Identity, Community and Victorian Medievalism in the South West

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For the Victorians, the Middle Ages were a vital touchstone in debates on religion, politics and society. Consequently, a clear picture of Victorian medievalism is crucial to understanding the culture of the period, and our inheritance from it. Medievalists looked to the past to make sense of a rapidly technologizing, urbanizing, globalizing present. Perhaps as a result of the extensive scope and remarkable complexity of this movement, scholars have tended to approach Victorian medievalism as a national movement. But writers, artists and architects in South West England were interested in the past as a way to define what was exceptional, authentic and exemplary about their region and its people -- as distinct from the nation as a whole. Our initial research reveals that South West medievalism responded in distinct ways to a growing sense of national homogeneity. According to South West medievalists, the universalizing, cosmopolitan urbanity of the metropolis threatened local identities they associated with such values as authenticity, a love of liberty, sympathy and a poetic sensibility intimately connected to the landscape of Cornwall and Devon. This case-study will explore how communities turned to their regional histories and local landscapes in response to economic, technological and social change. This study will investigate how an influential aesthetic movement was used to promote a sense of community grounded in local identities that stretched back over the centuries. We will explore how designers and writers borrowed from the literary artefacts and visual imagery of their region's past in order to forge an aesthetic that they thought capable of inspiring 'sensus communis' - that is, a shared sensibility about what it means for the life of a community to flourish. Their particular vision of sensus communis did not aim at the universal as was the case with other artists and thinkers; rather, it aimed at the local and particular. We will trace how South West medievalists constructed ideas of community inseparable from local history and landscape. These ideas, we will show, were reflected in the art, architecture and literature they produced. We believe that this is a timely study in light of recent challenges to retain and strengthen local character in the face of a globalizing world. Public attention has recently turned to consider the significance of the local within the global. However these are not solely new concerns: social disaffection, the loss of regional character and the disintegration of community were important issues in the nineteenth century. The discourse of Victorian medievalism lies at the root of our contemporary understanding of global vs. local. When communities feel under threat they reach for a common past. This study of Victorian Medievalism in South West England will demonstrate the ways in which the turn to a regionally-distinct past influenced the physical shape of the region and the cultural shape of its communities in often profound ways.