Abstract
The study of medieval literature at the end of the nineteenth century expands rapidly at the same time that the developing field of anthropology demonstrates a great interest in performances and rituals of what were regarded as primitive or decadent cultures, and in some subtle and some obvious ways, medieval literature and ethnic theatricality were thought of as analogous to one another. Moreover, at the same time that detailed literary scholarship was reconstructing the physical production of medieval drama, anthropology was engaged in a new practice of reconstruction by display. In the late nineteenth century, certain strands of high imperial culture quite literally exhibited a deeply ambiguous relation to the theatrical, and nowhere is this relation more strikingly demonstrated than in the developing field of anthropology. One of the topics in this chapter is the ways in which the concept of the medieval in the late nineteenth century is redefined by the rise of anthropology, an anthropology that owed a debt, if not directly to Nietzsche and Darwin, than to the popular understanding and appropriation of Nietzschean ideas, especially in regard to ideas of race and progress. I argue, therefore, that some of these analogies were visually expressed. At precisely the moment when the study of medieval literature and culture achieve academic institutionalization, the medieval is imagined again as both foreign and indigenous.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For heavily illustrated studies of international exhibitions and world’s fairs in general, see John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977); and
Wolfgang Friebe, Buildings of the World Exhibitions ([Leipzig, East Germany]: Edition Leipzig, 1985). For an extended analysis of the relation of world’s fairs to imperial politics, see the important study by
Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Approaching American fairs from a similar perspective is
Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). A record of documentation concerning the fairs is available from the Smithsonian on microflm reels, and much of the following depend on documents bibli-ographed in
Robert W. Rydell, The Books of the Fairs: Materials About World’s Fairs, 1834–1916, in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1992). I am deeply indebted to the important study by
P.A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2000) for the germ of many of the ideas that follow.
See, for instance, R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996);
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986);
Laura Morowitz and Elizabeth Emery, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003);
Angela Jane Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture, New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2003);
Janine Rosalind Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851–1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973);
Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970);
Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham London: Duke University Press, 1998); and
Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).The series Studies in Medievalism has been essential to this enterprise.
See Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918);
Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company Riverside Press, 1913);
Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J.C. Levenson (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982);
Henry Adams, Supplement to the Letters of Henry Adams: Letters Omitted from the Harvard University Press Edition of the Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J.C. Levenson (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1989).
For an overview of Paris 1900, see Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900:The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967). For an idea of what an American visitor was expected to see at Paris 1900, see the guidebook by
Barrett Eastman, Paris, 1900: The American Guide to City and Exposition (New York: Baldwin & Eastman, 1899). Paris 1900 is well documented in photographs and most major American archives such as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress have extensive holdings. For a contemporary view, see
Marius Bar, The Parisian Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Exposition at Paris (St. Louis, MO.: N.D.Thompson Publishing Co., 1900); L’Architecture à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Paris: Librairies-imprimeries réunies, 1902) and L’Architecture & la Sculpture à l’Exposition de 1900 (Paris: A. Guérinet, 1904).
For an argument that some of the thinkers described in the previous chapter predicted Jones’s thesis, see George J. Metcalf, “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, Dell Hymes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 233–57.
Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, 83. Schwab here is paraphrasing François Joseph Picavet, Les Idéologues: Essai sur l’Histoire Des Idées (Paris: F. Alcan, 1891).
Victor Hugo, Les Orientales, Collection Poésie ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1964).
Said, Orientalism, 139–43. On language study in England, and in general, see the standard works by Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967); and
Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Crinson, Empire Building, 16. For heavily illustrated examples, see Patrick Conner, Oriental Architecture in the West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979) and
Patrick Conner, The Inspiration of Egypt: Its Influence on British Artists, Travellers, and Designers, 1700–1900, ed. Patrick Conner (Brighton: Brighton Borough Council, 1983).
For an edition and translation of the original 1809–28 report of the Commission des Sciences et Arts d’Egypte, see Gilles Néret, Description de l’Egypte (Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1994). For a splendid edition of the prints, see
Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed. Monuments of Egypt The Napoleonic Edition: The Complete Archaeological Plates from la Description de l’Egypte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press in association with the Architectural League of New York, the J. Paul Getty Trust, 1987).
The most sustained critique of Said’s Orientalism in relation to nineteenth century cultural productions is John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Careful to place his larger political sympathies on the side of rather than against Said, he nevertheless attempts to assemble evidence to dispute Said’s thesis that Orientalism as it developed in the nineteenth century accompanied, and even justified, the expansion of imperialism. Even above and beyond his lengthy critique of Said’s historiography, however, Mackenzie is even more concerned with a postcolonial studies agenda that he claims follows in Said’s wake that assumes that all orientalist representations by Western artists and writers are condescending, dismissive, or hostile to Eastern and Islamic culture. In fact, as Mackenzie acknowledges, postcolonial studies accomodate a wide range of positions on the relative agency and hegemony of colonizer and colonized; however, he insufficiently acknowledges Said’s own concern to distinguish sympathetic from condemnatory attitudes. Mackenzie assumes that any sympathy displayed by a Western artist toward an Eastern subject or topic absolves them of Said’s critique. However that may be, Mackenzie amasses a good deal of extremely helpful evidence and data, and is attentive to the complexity of the occidental perspective on the Orient, usually when he drops his mission of refuting Said. As Mackenzie notes, the violence often portrayed in Orientalist paintings, even when dealing with animal rather than human subjects, is in many ways an inheritance of Romanticism, and the Romantic conception of the violence sublime, as much as it is a projection of violence onto the East. One might observe, however, that Romantic portrayals of Eastern barbarism and violence, however celebratory and fascinated, do in fact associate barbarism and violence with the East. More to our point, however, MacKenzie observes that such barbarism and violence is also associated with Gothic and medieval themes. On the positive side, Mackenzie notes the obsession with horses and hunting in many nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings. He correctly identifies the association of the British aristocracy (and gentry) with their counterparts in Arabian, and especially Bedouin, cultures. This bond is reinforced by the breeding of Arabian horse livestock in the West, and especially in Britain. Interestingly, this association is also noted by later commentators, including T.E. Lawrence, who makes a distinction between noble desert Arabs and decadent city Arabs. It is also a cultural connection noted by some of the travel writers and diplomats who open British communication with the newly important Arab states with the rise of oil economies in the early to mid-twentieth century. Along with other scholars, Mackenzie notes the fascination with the ambivalent gender and sexual relations sought after in Orientalist fiction and to some extent, art. Such a fascination is at least partly in reaction to the rigid gender categories of nineteenth-century Western Europe. But at the same time, Mackenzie also correctly observes that the fascination with the Middle Ages, and with the themes of courtly love as they are focussed upon during the same period is also a fascination with a different and more complex set of sexual and gender roles, and are also often as much projection as discovery of medieval practice. Where Said and others have criticized the imagery of the “empty” desert as a justification of conquest and possession—what could be wrong with claiming and cultivating an empty and unappreciated land?—Mackenzie observes that the timelessness and purity of the desert landscape in fact offered an alternative to the historically transformed industrial landscape of nineteenth-century Europe. The pure and empty desert was therefore an alternative, an escape and a critique of European environmental degredation. Other helpful debates with what their authors take to be too broad a brush, and too one-sided a version of Said’s account are
Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod, eds, Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); and
Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds. Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, Objects/Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Owen Jones, Lectures on Architecture and the Decorative Arts ([S.l.]: Printed for private circulation, 1863), 20–21. See the discussion of this passage in Crinson, Empire Building, 34.
See Jones’ most famous work, Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and son, 1856). For a sense of his appreciation of non-Western traditions, see
Owen Jones, The Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace., Guides and Handbooks, Crystal Palace (London, 1854);
Owen Jones, The Complete “Chinese Ornament”: 100 Plates, Dover Pictorial Archive Series (New York: Dover, 1990).
James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture Being a Concise and Popular Account of the Different Styles of Architecture Prevailing in All Ages and All Countries (London: J. Murray, 1855), 469–70. See also
James Fergusson, A History of Architecture in All Countries from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: J. Murray, 1862);
James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1891).
I have been presenting the Gothic revival as part of a complex and vexed history dating to the sixteenth century, but we should be reminded that E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, ed. E.J. Hobsbawm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) cites the decision to build the Houses of Parliament in the Gothic Style as a prime example of an invented tradition. As with most invented traditions, it was an effort to establish “the continuity with a suitable historic past” (1). As Hobsawm points out, however, the decision to rebuild the Chambers on the same plan after the devastation of World War II was also an establishment of a new tradition in the guise of connecting with an older one.
Edward Augustus Freeman, A History of Architecture (London: J. Masters, 1849), 271–72.
Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965);
E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1903).
In addition to Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, see Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
See the excellent discussion of the Mediaeval Court and the controversy over Pugin’s Catholicism in Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
See the description in Frank Cundall, Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, illus. Frank Cundall (London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1886), and
Ernest T. Hamy, Études Ethnographiques et Archéologiques sur l’Exposition Coloniale et Indienne de Londres (Paris: E. Leroux, 1887).
As described in Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 220.
For a description of the various “Streets of Cairo,” see Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs, Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
On the slightly later use of world’s fairs as anthropological laboratories, see Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Lowie Museum of Anthropology; Scolar Press, 1983).
See the excellent account of the exhibition by Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900, McGill-Queen’s/Hannah Institute Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 9–35.
See the standard study by Jane Brown, Lutyens and the Edwardians: An English Architect and His Clients (London: Viking, 1996).
David Wayne Thomas, “Replicas and Originality: Picturing Agency in Daniel Gabriel Rossetti and Victorian Manchester,” Victorian Studies 43, no. 1 (2000): 67–102. For an illustration of some of the recreations of medieval and early modern Manchester, see
Alfred Darbyshire, A Booke of Olde Manchester and Salford, ed. George Milner (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887).
Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
The most eloquent analysis of the desire implicit in medievalism is L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
Copyright information
© 2008 John M. Ganim
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ganim, J.M. (2008). The Middle Ages as Display. In: Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09039-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09039-3_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-60245-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-09039-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)