Louisa Stuart Costello’s Translations and Medievalism

Abstract

Costello’s interest in medievalism was a lifelong scholarly and artistic commitment and passion that infiltrated every area of her writing and publishing. Her first job, copying illuminated manuscripts from the Bibliothèque Royale for the British Museum, brought her into close contact with the artistic beauty and richness of medieval art and poetry, which she reflects on in many of her later works. She was, first and foremost, a scholar of medieval French and Italian literature, who found ways to disseminate her knowledge, and crucially earn a living, in a diverse range of literary outputs. Her negotiations of the literary market to this end provide a fascinating case study of the flexibility of the professional writer at the time. Costello recovered unknown French texts and communicated them to the British reading public. She used translations from medieval literature, and medieval settings for her poetry, skillfully in her work as a means of making social and political comment without attracting undue, and commercially disastrous, criticism. Her travel writing is distinctive because of the rich accounts of the medieval history and literature she offers for each area she visited. Costello’s influential, new adaptations of the Arthurian legends offer alternative versions of the stories from Celtic, Cornish, Welsh, or Breton originals.

Those illustrious names you mention carry me back to days of chivalry and romance, to which I blush to confess, living in these days, that I am devoted.¹