Tag Archives: medievalism

As I was preparing to teach “Medieval Wisdom for Modern Ministry” last year, I went in search of modern authors who find the medieval period still useful for us today. I quickly discovered that some of my favorite authors–Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, and others–had been avid “miners” of the Middle Ages–spelunking for wisdom that the modern age so desperately needs. One particularly useful essay in my search is a piece by Ian Boyd, “Chesterton’s Medievalism,” published in Studies in Medievalism: Inklings and Others and German Medievalism III n. 304 (Winter/Spring 1991): 243-255.

Though this is a scholarly essay with all the appurtenances, it proved readable, useful, and stimulating to this non-specialist (I am neither a medievalist nor an expert in Chesterton, or indeed literature!) I hope you’ll find it so as well—at least the bits of it that I took notes on.

The central insight of Chesterton’s that Boyd describes is golden: we must be neither romantic about the Middle Ages (“seeing them by moonlight,” as Chesterton said) nor dismiss them as hopelessly pre-modern. But it is appropriate and helpful to read the Middle Ages through our own modern (and we could add, postmodern) questions, so long as we recognize that the resulting portrait will be a sort of partly modern, partly medieval hybrid. This is, in fact, what the word “medievalism” in this journal’s title means: any appropriation and re-imagining, by folks from a later time, of the ways and means, look and feel, highways and by-ways of the Middle Ages.

So, here we go with Boyd on Chesterton on the Middle Ages (in note form):

First point: GKC’s medievalism is not as romantic and unconditional as critics sometimes have said.

Second point: what distinguished a bad from a good medievalist in GKC’s view was their ability to understand and engage with the problems of their own day: “He insists on the paradox that genuine medievalism is closely connected to contemporary political issues, declaring roundly that medieval history is useless unless it is also modern history, and mocking both the romantic [247] antiquarian who haunts Melrose by moonlight and the Don Quixote figure who fails to understand his own age. But always C insists that the sign of genuine medievalism is an ability to see the contemporary world with fresh vision. In C’s view, Cobbett, Carlyle, Hood, Ruskin, and Kenelm Digby are true medievalists, because when they look to a medieval past, whether real or imaginary, they look to it only in order to understand better their own age. The false medievalist is recognized by his blindness to the problems of his own day.” (246-7) Continue reading →