A new interest in medieval things surfaced in England in the 1760s and with it a revival of medieval forms, manifest in literature and in architecture. At first this modern medievalism was experimental and uncertain. A more serious attitude to the medieval past developed during the long war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. A longer historical perspective altered the ways in which the English – and perhaps the British – came to think of the evolution of their society and its political arrangements. In the 1830s this Medieval Revival affected religion, and produced major changes in architecture, and then painting and the decorative arts. The country’s idea of its history, and of its identity, changed.
In 1960, the founding editor of Penguin Classics, Dr E.V. Rieu, received a proposal for a book of verse translations, to be called The Earliest English Poems. The proposal consisted of trial versions of two Old English elegies, ‘The Ruin’ and ‘The Wanderer’, with a list of other poems to be translated. Dr Rieu, who had sat Classical Moderations in Oxford in 1908, accepted the proposal, though the translations were in verse, not the ‘readable modern English prose’ which was his policy for the series. Over lunch at the Athenaeum, he offered his undergraduate guest a piece of traditional advice: ‘You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references.’
Completing that book entailed the verification of many references, and the translator, my younger self, eventually took to teaching English literature, modern and medieval, to translating Beowulf and the Exeter Book Riddles, making glossed editions of Beowulf and of Chaucer, and writing about modern poetry.
In the 1980s, British universities were told by British governments to reward research, not teaching. One of the evil consequences of this directive was that the common inheritance of English literature was further enclosed into fields of academic research. As a gesture of resistance, I wrote a history of English literature from ‘The Dream of the Rood’ to The Remains of the Day. The writing of this history uncovered a story, known to some scholars but not to most educated readers, of the recovery of the past and the re-introduction in the 1760s of new – medieval – models into modern literature, and gradually into other fields: politics, religion, architecture and art. The following essay in cultural history is an attempt to trace the very far-reaching results of this re-introduction.