Manufacturing Middle Ages

Manufacturing Middle Ages Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe Edited by Patrick J. Geary and Gábor Klaniczay LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-24486-3 CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ xiii Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 PART ONE MEDIEVALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY National Origin Narratives in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ..... 13 Walter Pohl The Uses and Abuses of the Barbarian Invasions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ......................................................................... 51 Ian N. Wood Oehlenschlaeger and Ibsen: National Revival in Drama and History in Denmark and Norway c. 1800–1860 ................................. 71 Sverre Bagge Romantic Historiography as a Sociology of Liberty: Joachim Lelewel and His Contemporaries ......................................... 89 Maciej Janowski PART TWO MEDIEVALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE The Roots of Medievalism in North-West Europe: National Romanticism, Architecture, Literature .............................. 111 David M. Wilson Medieval and Neo-Medieval Buildings in Scandinavia ....................... 139 Anders Andrén © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-24486-3 vi contents Restoration as an Expression of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Hungary ........................................................................................................ 159 Ernő Marosi Digging Out the Past to Build Up the Future: Romanian Architecture in the Balkan Context 1859–1906 ........... 189 Carmen Popescu Ottoman Gothic: Evocations of the Medieval Past in Late Ottoman Architecture .............................................................................. 217 Ahmet Ersoy Medievalism and Modernity: Architectural Appropriations of the Middle Ages in Germany (1890–1920) ................................................. 239 Michael Werner PART THREE MEDIEVALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOLOGY A Cross-Country Foxhunt: Claiming Reynard for the National Literatures of Nineteenth-Century Europe ........................................ 259 Joep Leerssen Restoration from Notre-Dame de Paris to Gaston Paris ..................... 279 R. Howard Bloch The Czech Linguistic Turn: Origins of Modern Czech Philology 1780–1880 ...................................................................................................... 299 Pavlína Rychterová PART FOUR MEDIEVALISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES IN NATIONAL DISCOURSES ‘Medieval’ Identities in Italy: National, Regional, Local ...................... 319 Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-24486-3 contents vii Between Slavs and Old Bulgars: ‘Ancestors’, ‘Race’ and Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Bulgaria ........................................................ 347 Stefan Detchev With Brotherly Love: The Czech Beginnings of Medieval Archaeology in Bulgaria and Ukraine .................................................. 377 Florin Curta The Study of the Archaeological Finds of the Tenth-Century Carpathian Basin as National Archaeology: Early Nineteenth-Century Views ........................................................... 397 Péter Langó Notes on Contributors ................................................................................... 419 Index of Proper Names ................................................................................. 425 © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-24486-3 PART FOUR MEDIEVALISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES IN NATIONAL DISCOURSES © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-24486-3 ‘MEDIEVAL’ IDENTITIES IN ITALY: NATIONAL, REGIONAL, LOCAL Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri* Italy, like many other European nations and the United States, has an intense fascination with the Middle Ages, and the attraction is by no means new. The entire Italian Ottocento was characterized by a keen inter- est in the medieval period, one revived in diffferent ways in our own era. Medievalism was ingrained in nineteenth-century Italian politics, society, and tastes. Ideas about the Middle Ages were formed and disseminated through novels, patriotic songs, poetry, paintings, etchings, and architecture; the scenery, costumes, and arias of operas; tableaux vivants; and even collectable picture-cards. Nineteenth-century notions of the Middle Ages also forged forms and contents for future generations—images of fairy-tale castles and kings, lute-strumming troubadours, ladies with coni- cal hats and their errant knights—whose powers of persuasion were so profound that they came to constitute what Benedetto Croce described as a true “religion of the Middle Ages.”1 The phenomenon was so prominent that by the 1970s it had become the subject of signifĳicant historiographic literature. Since then, a size- able number of Italian historians have written on the theme, enough for the study of medievalism in Italy—and not only—to have become a vir- tual branch of historiography unto itself, a place of privileged encounter between scholars of the Middle Ages and scholars of contemporary culture. Today, Italian studies of medievalism tend to take one of two forms. The fĳirst consists of a comparative history of ideas, a variety of analy- sis that scrutinizes both period historical literature and a wide variety of other cultural evidence, be it archaeological, philological, literary, ethno- graphic, pictorial, architectural, philosophical, or cinematographic. Inqui- ries of this kind seek to produce a history of historical thought in a very * I wish to thank Lila Yawn for her invaluable help with the translation of this article into English. 1 Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, translated from the Ital- ian by Henry Furst (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1933), 49 (orig. edit. Bari: Laterza, 1931, reprinted in Benedetto Croce, Filosofĳia, Poesia, Storia. Pagine tratte da tutte le opere a cura dell’autore [Milano: Adelphi, 1996], p. 1306). © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-24486-3 320 tommaso di carpegna falconieri broad sense.2 The second kind of study, whose ties to the fĳirst are obvious, has been defĳined as a “historiography of perception,” meaning an attempt at recovering popular perceptions of the Middle Ages in post-medieval eras—perceptions that can then be juxtaposed with what professional historians have to say about the Middle Ages.3 Studies of this sort function on the premise that the practice of history would be incomplete if it did not include common perceptions of the Middle Ages in its purview, since those perceptions obviously belong to the course of history. Whether fĳic- tions, falsehoods, or invented traditions, common perceptions—ideas widely shared within a society—can contribute greatly to the formation of the overall idea of a historical period. Historians help to determine those shared ideas and are in turn influenced by them, so much so that the common perceptions in question sometimes have a direct impact upon what comes to be considered historical fact. These circumstances, in other words, afffect the work produced by historians of the Middle Ages, even though historians are accustomed to reasoning principally on the basis of sources produced during the medieval millennium itself. The same historians have a strong card to play nonetheless, since they are well posi- tioned to juxtapose the Middle Ages that emerge from primary sources with societal perceptions of the Middle Ages in post-medieval eras. Skilled in forging comparisons and acutely aware of the kinds of issues at hand, professional historians are singularly well equipped to recognize difffer- ences, contradictions, distortions, and inventions and to interpret their meanings in historical terms. In Italy, as elsewhere, it is a well-established historical tenet that the nineteenth century was the era when common perceptions of the medieval 2 One book merits particular mention: Arti e storia nel medioevo, ed. by Enrico Castel- nuovo and Giuseppe Sergi. IV. Il medioevo al passato e al presente (Torino: Einaudi, 2004). A joint efffort on the part of many scholars, it tackles the phenomenon of medievalism in its many manifestations, from political history to the history of art, music, and other cultural phenomena, with a prevailing but not exclusive focus on Italy. 3 Although currently dormant, the journal Quaderni medievali (founded in 1976) for a few decades included a column of essays focusing on ideas of the Middle Ages held by people who were not professional historians of the era. The column was titled “L’altro medioevo” (“The Other Middle Ages”) and dealt with “the Middle Ages belonging to non- specialists, the common culture, and the mass-media; the mechanisms that produced and transmitted a specular and deformed image.” (“Il medioevo dei non specialisti, della cul- tura comune e dei mass media; i meccanisimi di produzione e di trasmissione di una immagine speculare e deformata.”) For “perceptional historiography,” see Giuseppe Sergi, L’idea di medioevo. Fra storia e senso comune (Roma: Donzelli, 1999, 20052), 9. See also Antonio Brusa, “Un prontuario degli stereotipi sul medioevo,” Cartable de Clio 5 (2004); Medioevo e luoghi comuni, ed. by Flavia Marostica (Napoli: Tecnodid, 2004). © 2013 Koninklijke

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