Victorian Medievalism
Lamia and the Soldier, by John William Waterhouse
Wikicommons
You’ve heard the old saying that History repeats itself, right? Of course you have. But it’s not just the events of History that have a way of resurfacing every now and then. People have a tendency to look back to an earlier age for inspiration on both an artistic and spiritual level. At the end of the 18th century and in the Regency the trend was to look back to the ancient world of Greece and Rome. But as the 19th century progressed, artists and scholars began to take another look at a period of time that many of their contemporaries had written off as dark, bleak, and unenlightened: the Middle Ages.
In fact, Medievalism became such a fad with so many off-shoots by the end of the 19th century, that we are still feeling the effects of the revival today. What started as a small movement amongst painters and poets, a reaction against the modernization of Realism, turned into an expansion of creativity that today’s fantasy and paranormal fans would recognize, in spirit and practice. (more…)
