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.

In seeking to revive the spirit, culture, and appearances of medieval times the Victorians used many stratagems. Among them, and often overlooked, was their antiquarian study of medieval dress and their wearing of costumes that represented medieval clothing. Whereas the eighteenth century had expressed their interest in the Middle Ages largely through Gothick novels and through architectural research and reconstructions, the nineteenth century, although continuing to look to a medieval inspiration in architecture, enveloped themselves in the more intimate clasp of medieval apparel and, thus accoutered, sought to enact the pageantry and pastimes of the medieval ages.

In his classic study of the Gothic revival, Kenneth Clark describes the transformation of the Gothic from its eighteenth-century associations with the non-rational, the non-civilized, and the mysterious into the sacramental Gothic created in large measure by Pugin and Ruskin. This transformation of medievalism continued through the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, sacramental Gothic had been subverted, changed into what Walter Pater calls in his essay “Aesthetic Poetry” a “profounder medievalism,” a medievalism that is closer in sensibility and artistic form to the contemporaneous Decadent movement on the Continent, to the work of Baudelaire and of Poe. This transformation can be illustrated in the sharp changes in the use of one of the most important signs of Victorian medievalism, the monastic or cloistered life, from the early Victorian writings of Thomas Carlyle, to the work of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and through Dante Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors of the late 1850s and William Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume of 1858, the original subject of Pater's essay.

The fascination with the Middle Ages that stimulated Carlyle's Past and Present, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume, and Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse registered slight effect in Browning's poetry. Perhaps alone of Victorian poets, Browning recorded no impressions of Malory's Morte Darthur — which appeared in three separate editions early in the century and not only inspired the Laureate's magnum opus and the Pre-Raphaelite murals in the Oxford Union, but nearly prompted Morris to found a chivalric order before he alighted on the more practical scheme for a furniture company. Whereas Browning used specifically medieval settings and characters in two early unsuccessful works, Sordello and The Return of the Druses, he later returned to the Middle Ages in only a small number of poems. Though Arthur Symons praised Browning for having “distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages,” the claim that “there is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge” holds true for the Renaissance and later periods far more than for the Middle Ages. Even though his medieval interests, compared to those of his contemporaries, seem slight, Browning's perception and uses of the Middle Ages constitute an intriguing and rather neglected facet of the many-sided phenomenon, Victorian medievalism. To understand his sense of the Middle Ages – the period's viability and meaning as a contemporary subject – we may turn, first, to Browning's evaluations of nineteenth-century medieval works, and then to his poems themselves.

If the theory and practice of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism are something more today than historical curiosities, it is partly because critical interest still attaches to a question they explore. This question may be phrased as follows: how far is Ruskin's doctrine of unmediated sense perception, of the so-called uneducated or innocent eye, an artistic possibility? In this essay I shall consider a few of the ways in which Browning's approach to the question differs from the characteristic approach of three contemporaries. I shall briefly compare three of Browning's poems on medieval subjects – “Childe Roland,” “Count Gismond” and “Old Pictures in Florence” – with D. G. Rossetti's “The Blessed Damozel,” William Morris's “The Chapel in Lyoness,” and Gerard Manley Hopkins's “Duns Scotus's Oxford.”

Tennyson is not only breaking out of the pedestrian clichés and frozen critical expectations that for so long enshrouded him; he is gradually but steadily emerging as a poet of arbitration, as one of the poet-practitioners by whose work the nature of poetry must itself be defined and against which the work of poets habitually preferred to him will more and more be measured.

“Salvation lies not in tight lacing,” Carlyle quips in the opening of Book II of Past and Present by way of defending the loose structure of his comparative study of English society in the early 1840s. Critics still disagree sharply in their estimates of Carlyle's political argument, but the loosely-laced structure of Past and Present has allowed Book II, with its portrait of twelfth-century monasticism and Abbot Samson, to remain fairly immune to controversy. In fact, most readers, whether they applaud or dismiss the rest of Past and Present, would agree with A. M. D. Hughes that “it is in virtue of this interlude … that the book belongs among the classics of our tongue.” Several editors have gone so far as to sever Carlyle's tenuous connection between past and present altogether, printing the section devoted to Abbot Samson separately under a new title.

Critical attention to the dominant tradition of Victorian medievalism has stressed its essentially conservative tendencies. For representative proponents of this tradition – Carlyle, Ruskin, Young England – the imaginative value of the Middle Ages lay in their contrast with the political and social disorder of the present. The antidote to those modern poisons – laissez faire capitalism, Utilitarian ethics, Liberal individualism – lay in a resuscitation of medieval hierarchy, one which called on the Captains of Industry to form a new aristocracy, and the state to assume control over the economy and social welfare. For such thinkers, the spiritual health and organic order of medieval society depended upon its essentially undemocratic structure. The prominence of this analysis has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of two alternative treatments of Victorian medievalism, the Whig and the Socialist. While opposed in fundamental ways to one another, these interpretations are opposed in more significant ways to that dominant conservative tradition in that they created alternative myths of the Middle Ages to justify a more – not less – democratic society in the present and future. Such myths assisted the development of class consciousness by using the authority of history to sanction a social order which drew its moral and political strengths not from the ideals of the aristocracy, but from those of the middle and working classes, respectively. However, the following demonstration of the way similar historical points of departure can lead investigators to radically different conclusions ultimately reinforces the central characteristic of Victorian medievalism: that it represented less an attempt to recapture the past “as it really was” than a projection of current ideals back into time.

One branch of source study concerns an author's use of events, localities, works of art, and artifacts. We may sometimes ask ourselves whether it matters what porridge had John Keats, which Withens was the original of Wuthering Heights, whether there was a single identifiable Lucy. Yet so fascinated are we by the alchemy which the creative mind performs that we wish to view from all possible angles how it works on its raw material, how it transmutes crude fact into poetic truth, how it changes baser metal into gold. By doing this we deepen our knowledge of that mind. And so we seek for accuracy in our identification.

Once again, we have to thank the directors of the Browning Institute and the editor of Browning Institute Studies for this opportunity to update the information contained in our Checklist.