HC 421H, Honors College colloquium Inventing the Middle Ages

Study questions for reading due February 5 (week 5)

The first Gothic novel: The Castle of Otranto

1. Walpole's two prefaces sketch out the relation of his new type of romance to history and to the novel up to 1764. In the first preface, where he pretends to be the "editor," what attitude does he take toward "superstition" and the supernatural? How does he treat the "historical" status of the manuscript? Notice the time frames evoked: 1200s, 1529. Why choose these dates? Why choose the Middle Ages as a setting?

2. In the second preface, how does Walpole justify the new type of romance he's introducing? What is it that the novel has been lacking up until 1764 that he thinks The Castle of Otranto can give to readers?

3. With a giant helmet dropping from the sky, pictures stepping out of their frames, and blood dripping from the nose of a statue, this isn't exactly what we would call realism. What does Walpole mean in the second preface when he says "nature" and "the rules of probability" have guided him in his writing? Is it the psychological "realism" that distinguishes the novel from its predecessors?

4. What role does the Catholic church play in the story, and how might staunchly Protestant English readers tend to react? (Otranto was published soon after the end of the Seven Years' War, in which England trounced its great-power rival, Catholic France.) What about Father Jerome?

5. What symbolic use does Walpole make of the Eastern lands where Frederic and Alfonso go on the Crusades (as well as Algiers, where Theodore and his mother are enslaved)?

Essay on Gothic Romance

This article points to some of the primary questions Otranto brings up, such as the way England seems to simultaneously embrace and reject its medieval past. What is the role of the supernatural? Why would the Middle Ages inspire fear? Hogle notes "Gothic" architecture's new vogue at the time, and the simultaneous rejection of the medieval past as dangerous, Catholic, and violent. Notice the connotations of Gothic and its connection, as already mentioned in class, with "other races" and the Orient.

Note Hogle's point about emotions' "reality." Hogle argues that irretrievable loss defines the emotions of the Gothic novel. Like Dinshaw, Hogle relies on the concept of abjection to understand the modern take on the Middle Ages. He uses the term to point to a longing for an unattainable, evanescent "real." How "real" are the Middle Ages that the Gothic novel conceives, or is that not the question we should be asking? What role does individualism play in the Gothic novel? Is the concept of alienation key to understanding the Gothic genre as Walpole starts it?

Note too Hogle's comments about women in the Gothic novel. The last part of the essay treats the Gothic in modern culture, such as the television series The X Files. How do we explain the consistent attraction of the Gothic in the imaginative arts?

Dinshaw, Chapter One

You might find this definition of Lollardy or this definition of Lollardy helpful in understanding Dinshaw's chapter. Her primary point is to show the way the Church's critics used sexual behavior to condemn the Church, while the Church co-opts those same charges and flings them at the "heretics." The label of sodomy is labile, meaning it can move around and be used for different purposes. At the same time, as Dinshaw points out, the label is visible and simultaneously invisible, used infrequently and, for Wyclif (the philosophical head of Lollardy), less bad than simony, the practice of benefitting financially from purloined church property and offices. Yet Dinshaw also wants to avoid simple bifurcation as a tactic for analyzing medieval sexuality, and brings the concept of secrecy into her discussion. Think about how that concept resonates even in the 20th-century American army's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. The transubstantiation argument animated Catholic/Protestant debate for centuries, but Dinshaw emphasizes the desire to see change: the "gaze," the visual, is the ultimate proof. But what proof is there of sexuality, other than the "ocular proof" (what Othello demands of Iago, but is satisfied with a handkerchief). Dinshaw is also interested in the way the discourse of sodomy appears in a "performance of sodomitical fears that are always circulating, destabilizing and undermining efforts at building community and reforming a nation" (87). As such the queer becomes the locus of reform and imagination.

Chapter Four of Inventing the Middle Ages

Marc Bloch's work is, as Cantor indicates, still foundation to medieval studies. Cantor plays two notes in his assesment of Bloch: Bloch's heroism, which he situates within a general condemnation of the French for their lack of resolve during World War II, and Bloch's marxism, which Cantor avers characterizes postwar academic pursuits (notice the last paragraph in the chapter, about the "liberal-left culture of the sixties and seventies). Among the important concepts this chapter introduces that medieval historians still use are the longue duree and the annales school of historical thought. Make sure you can characterize these concepts. You get an eyeful of French academia (the "mandarins") but also, as with Cantor's other chapters, a sense of contemporary attitudes' effect on understanding the past. Cantor is (was -- he died in 2004) a practicing historian, and his Civilization of the Middle Ages is still in print. Evidently he believed in the practice of history, even as he anatomizes its practitioners and institutions. How does Cantor deal with this seeming contradiction? FYI, the John Boswell Cantor mentions in this chapter is treated by Dinshaw in her introduction: his book Same Sex Unions is an erudite if controversial defense of what Boswell considers a practice of monastic Christians up through the Middle Ages, in both western and eastern Christianity.

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