In a case that came before Southwark Crown Court in 2010, a woman found guilty of slashing her lover’s face with a broken glass was let off with a conditional discharge and a suspended prison sentence because the judge believed she had been threatened with medieval behaviour. During a drug-fuelled sex session – Britain’sDaily Mailreported – the defendant’s lover had wanted to use nipple clamps and hot wax; she had resisted, which led to an assault. Judge Michael Gledhill sounded sympathetic as he said to her, “I’ve seen at least two implements which looked to the untrained eye as medieval...

Shekhar Kapoor’s 2007 film,Elizabeth:The Golden Age, sequel to 1998’ sElizabethwith Cate Blanchett again in the title role, depicts the middle years of the Tudor queen’s reign up until the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Continuing the central drama of the earlier film, it traces the virgin queen’s establishment of her legitimacy as a woman on the throne. At the same time, in a scarcely less obvious way, the narrative is a triumphal drama of the forging of a Protestant nation, breaking free from and defining itself against a Catholic past of superstition and oppressive...

The dream vision encodes the impossibility of visiting the Middle Ages. When we stand, as tourists, before the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, we are encouraged to think that what we are doing is visiting the Middle Ages. We go to a medieval cathedral of the gothic era: “[T] he illusion of permanence and connectedness with the past is almost perfect,” as Richard Utz writes.¹ In fact this is almost as illusory as the travels undertaken by William Morris’s melancholic dreamers. When we walk in that vast nave, we move amid a palimpsest of all historical eras. We may...

J.-K. Huysmans’ 1898 novel,The Cathedral(La Cathédrale), presents the ruminations of Durtal as he seeks spiritual calm in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres. Aided by two priests, Durtal examines the cathedral in all its aspects. The novel consists chiefly of his responses to it, and a depiction of his inner states as he agonises over whether he should adopt the monastic life or not. At the end, Durtal departs from Chartres, with many misgivings, for Solesmes, where he plans to consider the life of a Benedictine monk.

The Cathedralis a largely meditative novel in which almost...

In the first two parts of this book, I have made various claims about the reach and impact of medievalism in a range of contexts, with a particular focus on the British. I have discussed the way in which medievalism can be traced back to the immediate post-medieval period itself, as a product of the invention of the Middle Ages in the sixteenth century. Its major phase in Europe is inextricably associated with the Medieval Revival that began after the middle of the eighteenth century. In Germany, for example, at the height of the Enlightenment with its neoclassical impulses, a...

In Marcel Proust’sIn Search of Lost Time, set in France of thefin-de-siècleand early twentieth century, the sense of time is founded on the Middle Ages. As we have seen in chapter 3, Marcel describes the beloved church at Combray as “an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space – the name of the fourth being Time.” He regards both the length of the church’s nave and the depth of its crypt as showing the way in which it extends across the centuries: the nave marking “each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant,” and the crypt “thrusting...