Clare A. Simmons – författare

Medievalism, the later reception of the Middle Ages, has been used by many writers, not just during the Victorian period but from the Renaissance to the present, as a means of commenting on their own societies and systems of values. Until recently, this self-interest was used to distinguish between Medievalism, a selective, often romanticised, view of the past, and medieval studies, with its quest for an authentic Middle Ages. The essays in this collection suggest that the search for knowledge of a "real" Middle Ages has always been a problematic one, and that the vitality of the vision of Medievalism is demonstrated by its constant adaption to current concerns.

This book, first published in 2000, uses interpretations of the French Revolution as a model to ask what history meant to Victorian Britain, how events became enshrined with the authority of history, and how such cultural assumptions might help us to read nineteenth-century British literature. By examining reactions to French revolution in a broad selection of texts, this book explores how the Victorians responded to developments in France in historical terms, repeatedly comparing new events to the touchstone of the first French Revolution, yet always with the goal of finding ways to understand Britain’s own past, present and future.

This book, first published in 2000, uses interpretations of the French Revolution as a model to ask what history meant to Victorian Britain, how events became enshrined with the authority of history, and how such cultural assumptions might help us to read nineteenth-century British literature. By examining reactions to French revolution in a broad selection of texts, this book explores how the Victorians responded to developments in France in historical terms, repeatedly comparing new events to the touchstone of the first French Revolution, yet always with the goal of finding ways to understand Britain’s own past, present and future.

Medievalism, the later reception of the Middle Ages, has been used by many writers, not just during the Victorian period but from the Renaissance to the present, as a means of commenting on their own societies and systems of values. Until recently, this self-interest was used to distinguish between Medievalism, a selective, often romanticised, view of the past, and medieval studies, with its quest for an authentic Middle Ages. The essays in this collection suggest that the search for knowledge of a "real" Middle Ages has always been a problematic one, and that the vitality of the vision of Medievalism is demonstrated by its constant adaption to current concerns.

Set in England, Scotland and France during the fourteenth century, John Galt’s Rothelan (1824) engages with major historical contexts including the Black Plague pandemic, Anglo-Scottish warfare and the Hundred Years’ War. Remarkable in its time for its representation of an alternative Jewish history showing sympathy for Jewish communities and for taking women’s agency seriously, the novel tells a story of usurped inheritance while narrating major historical events from the reign of King Edward III. Present-day students of literature may appreciate the novel’s metafictional play, including a found text device and a chapter that jokingly mocks a Walter Scott novel. Presented for the first time in a modern, annotated edition, this authoritative text features an introduction and appendices with background information pertaining to the novel’s content and relevant contexts.

Memorable for characters eccentric yet socially and economically representative, and for scenes alternately comic and tragic, John Galt’s 1823 novel The Entail is a compelling story of greed, anxiety, and tradition against a background of social upheaval. In addition to making this remarkable novel available in a scholarly edition with annotations suitable both for the general reader and for research, the editors provide an introduction that makes its complex legal issues—of property, marriage law, trial procedures—accessible in the context of Scottish Romanticism and modernisation. Situating Galt’s aesthetic choices in dialogue with the Romantic-era Scottish novel the volume discusses the text, Galt’s letters, early periodical reviews, and recent scholarship. Through annotations that clarify Scots language and dialect as well as legal parlance, the editors highlight the novel’s comic collisions of language and personalities, and the attention to social transformation that Galt painstakingly, although sometimes obliquely, details.

A survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages.What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun: living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many vaunted the superiority of the present to the past-yet others felt that if shadows of past ways of life haunted the present, they were friendly ghosts.This book explores such ghosts and how real or imagined remnants of medieval celebration in a variety of forms created a cultural idea of the Middle Ages. As Britons found, or thought that they found, traces of the medieval in traditions tied to times of the year, medievalism became not only the justification but also the inspiration for community festivity, from Christmas and Boxing Day through Maytime rituals to Hallowe'en, as show in the writings of amongst many others Keats, Browning and Dickens.