Medievalism and the myth of revival in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought

The nineteenth-century medieval revival in literature, art, architecture, and social thought has been chiefly discussed as an attempt to recapture the sentimentalized atmosphere of the Middle Ages by restoring its outer trappings. This dissertation instead delves into the underlying assumptions of the medieval revival that reflect the nineteenth-century change in the very concept of the past and its uses. Central to the work of Coleridge, Shelley, Cobbett, Pugin, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Chesterton, and Eric Gill, and to the goals of Aestheticism, the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Anglo-Catholic Revival, and the Anglo-Irish Renaissance is the idea of a vital past whose spirit could be rediscovered and carried forward into the present. The focus of this dissertation is two-fold. First, it analyzes the premises of the nineteenth-century myth of revival --the idea that older cultures remained available to be reincarnated in contemporary forms. Second, it traces the strategies by which the spirit of the Middle Ages was to be carried forward and, subsequently, the extensions of the revivalist impulse into the twentieth century. Revivalists, in contrast to most of their critics, focused attention on the process, rather than the products, of their movements; in exploring the underlying assumptions of revivalism, this dissertation adopts a similar method. As this dissertation concludes, the creative perspective initiated by the nineteenth century toward the past represents the most significant product of revivalism and emerges, not in static idealizations of the Middle Ages, but in vital aspects of the evolving aesthetic, religious, and social thought of the last two centuries