Back to the Future: The Birth of Modern Medievalism in England and America

Abstract

As the citizens of a technological and secular first world—the dot.com modern society of a putative global village produced by access to the Internet and a humanist education—we have a long and historically ambivalent relationship with our medieval past. For citizens of America, a country founded in opposition to the social and political structures, rooted in the Middle Ages, of aristocratic and monarchical England, this relationship becomes even more problematic. On the one hand, the Middle Ages became, almost from the very moment the Renaissance recognized they were past, synonymous with the barbaric, the violent, and the superstitious— “modernity’s common, rejected … past,” antithetical to the values of rational, humane, and democratic discourse.¹ On the other hand, the romance of the medieval has historically provided Western culture with the site of a lost ideal and a past to which the modern must return in order to ensure its future.² As “moderns,” particularly modern Americans, we are schizophrenic about our medieval past; we are also obsessed with it. From the early modern period to the present, western Europe—and in its time, America—has experienced what Umberto Eco argues is a continuous return to the Middle Ages, a return that he identifies as a quest for origins: “looking at the Middle Ages means looking at our infancy, in the same way that a doctor, to understand our present state of health, looks at our childhood, or in the same way that a psychoanalyst, to understand our present neuroses, makes a careful investigation of the primal scene.”³

Let it not be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment, that was known as Camelot.

Camelot

Let’s not go to Camelot. It’s a silly place.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail