By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Poetry, fantasy, and folklore were the initial carriers of Romanticism, which was then disseminated and translated through the performing arts. In Great Britain, this trend had been prefigured in the late 18th century by the Gothic novel and the faux-medieval forgeries of Thomas Chatterton, and James McPherson, who translated an alleged Gaelic cycle of poems.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Thomas Chatterton and James McPherson’s immediate heirs were the Romantic poets, especially Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the inescapable Walter Scott, whose historical Waverley novels and poems immediately found imitators and adaptors all over the world.
However, the Romantic appeal of the medieval past in Britain was most vividly realized in the visual arts associated with the members and supporters of the mid-19th century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose works relied heavily on the stories and imagery furnished by medieval authors as well as by Byron, Tennyson and Scott.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Medieval Legacy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
A. W. N. Pugin
The Pre-Raphaelites wanted authentic materials and craftsmanship that would not just mimic medieval buildings and objects, but recreate them. They were inspired in this by the work of the draughtsman and architect A. W. N. Pugin, an early champion of Gothic revivalism, who was a convert to Roman Catholicism and whose father was a French refugee from the Revolution.
In 1836, Pugin published an illustrated book called Contrasts: Or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the 14th and 15th Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, which responded in part to the slipshod design and poor construction of recent Anglican churches.
A Champion of Gothic Revivalism
Pugin, in his book, not only insisted that such structures should be truly medieval in appearance and construction, but also that a robust revival of the Gothic style would promote “return to the faith and social structures of the Middle Ages”, to the improvement of the English character. Moreover, these principles did not apply to churches alone, but to prisons, sanitoria, hospitals, and poor houses as well.
Pugin’s own personal house was built to his specifications on Gothic lines, and it is thanks to his designs and influence that the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament) and Big Ben itself were rebuilt in the Gothic style after the disastrous fire that had destroyed them in 1836.
The adoption of the Gothic style for these now-iconic structures had happened in the face of strong opposition by those who insisted on a neoclassical design inspired by the Parthenon.
Arts and Crafts Movement
The Arts and Crafts movement of the Pre-Raphaelites built on this momentum and extended Gothic design and craftsmanship beyond the public sphere and into the domestic, where it impacted everything from wallpaper to washbowls.
Its leader, William Morris, was a textile designer by training and eschewed modern mechanized manufacturing. He regarded medieval artisans as inspired by pure faith and the love of nature, and the Middle Ages as an era in which the art of the common people was also sustained by a strong sense of community and shared responsibility. Like many of his colleagues, he was an ardent and active socialist, and the movement at large became connected with a huge array of social, cultural, and political projects, from dress reform and women’s suffrage to experiments in ruralism and the collection of folk songs.
Medieval Heritage
The extraordinary reach and depth of medievalism’s impact on architecture and allied arts in Britain and elsewhere, especially in its colonies and in northern Europe, can be illustrated by two divergent trends: the rejection of Gothic revivalism in France and its passionate embrace in the United States.
The French Revolution had a profound but often contradictory impact on artists, activists, and intellectuals outside France. Within France, the Revolution’s transformation into a Reign of Terror and then into a Napoleonic imperial juggernaut, which ended at Waterloo in 1815, had led to profound uncertainly about the nation’s fate. One aspect of this uncertainty, by no means trivial, was the status of its medieval heritage.
The medievalist Robert Stein has showed that the term medieval appears for the first time in print, in any language, in a novella by Honoré de Balzac published in 1830, where it is explicitly set in opposition to the Classical values of the Renaissance. As Stein points out, the fact that Balzac can rely on his popular audience to understand the aesthetics and ideologies undergirding these terms shows how current the awareness had become.
Common Questions about Medievalism’s Impact on Architecture and Allied Arts
The Pre-Raphaelites wanted authentic materials and craftsmanship that would not just mimic medieval buildings and objects, but also recreate them. They were inspired in this by the work of the draughtsman and architect A. W. N. Pugin, an early champion of Gothic revivalism.
In 1836, Pugin published an illustrated book called Contrasts, which responded in part to the slipshod design and poor construction of recent Anglican churches. Not only did Pugin insist that such structures should be truly medieval in appearance and construction, he also insisted that a robust revival of the Gothic style would promote “return to the faith and social structures of the Middle Ages”, to the improvement of the English character. Moreover, these principles were not to be applied to churches alone, but to prisons, sanitoria, hospitals, and poor houses as well.
William Morris was the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement of the Pre-Raphaelites. He was a textile designer by training and eschewed modern mechanized manufacturing. He regarded medieval artisans as inspired by pure faith and the love of nature, and the Middle Ages as an era in which the art of the common people was also sustained by a strong sense of community and shared responsibility.
