Order and Disorder in the Medieval Revival

Abstract

The medieval revival was a great imaginative force for more than a century in art, literature, politics, and culture. Its imprint is most visibly recorded in the architecture of the age which, with greater or lesser fidelity to the past, delivered its sermons in stones. It was also present in the whole texture of nineteenth-century thought: in the imagery with which it expressed and surrounded its daily life and in a broad network of values and ideas that similarly sought to recapture an idealized vision of history. Far more than Orientalism or Classicism, it took hold of the spirit of the age, causing a whole era to reverberate with the memories and associations of a half-actual, half-imagined past.