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

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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. Biddick witnessed the creation of the earliest texts on the history

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PSU_Reeve.indb 13 3/30/20 2:20 PM of medieval art (including Walpole’s) and the popular- representation of the Middle Ages is all the work of ization of the Gothic as a dominant style for modern medievalism. Such a project is buttressed by current architecture and the decorative arts. Less tangibly, the thinking on the anachronic or multitemporal nature of scholarly apparatus for analyzing and recording medieval art and ideas in the medieval and modern periods.12 In art came into being then, in part as a result of the signifi- Leslie Workman’s formulation, “the Middle Ages quite cant destruction or “restoration” of medieval buildings simply has no objective correlative. . . . It follows quite and their components (tombs, choir screens, wall paint- simply that medieval historiography, the study of the ings, sculpture, etc.) and the urgent need to study and successive recreation of the Middle Ages by different record them. Nostalgia and necessity were equal drivers generations, is the Middle Ages. And this of course is in the formation of a medieval art history.9 As we pressure medievalism.”13 This perspective has been increasingly and question the temporal structure of the Middle Ages central to recent formulations of medievalism and and its period labels—Romanesque, Gothic, Byzantine, guides my approach here.14 While this book will, I hope, etc. (none of which, of course, had any meaning in the be of interest to scholars of medieval art (proper), medi- periods to which they have been assigned)—we are aware evalism, the history of architecture, and to specialists of the Middle Ages’ status as a dominant historical myth of eighteenth-century English culture—including those of modernity, and arguably the dominant historical myth specifically interested in sexuality—it was conceived as of modernity. The initial formulations of the mythology an extension of my research into medieval art and its of the Middle Ages and of the Gothic by Raphael, Vasari, histories. In this, Horace Walpole and the men in his and others in the humanist art historiography of the circle stand as our predecessors, whose quarry, like my sixteenth century necessarily separated a “middle age” own, was the forms of medieval art and their re-rep- from classical antiquity and from what was perceived as resentation in their modern present. Although, it must its revival in the so-called Renaissance.10 The invention be said, they did it with much greater flair than their of the Middle Ages—and the Gothic in particular—was it- academic successors, their project is our project. self an episode of medievalism conceived in the formative If Walpole’s construction of the Gothic was moment of the history of art, as Erwin Panofsky pointed influential in shaping one of modernity’s dominant out long ago.11 discourses, it is significant to acknowledge that reception These ideas and labels, of course, remain part of his construction was neither linear nor constant. of the very fabric of art history as a discipline and are His Gothic productions were appreciated and ap- not easily divorced or disentangled from it. One useful propriated by a range of thinkers and movements for way forward has been to abandon the academic chau- various subjective and political ends that are relevant vinism that aims to restrict forms or ideas to singular to the concerns of medievalists taking “the long view” temporal periods—an agenda advanced, for example, of these productions (and, of course, the long view of at the Gothic Modernisms conference organized medievalism itself). Walpole and his Gothic productions at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2017—and to have enjoyed a reception history in LGBTQ studies, acknowledge that the continuing research into and and he is a significant figure in later twentieth-century

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PSU_Reeve.indb 14 3/30/20 2:20 PM accounts of “the history of sexuality.” (For example, he instability of The Castle of Otranto and, by extension, received an entry in the recent Who’s Who in Gay and of Strawberry Hill, upon which it is based. For Breton, Lesbian History [2002].)15 In this context he has often the novel was a forerunner of “the surrealist method,” enough been placed within genealogies of queer writers, since it emerged from a dream and was composed in a including his friend Thomas Gray, William Beckford, manner akin to the surrealists’ “psychic automatism,” or Oscar Wilde, and Lytton Strachey.16 Susan Sontag, in her “automatic writing.”21 Employing a range of medieval/ famous 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” was the first to read medievalist sources, surrealists engaged with Walpole’s a modern “camp” sensibility into Walpole’s queer affect homosociality, theatricality, and dandyism. It is, of course, and into the design of Strawberry Hill, a sensibility she beyond the current study to address these discourses, but sees starting in Walpole’s milieu and developing into the they remain part of the very fabric of Walpole’s Gothic, modern present.17 and they suggest a broader historical trajectory for Walpole’s Gothic products cast an equally long medievalism itself. shadow across psychoanalysis in the nineteenth and The origins of this book stretch back to my days twentieth centuries. Not only did psychoanalysts engage teaching at the University of London about a decade with Gothic fiction as what some believed was a mode ago, when living through what Umberto Eco called “the of psychoanalysis in and of itself, but later critics found New Middle Ages” as an academic medievalist posed psychoanalysis to be a fitting tool to excavate the dense some interesting challenges.22 The school system had sexual and familial trauma that lay at the heart of Gothic not prepared university students for the sheer brilliance fiction. Walpole famously employed the Old Testament of medieval art, its intellectual sophistication, or the concept of “the Sins of the Fathers” as a central trope of extraordinary possibilities of the medieval imagination, the Gothic to articulate the irrepressibility of sin (and, lat- much of which was still obfuscated by a post-Renaissance terly, of trauma) as the dominant narrative of the Gothic.18 historiographical construct that considered the Middle Scholars have variously credited the Gothic with the Ages an ugly precursor to modernity (sorry cliché though invention of a systematic discourse on the irrational, an it was and is). But one could deal with this through good invention that anticipates Freud’s discussions about the teaching and some additional (and, for a medievalist, unconscious, and with the invention of a language of remedial) lectures on medieval art and history. What sexological critique for sexual alterity (or “dysfunction”) was more challenging and less readily fixed was teaching that precedes psychoanalysis’s introduction of a “theory” against the backdrop of the remarkable medievalist of homosexuality.19 An extensive bibliography of psycho- productions of the present age, including the afore- analytic readings of Walpole’s Gothic fiction can now be mentioned Lord of the Rings films, not to mention major cited.20 Walpole’s Gothic also enjoyed a heritage among exhibitions in London during those years, such as Gothic surrealist writers in the early and middle twentieth cen- Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination tury: André Breton, among others, considered Walpole at Tate Britain (2006).23 While students knew these were a sort of proto-surrealist, an apt characterization in not representations of the real Middle Ages (something many respects given the spatial, temporal, and narrative we would struggle to define), they were nevertheless

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PSU_Reeve.indb 15 3/30/20 2:20 PM informing an imagination for the Middle Ages, whether were manifestly familiar to them, since they had viewed academics liked it or not. many versions of them either directly or through their So, it was time to go to war with these medievalist innumerable iterations in subsequent art, literature, productions (and, to some extent, with my students) and cinema. Walpole presented to them, and to me, an by teaching them in a new course. Beginning with the uncannily familiar face. early texts by Raphael and Vasari that constructed “the Horace Walpole has continued to occupy much of Middle Ages,” my students and I marched forward in my thought and writing since then. While it could hardly time to explore the broad morphology of “medieval,” be said that aspects of Strawberry Hill and Walpole’s and thus of “medieval art” as a historiographical con- conception of the Gothic style have not been carefully struct, with a particular focus on the Gothic. This was a studied, a key part of the story seemed to be missing. win-win, since it has been a lifelong fascination of mine, As my understanding of Walpole’s sexuality came into and London and its environs held as much Gothic and focus, it offered a crucially important insight, not only Gothic Revival art and architecture as we could hope to into his promotion of the Gothic as a kind of counterstyle study in a lifetime. I took the broadest possible approach, to the Palladian, but also into the often suggested but and I, naively as it turned out, opted to work through the seldom articulated kinship between Walpole and the men seventeenth through nineteenth centuries with classes in his Strawberry Committee. I published a number of on the Gothic novel, ending with the construction of the essays on the subject in the Art Bulletin, Architectural Gothic (or the “American Gothic”) in cinema. I could not History, the Burlington Magazine, and elsewhere, and my have imagined how popular this class would be. Students work was featured in a piece in the Financial Times by embraced Eco’s concept of a perpetual reimagining of the Jonathan Foyle.24 But the topic seemed to exceed even the Middle Ages, from its rather unfixed temporal point(s) lengthiest essay word limit, and so this book needed to be to the present. This not only made “the Middle Ages” written. It is not, I hasten to state, a “queering” of the ori- considerably more palatable for them and unpacked the gins of the Gothic Revival, since the early Gothic Revival Renaissance construction of a “middle” age, but it also might be understood to be in need of a straightening out brought into sharp focus our own location within this rather than a queering, to paraphrase a treasured col- unfolding mythology. We naturally came across Horace league. It is also not an attempt to “out” Horace Walpole Walpole and Strawberry Hill and, eventually, the series or his circle. Readers looking for this can certainly find of buildings built by the men and his circle, including it in other sources, not only in recent scholarship but in parts of the Vyne in Hampshire, Dicky Bateman’s Old critical accounts published during Walpole’s lifetime. It Windsor, and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, all of is, instead, a study that aims to locate sexual and aesthetic which were within a short train ride from central London. changes within a shared historical trajectory. Having read The Castle of Otranto, we were primed to I am pleased to thank the people and institutions explore the house, which was then just beginning an who helped make this book possible. Ellie Goodman at extensive restoration. My students got Horace Walpole Penn State University Press deserves hearty thanks for and they got Strawberry Hill. These Gothic productions her early and sustained interest in the project and her

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PSU_Reeve.indb 16 3/30/20 2:20 PM careful attention to detail throughout the transformation Nina Rowe, and Sherry Lindquist. Laura Ashe, Robert of my early ideas into this book. I am also grateful to Mills, Linda Neagley, and Maurice Howard each offered Brian Beer and the staff of Penn State for their careful expert advice and a rare image or two. My colleagues in attention to the text and for compiling the index. As with the history of sexuality and related disciplines offered all scholars of Walpoliana, an enormous debt of gratitude me their time and friendship as I came to terms with is owed to the remarkable Lewis Walpole Library and eighteenth-century sexualities, namely George Haggerty, the Center for British Art at Yale. I was honored to Randolph Trumbach, and especially Whitney Davis, hold fellowships at both places when working on this whose influence and generosity will be manifest in one material, and I incurred a long series of debts. Susan way or another on many pages of this book. At Queen’s, Walker, Cynthia Roman, and Kristen McDonald at the I was lucky to have excellent colleagues who discussed Lewis Walpole Library tirelessly answered questions, this material with me and read parts of it at various stages, sent images, and looked things up so many times I have particularly Pierre du Prey and Stephanie Dickey. Ruth lost count. All scholars should be so lucky to have such Wehlau and Leslie Ritchie invited me to give two packed excellent and supportive archivists (and fellow obses- lectures to the English Department, which were inspiring sives) to work with. I can say the same of Bernard Nurse and a lot of fun. Our wonderful art-history librarian, from the Society of Antiquaries of London, who was Lucinda Walls, tracked down countless things for me tremendously helpful in and out of the society’s library. from far and wide. A generous three-year grant from the Social Sciences and In the course of things, I was honored to be Humanities Research Council of Canada allowed me to welcomed into the field of “British Art” (which gener- travel to do the work, and a Mid-Career Fellowship from ally excludes medievalists), and I want to thank Tim the Paul Mellon Centre in London allowed me a term Barringer for inviting me to speak in his seminar at Yale, free of teaching to finish the writing. The Paul Mellon Timothy Brittain-Catlin for having me present an icono- Centre and the Principal’s Fund at Queen’s University clastic paper at the Pugin conference at the University of also awarded me generous publication grants, which Kent, and Jongwoo Kim, Dominic Janes, and Whitney allowed this book to be more fully illustrated than it Davis (again) for taking part in the “Queer Gothic” might have been. Turning to my academic colleagues, it session that Ayla Lepine and I organized at the College might be best to begin with the medievalists and spe- Art Association in Chicago. I was also welcomed into the cialists in Gothic architecture: William Diebold, Anne intimidating world of “Eighteenth-Century Studies,” and Hedeman, Stephen Murray, Stephen Perkinson, and I enjoyed excellent exchanges with Stephen Calloway, Ittai Weinryb invited me to speak on this topic at a range Stephen Clarke, Noah Heringman, Crystal Lake, and of venues, from one side of the continent to the other. Dale Townsend. In the years since, many of these schol- In Toronto, Matt Kavaler and his work on Renaissance ars became friends and have offered me their knowledge Gothic architecture were an early and vital influence.25 and humor in London, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Others in the field offered support and even venues to Yale, and elsewhere. Peter Lindfield invited me to give a publish early musings, including Colum Hourihane, keynote lecture at the Gothick Symposium at Oxford and

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PSU_Reeve.indb 17 3/30/20 2:20 PM went on to be a friend, collaborator, and fellow student of Walpoliana. We were both writing books on Walpolean Gothic simultaneously and exchanged chapters and shared much during the research and writing. Final talks on the material were given at the Gothic Modernisms conference at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Yale Center for British Art, Strawberry Hill, Columbia University, and the Bard Graduate Center in New York. I conclude by offering thanks to the mentors who taught me a great deal about art history as an under- graduate at the University of Toronto and a graduate student at Cambridge, a genuflection that is surely emblematic of being “early mid-career.” None of them were directly instrumental in shaping this project, nor do they work in the field, but their example and wisdom nevertheless permeate what follows: Suzanne Akbari, Paul Binski, Patricia Brückmann, Michael Koortbojian, Elizabeth Legge, Alexander Nagel, and Malcolm Thurlby. Although this is a book about men, it is dedicated to the women with whom I share my life, my wife, Tia, and our daughter, Adelaide, whose arrival into the world coincid- ed with the completion of this book.

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