By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Since the end of the 19th century, modern technologies have been enabling increased access to the medieval past, particularly in the US. As Mark Twain understood, in his 1889 satire, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, medievalism went hand-in-hand with the promise and perils of modern industrialization.
World’s Columbian Exposition
During the long summer of 1893, more than 27 million people flocked to the South Side of Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition: a massive celebration of national pride that marked the United States’ emergence as a major player on the world stage. It enabled even working-class Americans to embark on a virtual grand tour of the world, against which they could compare and contrast homegrown inventions with the splendor and exoticism of Old World cultures.
Americans were exposed to historical artifacts and architectural replicas that most would never be able to visit in situ. In the French pavilion, they saw a Classical statue from the Louvre juxtaposed with the effigy of a medieval knight from the cathedral of Rouen. In the Victorian-style pavilion devoted to Great Britain, the regal splendor of Windsor Castle was revealed in miniature, while the newly constituted German Empire was represented by a medieval city hall.
The ‘American Century’
Outdoing them all was Norway, which had constructed a full-sized authentic replica of a 9th century Viking ship which had been discovered at Gokstad in 1880, just a decade or so earlier. Helmed by Captain Magnus Andersen, it had set sail from Bergen across the Atlantic, and then through the Erie Canal to Lake Michigan—while it advertised the benefits of Yankee engineering, on display in the canal zone.
Thus, an exhibition which had begun as a celebration of American progress, heralding the coming of ‘American Century’, also served as window onto a distant European legacy for which Americans, across the social spectrum, hungered and yearned. Hence the one-two punch of Twain’s novel, which parodies the American tendency to romanticize the Middle Ages and, at the same time, pokes fun at the absurd inventions, violence, and exploitation of industrialism.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Medieval Legacy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Reclaiming Our Medieval Past?
Medieval historian and diplomat Henry Adams would later compare the powers of ‘the Virgin and the Dynamo’ to the detriment of the latter: contrasting the noisy, sterile productivity of the Exposition’s engines to the austere beauty wrought by cathedral builders. As he snobbishly declared, “All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”
What we are witnessing, then, in these last decades of the 19th century, is the mass movement of medievalism from the realm of high art and intellectual critique to popular culture and the public sphere, and in places that had no medieval European patrimony of their own.
Indeed, one could tell a similar story about medievalism in Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, or India. Around the globe, the very technologies that were so self-evidently ushering in the modern age were paradoxically making the apparent simplicity of the medieval past more keenly felt.
The Paris International Exhibition
Take, for example, the Paris International Exhibition of 1900, which featured a life-size replica of ‘old Paris’—ironically hearkening back to the very streetscapes that Baron Haussmann had just succeeded in eradicating a few decades before.
At the same time, these same modern technologies were making medieval artworks, buildings, and landscapes newly familiar to the new middle classes that could afford to travel by steamer to Europe; as well as to those, less affluent, who could consume them on picture postcards, through stereopticon sets, in moving pictures, or via the pages of Stoddard’s Travel Lectures, in ten volumes, published in 1898 and a feature of most well-appointed middle-class parlors in the US.
Oberammergau
One of these staple volumes was almost entirely devoted to the most wildly popular medieval destination of this Gilded Age, Oberammergau—the remote Bavarian village where “the last of all … medieval dramas still exists … kept alive by the breath of simply piety”—that is, the Oberammergau Passion Play.
According to the carefully curated legend that made this tiny hamlet a massive tourist attraction, the villagers of Oberammergau had been spared from an outbreak of the plague in 1633 and had accordingly vowed to perform their own medieval version of Christ’s Passion every 10 years, devoting the energies of every man, woman, and child to this sacred feat.
By 1850, it was a regular stop on the grand tour. By 1890, Oberammergau’s popularity was such that a new theatre was built to house the massive audiences that thronged to the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, seating 4,000 people at a time for daily performances from May to October and entrancing not only the millions who visited, but the many more millions more who pored over published news of the play’s popularity.
Anton Lang and the Americans
Americans, in particular, became obsessed with this medieval spectacle. The Oberammergau actor Anton Lang, who played Christ in the play from 1900 to 1922, often had to take refuge from his overzealous fans by hiding in the mountains.
In 1923, after his final season, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Hundreds of magic lantern slideshows, commemorative brochures, and illustrated eyewitness accounts of the Oberammergau play were produced for American markets. In 1891, when Kodak introduced the first affordable Brownie camera for amateur photographers, it was explicitly advertised as an essential accessory for the tourist visiting Oberammergau.
Common Questions about the Medieval Past
The World’s Columbian Exposition enabled working-class Americans to embark on a virtual grand tour of the world, against which they could compare and contrast homegrown inventions with the splendor and exoticism of Old World cultures.
The villagers of Oberammergau had been spared from an outbreak of the plague in 1633 and had accordingly vowed to perform their own medieval version of the play, Christ’s Passion, every 10 years.
By 1890, Oberammergau’s popularity was such that a new theatre was built to house the massive audiences that thronged to the foothills of the Bavarian Alps.
