‘On the topic of medievalism, a question has been preying on our minds of late. What is the term for a specialist in medievalism? “Medievalist,” alas, is already taken. Medievalite? Suggestions in the comments section, please.’

The Leeds International Medieval Congress 2009 gets underway two weeks from today. The theme of this year’s gathering is “Heresy and Orthodoxy” but, as ever, the congress includes a rich range of thematic strands, including a healthy selection of panels on Medievalism. One such panel has been organized by the recently founded Exeter Medievalism Network. The Exeter Medievalism Network has been set up by a group of colleagues who, specializing in different historical periods, have found a common interest in the the phenomenon of medievalism (broadly defined as a fascination with and/or attempt to revive some aspect of medieval culture). Medievalism has been of increasing fascination to scholars in a range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, art history and archaeology, and to specialists in all historical periods ranging from the Renaissance to the present. For all this, academic approaches to medievalism have tended to be limited in two key respects. Firstly, medievalism has generally been understood as a nostalgic and aesthetic response, with scholars focusing on the revival or reinvention of formal practices (Spenserian diction, pre-Raphaelitism) and/or heroic national legends (King Arthur, Robin Hood). There has been far less attention to how the broader array of medieval social structures and practices have appealed as models or otherwise found representation in subsequent periods. Secondly, individual studies of medievalism have almost always been synchronic, focusing on the vision of middle ages in a given historical period (eg, the Romantic era, the Victorian period, or indeed the present day. What is less common is the diachronic narrative charting how the reputation, image or use of a particular medieval phenomenon changed over time. Our aim as a research network is to encourage the development of such narratives, through our own collaboration and through the sponsorship of events including an international conference at Exeter in 2010 (of which more later). Here are details of the EMN session at IMC:

Session: 1625 Title: Imagining Monastic Communities Date / Time: July 16, 2009 11.15-12.45

Sponsor: University of Exeter Medievalism

Network Organiser: Corinna Wagner, Department of English, University of Exeter

Moderator: Cory James Rushton, Department of English, St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia

Paper 1625-a: ‘It was never merry world since…’: Dissolution, Nostalgia, and the Birth of the Middle Ages Philip Schwyzer , Department of English, University of Exeter

Paper 1625-b: ‘An habitual propensity to indolence and inactivity, contracted during his confinement in the cloister’: Medieval Kings, Catholicism, and Masculinity in the 19th-Century Novel Joanne Parker, University of Exeter Medievalism Network, University of Exeter

Paper 1625-c: Medievalism, Community, and the Rise of Modern Political Economy Corinna Wagner, Department of English, University of Exeter

Abstract: This panel investigates constructions of medieval monasticism in the early modern and modern English imagination. We examine how narratives surrounding monastic society evolved over time: each of the papers will explore the ways in which narratives about monks and pious kings were employed in different political and religious contexts. After their Dissolution, monasteries became – for both Catholics and Protestants – emblems of a lost era of cultural harmony. In the late 18th century, these emblems were used to protest the rise of modern political economy. Then, in the 19th century, monastic heroes were used to promote Catholic Relief and related political initiatives.

On the topic of medievalism, a question has been preying on our minds of late. What is the term for a specialist in medievalism? “Medievalist,” alas, is already taken. Medievalite? Suggestions in the comments section, please.

Other (genuine) medievalists from Exeter University speaking at IMC include Sarah Hamilton, Naomi Howell, and Anthony Musson.

Haunted House

Originally uploaded by McCarthy’s PhotoWorks

]]> http://gothicstudies.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/haunted-house-2/feed/ 0 agodwinian http://gothicstudies.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/haunted-palace/ http://gothicstudies.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/haunted-palace/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:54:40 +0000 agodwinian http://gothicstudies.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/haunted-palace/ ]]>


haunted palace

Originally uploaded by Luxgal

There is a (I think) wonderful trend toward recreating images that have a distinctly aged patina. Digital enhancement programs allow for some wonderfully gothic and medievalish images.

Gothic and Steampunk Photography

This Piranesi image  reveals an emerging and increasingly significant conflict in the eighteenth-century between modernity and what might be termed the pre-modern condition, between the legacy of Enlightenment and the medieval legacy (or what was interpreted to be the medieval legacy).  In terms of chronology, approach and discipline, medievalists were and are a diverse bunch, but arguably, hey are all in some way reactionary: as an aesthetic movement and as a social practice, medievalism counters what it identifies as the problematic symptoms of modernity.  To be more specific, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medievalists challenged the emphasis on utility in politics, on rationality in medicine, on efficacy in public life and on individualism in what the historical writer Thomas Carlyle famously termed ‘the dismal science’ of economics.

This is the starting point for a project I am working on that traces the cultural and political legacy of this enduring and widely varied contest between on the one hand, medievalists who emphasize the sanctity of human life, cultural collectivity and the moral obligations required for a cohesive, organic community, and on the other hand, the modernizers they challenged — that is, utilitarians, economists, industrialists, medical researchers and liberal politicians.  The aim of this project is also to demonstrate how this nineteenth-century legacy has continued and continues to be used to challenge the ideological demands of the present.  This project might be described, then, as a genealogy of anti-Enlightenment sentiment, a genealogy that can be traced through nineteenth-century medievalism to twenty-first century neo-medievalism.

The Dream of a Transparent Body:

Identity, the Origins of Neuroscience and the Gothic Novel

The body,

Eternal Shadow of the finite Soul,

The Soul’s self-symbol, its image of itself.

Its own yet not itself–

(Fragment, ST Coleridge, undated [1810?])

In the history of ideas about the relationship between mind and body, scholars have regarded the eighteenth century as particularly fertile ground.  The debates sparked by John Locke’s challenge to Cartesian dualism in his account of the self as an amalgam of soul and body were especially significant to the development of modern medicine and social science.  The Lockean notion of a self-reflective consciousness firmly situated in the body – ‘the soul begins to have ideas when it begins to perceive’ – inspired scientists and philosophers to attempt to map the unseen internal life of the human onto the material surface of the body.  This attempt is manifested most clearly, for instance, in the hugely popular science of physiognomy, which posited that individual character was embodied in the features of the face.  To the modern observer, eighteenth-century physiognomy may appear simply as a case of ‘bad science’ or as occultism; nevertheless, its underlying principles have much in common with the logic behind the development of not only seemingly tenuous sciences like phrenology or craniometry, but also to more ‘reputable’ modern disciplines like psychology, criminology and neuroscience.   Up-to-the minute technologies and current medical research obviously appear to us as much more legitimate and scientifically sound than their eighteenth-century precursors, but all of these sciences offer a surprisingly similar model of self-understanding.

In fact, to rank physiognomy as one of several ‘marginal pseudoscientific eighteenth-century developments,’ as health researchers W. Michael Bird and Lynda A. Clayton have done, is to hastily dismiss what seems to have been a lapse in rational judgment, from which (mercifully) we have evolved.^[1] To characterize physiognomics – and related branches of eighteenth-century science – as marginal pseudo-science is to obscure how remarkably perennial have been its central tenets.  In fact, it is rather surprising that Bird and Clayton would use such a characterization since their research identifies the origins, and traces the development of racial discrimination in medicine.  As they otherwise show, it is crucial to recognize the theoretical and methodological continuities between our medical past and twenty-first century developments.  The history of modern prejudices cannot be so easily dismissed from the history of ideas.  Although the branches of social and medical science I have mentioned here – physiognomy, phrenology, craniometry, criminology and neuroscience – are obviously enormously diverse in many ways, we should not miss the links between them.

I would argue that on the issue of human identity, these sciences share a foundational premise, have comparable aims and have adopted similar methodological approaches.  These sciences conceive of the body as intimately linked to, indeed inseparable from, the mind and/or the ‘self.’  They are underwritten by the belief that the body shapes—if not determines—character, behaviour and intelligence.  From this premise, it follows that the body conveys information about such things as pathology, moral depravity, sexual deviance and criminal predisposition.  There is obviously great diversity between these sciences as well as within their most specialized branches; still, there are observable methodological similarities.  Amongst the otherwise disparate group of eighteenth-century physiognomists, for example, there is procedural uniformity.  As Ludmilla Jordanova notes, they practiced techniques of ‘inference’ based on the premise that ‘the human body gave rise to signifiers, which systematically led to the signified.’^[2] Jordanova’s observation could just as well apply, it seems to me, to the methodologies of twenty-first century sciences that are likewise motivated by a desire to identify and to understand the bodily clues that indicate character, intelligence, emotion or dysfunction.  The branches of medicine referred to here may span two hundred and fifty years of the modern age, but they subscribe in some way to what Richard Gray describes as ‘one of the most persistent fantasies held by the human intellect’: the desire to develop ‘a kind of penetrating interior vision that would infallibly reveal the psychological constitution of any human being at which it is directed.’^[3] Post-enlightenment science seeks to increase human wellbeing and to secure the social order by rendering the body a more transparent entity.  Transparency has been and remains a key ideal in the modern Western world.

In light of this shared aim, it is perhaps not surprising that the scientific tradition I will trace here is in some way connected to the gothic — a literary genre that is also tremendously concerned with in the relationship between human ‘nature’ and the body, and with the psychological and bodily sources of vice and criminality more specifically.  In fact, art historian Victor Stoichita’s description of physiognomy as a science that sought to identify ‘the devil’ within, rather than outside the human body might just as well apply to the gothic novel.^[4] Yet — and this is a crucial point — at exactly the points of overlap between Enlightenment science and the gothic, there is also an important parting of the ways.  In contrast to scientific faith in the transparent body, late eighteenth-century gothic novels often represent the body as an untrustworthy source of information about the self.  I would argue that the use of the body to define the self—as practiced by Enlightenment scientist-philosophers as well as by individuals in everyday life—comes under intense interrogation in such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya. In these novels individuals are often reduced to a bodily map, and in particular, to a facial map, which gives clues as to personal character, motivation and intention.  The faces of gothic characters can communicate and guide, but more often, they mislead and misinform.  Through disastrous mis-readings, misdiagnoses and mis-identifications, Lewis, Radcliffe and Dacre demonstrate how the practice of conflating body and self is deeply threatening to the notion of ‘unique’ personhood.  The recurring gothic trope of disguise is a particularly revealing literary manifestation of authorial anxieties about attempts to forge an increasingly intimate connection between the codified body and the codified self.

^[2] Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘The Art and Science of Seeing in Medicine: Physiognomy 1780-1820,’ Medicine and the Five Senses ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) pp. 122-133, p. 125.

^[3] Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomical Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz, (Wayne State UP, 2004), p. xvii).

^[4] Stoichita, Victor, from Turner, Christopher, ‘A Short History of the Shadow: An Interview With Victor I. Stoichita’ The Cabinet 24: Winter 2006/07.  A contemporaneous work, On the Non-existence of the Devil (1776), instructed: “Do not see the devil outside, do not seek him in the Bible, he is in your heart.”

I am working on a gothic anthology of literature, which includes poetry and short fiction from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century.  What would you include?  What are your favourites?  Coleridge, Poe, Hawthorne?  What theoretical and historical documents do you see as integral to understanding the gothic?  Kristeva, Freud, Thomas Carlyle?