'Barbarous, Antiquated Stuff': The Politics of Medievalism in England, 1688--1740

"Barbarous, Antiquated Stuff" investigates the emergence of "political medievalism" as a response to the crisis of historical consciousness that characterized the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688 and the fall of Robert Walpole in 1742. As a literary discourse, I argue that political medievalism constitutes a distinct period of medieval reception between early modern humanism and empiricism, and the mid-eighteenth-century Gothic Revival. This period, dominated by the Ancients vs. Moderns debate and discourses of "party rage," saw a diverse group of poets, playwrights, critics, and antiquaries retrieving medieval writers and texts and adapting them as "literary objects" whose aesthetic qualities offered a solution to widespread historical uncertainty. These literary objects, as I call them, function as contested allegories that destabilized the binary of ideological belief and skepticism into ambivalent credibility, in which partisan claims are both plausible and suspect, and clarify the positions at stake between Ancients and Moderns as well as Whigs and Tories before the Gothic Revival.;Chapter One details the contemporary political and cultural conditions that generated political medievalism, and reads the reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain as a paradigmatic example of a literary object mediates rival partisan strategies to brand civic ideals like patriotism and politeness as common inherited property. In Chapter Two, I examine John Dryden's and Richard Blackmore's treatments of Arthur as an allegorical hero, which made possible the rehabilitation of epic as a matrix for Whig ideology that could successfully subvert the aesthetics of Stuart absolutism. Chapter Three turns to the Wife of Bath as an early eighteenth-century political icon, adapted by Dryden, Alexander Pope, and John Gay. In their hands, the Wife's language of sovereyntee and maistrie in marriage mediates the ideological problem of political resistance, mirroring the persistent blending of politics and sexuality that is usually investigated in studies of amatory fiction by women. Chapter Four investigates the female antiquary Elizabeth Elstob, who redirects antiquarian energies from clashing partisan polemics entrenched in minute interpretations of Anglo-Saxon laws to a critical literary discourse that attempts to reconcile Whig and Tory principles through a common patriot canon.