Introduction

Abstract

In the painting Reading the Legend, (1852) (front cover) a man sits reading aloud at a woman’s feet, in the pose of a courtly lover, a ruined castle looming in the background. Rather than attending to his words, the woman gazes at the castle itself. The landscape before both is the same, but their view is in different directions. The painting encapsulates the huge interest in the Middle Ages, and related chivalry and romance, which surged in the mid-nineteenth century: it succinctly depicts nineteenth-century medievalism—the study and use of medieval literature and culture in a post-medieval period, here nineteenth-century Britain. Nineteenth-century medievalism did not take the Middle Ages and assess them as the separate past, but tried to absorb elements of the medieval into the present: the couple, well dressed in the contemporary fashion, immerse themselves and become part of a landscape of medieval romance. The painting also illustrates the interplay between the contrasting “male” and “female” versions of the medieval: the woman is producing her own version of the story, with its roots in the landscape, independent from the reading of her male companion. The artist, Lilly Martin Spencer, was herself “inspired by Tennyson’s poem ‘Lancelot and Elaine’” (Bolton-Smith and Truettner, 164), was influenced by the writing of a male medievalist.