title: Gothic Medievalism: How Medieval Culture Haunts Gothic Literature (1764-1900)
Creators: name: Carabine, Alex
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2024

description: The role of the Middle Ages in the Gothic has garnered relatively little criticism in previous scholarship. It is the purpose of this thesis to establish the multivalent ways in which the Gothic mode is indebted to the art, literature, religion, and culture of the Middle Ages. The importance of a medieval aesthetic in establishing the atmosphere of Gothic literature has been acknowledged; however, it is at this point that my research intervenes to assert that the influence of medieval culture runs deeper than that of atmospheric mise-en-scène. Its presence is tangible from the inception of the Gothic in the eighteenth century (where this thesis begins), through to the fin-de-siècle (where this thesis ends). The Gothic authors studied here demonstrate a steady and at times scholarly interest in the art, culture, and religion of the Middle Ages. Whether through researching histories, reading texts, or collecting artefacts, each author chosen for this thesis was inspired by the Middle Ages, and that inspiration found its way into their Gothic writing. The authors therefore re-enchanted their Gothic texts by turning to primary medieval sources. In doing so, they necessarily had to create what I term a ‘medievalised universe’ (a simulacrum of the cosmos as understood by the Middle Ages) within their Gothic narratives. As such, most of the texts chosen adhere to one or more of the following: first, religion is not a source of doubt, though it can be a cause for anxiety; second, evil exists; third, monsters, magic and supernatural creatures are active agents in the world. 

This thesis offers a chronological examination into the role medieval culture played in the development of the Gothic. It begins in the eighteenth century, when interest in the medieval past was both political and literary, informed by a desire for an indigenous British heritage. Chapter One examines The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764), The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe, 1794), and The Monk (Matthew Lewis, 1796). Chapter Two investigates the ways in which the medieval Romance revival, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and the tale of Mélusine were used by the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon to establish the Enchanted Gothic. Chapter Three demonstrates the development of Folkloric Gothic and examines the ways in which medieval witches and werewolves are reinterpreted in the Victorian novels The Phantom Ship (Frederick Marryat, 1839) and The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (William Harrison Ainsworth, 1849). Chapter Four revisits Dante and establishes the ways Vernon Lee critiqued courtly love in her story, ‘Oke of Okehurst: Or, The Phantom Lover’ (1890), and how Oscar Wilde’s interest in Inferno is visible in the eponymous portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Finally, Chapter Five reveals the ways the fin-de-siècle reimagined Arthurian grail narratives wherein the pursuit of the vampire is an unholy grail quest in Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), and the grail is figured as a malevolent relic in A Fragment of Life (Arthur Machen, 1899/1904). The medieval era remained a continual source of inspiration within the Gothic, and received a richer, more detailed attention on the part of Gothic authors than has previously been acknowledged.