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Preface: Medievalism, Modernity, and the History of Sexuality

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Preface: Medievalism, Modernity, and the History of Sexuality Preface MEDIEVALISM, MODERNITY, AND THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY No doubt men who speak as I do will be charged with being mere medievalists. I dispute the adjective but accept in its fullest sense the substantive part of the charge. —George Edmund Street, “On the Future of Art in England” (1858) This book was written by a medievalist, albeit one of the “modern styles” that challenged the authority of with broad interests in the history of art and culture. Palladianism as the dominant language of architecture. It addresses a question of significance to medieval art To the medievalist, the justification for posing history, to historians of eighteenth-century art (and thus this question is less straightforward, although no less to discussions of the Enlightenment and “modernity” in germane to the discipline as it is currently practiced. general), and to historians of sexuality. That question is, For me, and for many others working on the history of how and why did Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and the medieval art, the question delves deeply into the very men in his circle actively shape and promote the Gothic origins of the discipline through examination of some of as a new style of art and architecture (and, although it is its most influential practitioners. Horace Walpole and not my subject, literature)? To the eighteenth-century the men in his circle were among the first students and specialist, the justification for posing this question is collectors of medieval art in England, and their com- straightforward: Horace Walpole and his Gothic produc- mentaries, collections, and houses stand as significant tions—The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764/65) “texts” in the historiography of the discipline. Led by and his Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham Walpole, these men substantially imagined, invented, (1747–97)—are central monuments in most accounts of and promoted a profoundly influential vision of the the period, and the Gothic stands now (as it did in the Middle Ages that is still very much with us. Walpole’s eighteenth century) as one of the dominant aesthetic dark, psychologically intense, glamorous, violent, movements of English modernity. Along with Chinoiserie and even “camp” vision of the Gothic established the and other new styles, the Gothic was considered one form of the Gothic novel and its later iterations in art, PSU_Reeve.indb 11 3/30/20 2:20 PM literature, and cinema. For Walpole, the Gothic was Fothergill’s study2—that Georgian culture has asso- articulated not simply as a temporal period but as ciated the Gothic taste. How and why this was so are an aesthetic, ideological, and social “other.” In John questions I explore in the pages that follow. Fletcher’s useful epitome, the Gothic became “the It must be said that this thesis could be, and in discourse of modernity about its own pre-history, about some cases has been, explored across other productions the archaic that has been surpassed for modernity to of this circle—historiography, theater, literature (where be put in place. [It is a] repository of whatever is the most productive discussions of Walpole’s sexuality felt to have been lost in the advance of civilisation and have taken place), the history of collections, the history of Enlightenment.”1 Many of our most vibrant medievalist fashion, etc.—but my main concern is with the architec- productions, from the Game of Thrones television series tural patronage of half a dozen men surrounding Walpole. to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, draw deeply His famous villa at Strawberry Hill was a vital nexus for from a medievalist well that Horace Walpole bored Gothic designs, and many of the men who collaboratively centuries earlier. designed the building in and beyond the Strawberry The question I pose above is hardly new. In this Committee disseminated the “Strawberry Hill Gothic” book I look at it afresh, however, and propose that some mode in a handful of significant commissions, which valuable answers to it can be found within the complex are considered here. These houses and their collections sexual and social bonds Horace Walpole and the men amount to one of the most fascinating and compelling in his circle shared. Recent studies have explored sequences of buildings in what would be called the the broadly homoerotic culture of these men and the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century. “Gothic expression of that culture in letter writing, literature, Revival” might better be placed in quotation marks here and, to a far lesser extent, art and architecture. Walpole not only because the concept did not exist in Walpole’s and his intimate circle belonged to and helped to define period (a point I shall return to) but because the Gothic the so-called “third sex” of homoerotically inclined men was a mode of architectural design that was employed that emerged as a new category of sexual subjectivity consistently from the Middle Ages onward, and recent in England after ca. 1700. At the core of this book is commentators have, rightly I believe, preferred to call it thus an exploration of interrelationships between two the Gothic tradition.3 contemporary phenomena: the development of a new For scholars of medieval art, Horace Walpole is mode of sexual subjectivity and the development of “the well known as an effete eccentric, a “typically British” modern styles” of art and architecture, and in particular scholar whose quirky commentaries on medieval art, the Gothic style that Walpole and his circle adopted whose recording and replication of medieval forms, as their own. Of course, these men were by no means whose collection of medieval objects and its context at the first or only practitioners of the style, but they were Strawberry Hill, are often quoted but seldom explored. the most influential, and it is with them—variously He appears as a “father” of medieval art history in many “the Strawberry Committee,” as Walpole would have survey texts, in which his architectural and literary it, or the Strawberry Hill Set, to cite the title of Brian Gothic get a few prefatory pages of description, or he is PREFACE xii PSU_Reeve.indb 12 3/30/20 2:20 PM referenced in accounts of the afterlives of medieval objects rightly shows that medieval studies is impoverished by or in accounts of medieval art collections.4 Apparently abandoning these methods—by evacuating a sensory as “whimsical,” phony, and affected as the man himself, subjectivity from our studies in favor of purely empirical they are figured as amateur, early, and flawed episodes of approaches. She also shows that the splitting of methods medievalism that would be “corrected” by later Victorian artificially created two fields: medieval studies, defined by practitioners who gave birth to an official, empirical, quantifiable approaches, and medievalism, the “less-posi- academic medieval art history. Such superficial treatment tivist, ‘nonscientific’” approach to the medieval past. This of Walpolean Gothic, it might be said, reflects the inability division has been maintained through much of twenti- of the discipline to historicize itself. Walpole’s dismissal eth-century medieval art historiography and has often from medieval art history can be understood as arising enough been employed to divide “the real Middle Ages,” from what Kathleen Biddick has called “the shock of which might be understood to end with the Dissolution medievalism.” As Biddick has shown, the shaping of of the Monasteries (1536–41) or another imposed chrono- medieval studies as a modern discipline emerged from a logical marker, from “medievalism,” figured as series traumatic splitting of positivist methodologies favored by of postmedieval reimaginings of the Middle Ages, from the academy—philology, archaeology, codicology, diplo- Renaissance Italy to the present. matics, etc.—considered then as “scientific” approaches Happily, much work has helped to question, if not and therefore more intellectually rigorous, from less dissolve, these rather arbitrary ideological and temporal positivist, or “nonscientific,” methods that would then divisions. The field or subfield of medievalism is now be called “medievalism,” a camp into which Walpole’s thirty years old and seemingly well established in the Gothic productions squarely fit.5 humanities, even if the lion’s share of scholarship is Walpole had little time for the approach to tax- conducted by historians and literary critics.7 A number onomy and classification that would shape the history of of excellent recent studies in the history of art, however, art and architecture during his own period (methods bor- by Kathryn Brush, Michael Camille, William Diebold, rowed from the burgeoning study of natural history) and Robert Mills, Kevin Murphy, Amy Knight Powell, and manifest particularly in the early nineteenth century (one others indicate that medievalism—the study of postmedi- thinks of Thomas Rickman’s Attempt to Discriminate eval replications, appraisals, and re-presentations of the the Styles of English Architecture [1817]).6 Unlike later Middle Ages—is becoming increasingly central to the students of the Middle Ages, from the nineteenth through broader intellectual project of medieval art history. (I have the twenty-first centuries, Walpole did not depersonalize elsewhere described this as a “historiographical turn” his desire for the past. On the contrary, Walpole’s was an in medievalist art history.)8 And honestly, how could it erotic, subjective, and emotional Middle Ages, and he be otherwise? The period I am concerned with here, approached it not in terms of quantification and careful which stretches from the early eighteenth century to the sequencing of styles and dates but as a broad historical early nineteenth, substantially developed the very idea of idiom in which political and social modes of being “the Middle Ages” and “the Gothic” employed today. It were wed inextricably to architectural form.
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