do with these visual orphans?2
Late medieval London was, like contemporary London, the greatest city of the realm, a center of power, finance, trade, and culture. lt mythologized itself as Troynovant, "pe firste citie of Brettayne," built by Brutus.3 And yet the depredations of time - or, specifically, of fire, bombing, and redevel opment - ensure that medieval London is barely visible today. There are, of course, two world heritage sites, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, bookending the city to east and west. But most of medieval London is hidden, or glimpsed in passing, or a trace of something lost, or virtual. The City's street plan is still substantially medieval: the stone or glass palaces of the financia! institutions cluster on streets named for medieval parishes and commodities. Medieval material survives underground, in crypts and cellars; lost buildings such as Baynard's Casde are commemorated with blue plaques. Or one might see, momentarily, a medieval illusion: from the comer of an eye misrecognize Renzo Piano's ultra-modero Shard (completed in 2013) as a scaled-up church spire. Seeing medieval London takes effort, imagination, luck, or knowledge. The city offers chance, routine, and quotidian encoun ters with the Middle Ages, of which its inhabitants and visitors might not even be conscious. Bruno Latour writes of the packaging of time into mate-
1 Thanks to Karl Fugelso, an anonymous reader for SiM, and Josh Davies for commencs on drafts of this essay. 2 Michael Ann Holly, 7he MelancholyArt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), xix. 3 Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translations of john Trevisa and ofan Unknown Writer ofthe Fifteenth Century, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby (London: Longman, 1865-86), 2.57.
Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016 54 Studies in Medievalism In/visible Medieval/isms 55 rial culture, "Time is always folded. [ ... ] Action has always been carried on tion, circumstances are ali transient. There is an infinite number of medieval thanks to shifting the burden of connection to longer- or shorter-lasting Londons, their frames of visibility continually shifting. am excluding for this purpose the charismatic heritage-sites such as the entities."4 The past acts on the present through material things: in London, 1 Tower, Westminster Abbey, and Southwark Cathedral, significant though the medieval past acts upon the present even in the absence of those mate they are. These are marked rial things, operating through the spaces where they were. If 1 walk from off as heterotopiae, which people visit in arder to encounter the past, while also being partially functioning continuities London Bridge to the Strand, for example, 1 follow much the same route as of 1 would have 600 years ago, though what 1 see is almost entirely different. thei~ m~dieval iterations. The Tower is no longer a royal residence or prison, The medieval city thus acts on me, through me, as it determines my steps, but 1t snll houses the Crown Jewels; Southwark Cathedral and Westminster Abbey are no longer monastic sites, but they remain churches and mauso whether 1 remember to think so, or not. Meanwhile, the city is ful! of structures that allude to the medieval, but leums. There is much that might be said about the kinds of medievalism these great sites generate in the process are not medieval, thanks to the adoption of neo-Gothic as the house style of framing their medieval mate rial. The medieval-ness of the British state in the nineteenth century: one of these, the dock tower of the Tower, for example, contributed to the 2014 of the Houses of Parliament, is perhaps the city's most famous icon. Hence installation, "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red," which poured a tide of looking at medieval London is always a complex and mediated business, ceramic poppies into the moat to commemorate the First World War, an more so than in other British cities with more substantial survivals of medi event significantly related to the Middle Ages as the imagined endpoint of 6 eval fabric. The city is inescapably the accumulated sum of ali its pasts. chivalry. The location reanimated the Tower's medieval history as the seat of Michael Camille's account of the medievalist gargoyles of Notre Dame in monarchical and state power by placing it as the source of violence, which París describes the multi-temporality of such palimpsestic sites: could thereby be relegated to the premodern and disavowed. However, I am interested here not so much in event destinations such as these, but in sites What these insistent monsters have taught me is the impossibility of where the Middle Ages are on the verge of visibility. viewing the art of the Middle Ages without looking past and through A post-medieval, post-Roman city such as London is a conglomeration the nineteenth century, without appreciating our own and the cathe of long-lasting material entities, ali trailing their own specific histories. Few dral's substantial modernity. This should not preclude our wanting to things are longer-lasting than the London Stone. The Stone currently occu understand the Middle Ages as a distinct historical period; we find, pies a niche, guarded by an elaborate ironwork grill, built into the wall of however, that it is hardly ever as distinct or as separare as we might a shop currently occupied by the newsagent and stationery chain W. H. want to think, but always flowing into other periods, haunting other Smiths, in Cannon Street, opposite a busy commuter station serving the City. In the latest available figures, the station has an annual footfall of over epochs, emerging when we least expect it.5 20 million, many of which will be regular commuter journeys, so encounters London, too, offers medieval things that are not purely medieval, and a with the Stone, whether or not people pay it anrattention or even know present day that incorporares medieval survivals, sometimes visibly, some what it is, mark for many the moment of transition between sites and selves, times not. This essay aims to sketch out those variations in visibility, the work and home.7 The Stone is a site of memory, remarkable for the disparity material and discursive frames that mark or conceal the intrusion of the between the utter mundanity of the material object and the grandeur of its Middle Ages into the present day. The visibility of medieval London is thor accumulated meanings. lts very ordinariness generares narratives to account oughly fragmented. No two individuals have the same medieval London for its otherwise perplexing prominence. Of course London is ful! of stones, (mine, for example, focuses more clearly on the late than the early Middle is indeed made of them: this one is marked out as an individual actant, not Ages, centers on the areas where 1 live and work and the transport networks just a stone but the Stone, by material and discursive frames of medievalism. around them); no individual has the same one twice, as knowledge, atten- The decorative elaboration of the neo-Gothic grating contrasts to the stone's blank stoniness. The grating is superimposed onto the stone, so one can
4 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: 6
Ackroyd's "biography" of the city, combining history, legend, and psycho There is no awe here. The Stone is evidently framed and visible, but what it geography, has been prominencly on sale in central London bookshops does, or means, is quite obscure: it is, then as now, just somehow irreducibly ever since its publication in 2000, and can reasonably be assumed to have there in the background as the city goes about its daily business. informed many of the Stone's current visitors. He lists the major identifica Attributions of special powers to the Stone are always retrospective: it is tions of the Stone - as Brutus's foundation stone and as the Roman mile said to have been a site of power in the past, not to be one in the present. stone from which distances were measured - and incidents of its history, The Stone's post-medieval fame is founded upon its appearance in an early such as its role in Jack Cade's rebellion: this combination of the accumu modern account of medieval history that invests it with obscure power. In lated, incoherent, mythohistory of the Stone and Ackroyd's attention to its Shakespeare's dramatization of Jack Cade's rebellion in Henry VI Part 2, continua!, if low-key, presence is the most likely discursive frame for visitors Cade's seizure of the city is staged as an appropriation of London Stone: encountering it. The Stone can reasonably be classed as a remnant of medieval London, Enter jack CADE and the rest, and strikes his stajf on London Stone but of course that classification is selective. lt is a stone: it is as old as stones CADE. Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting upon are; that is, its age is measured in a geological scale incommensurate to London Stone, I charge and command that, at the city's that of human history. If this stone is medieval, then so too are ali of the cost, the Pissing Conduit run nothing but claret wine this city's stones, insofar as they were in existence during the period, though the first year of our reign. And now henceforward it shall be medieval is a barely perceptible flicker on the scale of a stone's existence. treason for any that calls me other than Lord Mortimer. 14 "To touch stone," as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, "is to encounter alien 9 duration." However, the Stone certainly had a medieval personality: it first 10 John Clark, "London Sto ne: Sto ne of Brutus or Fetish Stone - Making the Myth," Folklore appears in the documentary record at sorne point between 1098 and 1108, 121/1 (2010): 38-60 (39). 11 Clark, "London Stone," 39. 12 Clark, "London Stone," 39. 13 London Lickpenny, in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, B Peter Ackroyd, London: 1he Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 18-19 MI: Medieval Instirute, 1996), last accessed 28 August 2015 from
Shakespeare's version makes appropriately theatrica.l use of the Stone as The multiplicity of its connections ought to make it an enriched site mock-throne, departing from the historiographica.l accounts that have the of interaction; yet it is a curiously muted object today. lts loca.tion and Stone playing a more casual and fleeting role in events. 15 Hall's Chronicle, material characteristics make it difficult to approach: the resulting obscu the likely source, reports that Cacle: rity then allows it to be imagined as a latent, esoteric actor. The Stone is no longer a landmark; indeed, it is barely visible in its current setting and entered into London, and cut the ropes of the draw bridge, striking his is notably unsatisfactory as a visitor attraction. 1 have never actually seen sworde on London stone, saying: now is Mortymer lorde of this citie, anyone paying attention to it. lt is sited on a not very broad pavement in a and rode every street lyke a lordly Capitayn.16 busy thoroughfare in the City, a location that does not encourage contem plative gazing; so, the Stone remains, typica.lly, momentarily glimpsed in Later elaborations of the mythology of the Stone read as attempts to make the background. lt is more clearly visible from the interior of the shop, but sense of Shakespeare's version of Cade's carnivalesque appropriation of it. The from there you have to edge behind a magazine rack and look sideways at legends are a post-medieval back-formation, explaining how the Stone might it; there is no room to look at it frontally. lt is sited low in the exterior wall; originally have been invested with the official power that Cacle apparendy so, to see it at all from the pavement, you have to crouch to peer into the appropriated. William Blake imagined it as a site of monstrous authority, a grill, getting in people's way. The Stone itself only shows up in photographs druidic cult of human sacrifice, but also as "the primal matter from which if backlit, which it no longer is: to photograph the setting at any sensible Britain and its civilization are built." 17 The identification of it as Brutus's angle you have to stand back, almost stepping into the road. lt cannot be stone, foundation and guardian of the city, was made in 1862 by a Welsh touched and could only be attentively gazed upon in those rare moments cleric, Richard Williams Morgan, drawing on the forged ancient British lore when the street is empty. And then, after all, it is just a stone: gazing upon of Iolo Morganwg to fabrica.te the proverb quoted by Ackroyd. 18 lts status as it has limited returns. guardian spirit, which is central to the current character of the Stone, is thus lt is better contemplated virtually, via its textual supplements. However, an unexpected offshoot of Iolo's brand of medievalism, a combination of its semi-visibility and unobtrusiveness contribute to its current character. Welsh nationalism, proto-hippy idealism, and outright personal aggrandize The much larger medieval Stone had been a forcefully visible free-standing ment.19 Iolo's narrative of the national past, like Blake's, centered on Druids, monolith: the contemporary remnant has retreated into the shelter of its but his were humane, wise, and monotheistic resisters of Roman imperial setting.21 A2006 BBC report claimed that it was so unobtrusive it had almost ism. 20 The Stone, in its inscrutable stoniness, ca.n work as a figurehead of been accidentally destroyed by builders refitting the shop.22 But this obscu whatever medievalism anyone chooses to assign to it. So, the Stone is at once rity also gives it power. Alfred Gell argues that humans intuitively imagine a a Roman, medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, conscious being as "primordially spatial and concentric; the mind is 'internal' contemporary, and stone-aged stone. The Stone is a survivor of multiple enclosed, surrounded, by something (the body) that is non-mind. Now we pasts and numerous medievalisms, and ca.rries traces of them all: like the begin to see why idols are so often hollow envelopes, with enclosures.''23 The gargoyles of Notre Dame, its medievalness is mixed up with other periods Stone in its setting is easily imagined as a beast within a cage, or ghost in the and alternative histories, speaking of both Rome and Troy. machine, a being with sorne kind of unimaginable lithic consciousness. The difficulty of photographing it adds to its mystique. 1 cannot tell for certain, looking at my recent attempts, whether it is visible at all, or whether 1 have 15 See John Clark, "Jack Cade at London Stone," Transactions of the London and Middlesex ca.ptured only reflections in the glass: the Stone, it seems, declines to make Archaeological Society 58 (2007): 169-90 for further discussion of this episode and its representations. itself available. lts withdrawal from the plane of the street can be read as 16 Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. III: Earlier English History Plays, ed. lurking: it gives a strong impression of latency, of power held in check. A Geoffrey Bullough (London: Roucledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 115. 1920s photograph of a policeman standing beside it, reproduced in Clark's 17 Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History ofLondon from Chaucer to Dickens (London: Verso, 2015), 283. 18 Clark, "London Stone," 44-52. 21 Clark, "London Stone," 40. 19 Ronald Hutton, Búiod and Mistletoe: The History of the Dniids in Britain (New Haven, 22
24 Clark, "London Scone," fig. 4. 25 Rosemary Hill, "Emanations of Albion," 30 March 2012,
28 Michael Alexander, Medievalisrn: lhe Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 71. 29 Rebecca Schneider, Perforrning Rernains: Art and Wúr in Times of lheatrical Reenactrnent (London: Routledge, 2011), 25. 31 Pugin, Contrasts, 5. Emphasis in the original. 30 Preface to 2nd edition of Contrasts, in A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts and lhe True Principies 32 Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival in England (London: Longmans, Green ofPointed or Christian Architecture, intro. Timothy Brittain-Catlin (Reading: Spire Books, and Ca., 1872), 116, 131. 2003), v. Emphasis in the original. 33 Eastlake, Gothic Revival, 184-85. 64 Studies in Medievalism In/visible Medieval/isms 65
They pulled in behind the church at the crown of Ladbroke Grove, is not necessary for the church to convey tradition, dignity, venerability, in the shadowy crescent of plane trees. "Thanks very much," said Nick. or indeed for it to advertise the prosperity of the neighborhood. Ronnie He really had to rush but he didn't want to seem unfriendly. Ronnie reads ali these meanings perfectly well: the precision of Nick's art-historical was looking out thoughtfully through the windscreen. knowledge would only get in the way. Gothic, when the church was built "This is an old church, Rick," he said. "This must be old." in 1844-45, had become the default style for new churches, conveying both "Yeah - well, it's Victorian, 1 suppose, isn't it," said Nick, who in historical depth and universal timeless values, patriotism and spirituality. fact knew ali about it. As Rosemary Hill writes, Gothic Reviva! had become "a national style, a "Yeah?" said Ronnie, and nodded. "God, there's sorne old stuff public principie, the proper form for the Houses of Parliament, for schools, round here." shops, railway stations and nearly every church."37 The style, for Ronnie, is Nick couldn't quite tell what he was getting at. He said, "It's not that effectively anachronic, its specific period obscured by a general impression old - sort of 1840s?" He knew not everybody had a sense of history, of venerable antiquity. Nick's knowledge of it functions as a form of resist a useful image, as he had, of the centuries like rooms in enfilade. For ance to its claims, while Ronnie impressionistically registers them. half a second he glimpsed what he knew about the church, that the In buildings with fewer pretensions, Gothic becomes even less visible as reredos was designed by Aston Webb, that it was built on the site of a form of medievalism. In the miles of residential streets in the nineteenth the grandstand of a long-vanished racetrack. lt was a knobbly Gothic century railway suburbs, builders unleashed a miscellany of naturalized oddity in a street of stucco. ornamental detail, in which loosely Gothic arches and the occasional turret ''I'm telling you, I'm moving up here, too fucking right I am," said amicably rub joists with almost classical porticos and slightly Dutch gables. Ronnie, in his protesting murmur.34 While the Houses of Parliament and Gothic Reviva! churches certainly mean something by their medievalism, a pointed arch on a suburban house The church is St. John's, Notting Hill, and Nick's information is accurate: may be visibly Gothic in form, but its medievalness is attenuated to invis "architecturally undistinguished, although [ ... ] archaeologically correct," ibility; pointedness is just one of the possibilities from the repertoire of Nikolaus Pevsner remarks, locating it in the turn of the Gothic Reviva! in decorative detail. the 1840s to a more historically precise form of medievalism. 35 The failure of There is even a formless form of medievalism. Merton Abbey Milis, in the their attempt to converse about it is complex. They share a profound indif south-west London borough ofMerton, is both a medieval anda medievalist ference to any spiritual claims of the building, but Nick is on the face of it site, once the location of Merton Abbey, later the site where Morris & Co. better informed than Ronnie, able to tell the difference between "old stuff" and then Liberty printed fabrics, a history now recalled in the presence of and "sort of 1840s," Gothic and Gothic Reviva!. He is the kind of person the William Morris pub in a former workshop on the riverside. The remains who knows that kind of thing: such knowledge contributes to the cultural of the Abbey's chapter house, tucked into an underpass below a ring road, capital that he deploys to land a sinecure as the "aesthete" on his wealthy are open to visitors on special occasions, but parches of medieval stonework boyfriend's vanity project.36 Ronnie, however, has no use for that specific have been incorporated into walls in the area. Entering the shopping center, knowledge, and is not interested in Nick's tentative attempts to inform one encounters fast-food shops whose contemporary red-brick walls include him. His perception of the church conjures the medieval prototype, not the square parches of embedded flint and pebbles. Given the history of the area, Gothic Reviva!, sketching an imaginary alternative history of the locality. it looks as if these are remnants of the abbey's fabric, with the modern brick Knowledge of specifics such as the date and the names of the designers acting as a frame for the medieval remains, or the medieval remains embel lishing the brick. According to the conservation report on the area, however, they are merely an eccentric decorative feature in a modern building.38 This 34 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line ofBeauty (London: Picador, 2005), 234-35. decorative feature, however, mimics the genuine hybridity of the wall in 35 Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 3: North Wfst (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 458. Historie Buildings report by lhe Architecrural History Practice Ltd at
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