‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalism
This chapter explores the reception and reader responses to medievalism by women who were engaged in political discussion in the long nineteenth century. <br> From her very accession, Queen Victoria used the nineteenth-century cultural fascination with medieval and chivalric revival to her ow...
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| Format: | Book section |
| Language: | English |
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Boydell and Brewer
2024
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| _version_ | 1824459076741890048 |
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| author | Broome Saunders, C |
| author2 | Crookes, E |
| author_facet | Crookes, E Broome Saunders, C |
| author_sort | Broome Saunders, C |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | This chapter explores the reception and reader responses to medievalism by women who were engaged in political discussion in the long nineteenth century.
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From her very accession, Queen Victoria used the nineteenth-century cultural fascination with medieval and chivalric revival to her own political advantage, to manipulate public opinion in favour of her monarchy and her consort, and to explore the social complexities of her own position. Commentators, poets, and artists similarly used medieval settings and imagery to interrogate the anomalies and impossibilities of her role, with the use of the historical figures of King Alfred and Joan of Arc, and the legendary King Arthur, central to these discussions.
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This chapter will consider women’s reception and political application of medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism in the nineteenth century, from Victoria’s accession to the widespread use of Joan of Arc as an icon for the suffragettes and suffragists in the late nineteenth century. It will explore the political implications of this consistent use of the language, settings, conventions and constrictions of nineteenth-century medievalism throughout Victoria’s reign: from the powerful impotence of the girl-queen’s accession speech, as explored in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s contemporary poetry; the matron-queen’s casting of her consort as the ideal English knight in portraiture and sculpture, and most obviously in elegiac work after his death. By contrast, suffragists and suffragettes at the end of the century had recourse to medievalism to articulate their struggle for political rights, from the pervasive use of Joan of Arc as the militant woman’s ideal, to the complex historicism of Cicely Hamilton’s <i>A Pageant of Great Women</> (1910). |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-09T03:22:00Z |
| format | Book section |
| id | oxford-uuid:412b1cb6-c9ca-486a-a687-e90770449cfc |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2025-02-19T04:36:02Z |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publisher | Boydell and Brewer |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:412b1cb6-c9ca-486a-a687-e90770449cfc2025-01-30T10:02:47Z‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalismBook sectionhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_1843uuid:412b1cb6-c9ca-486a-a687-e90770449cfcEnglishSymplectic ElementsBoydell and Brewer2024Broome Saunders, CCrookes, EWillis, IThis chapter explores the reception and reader responses to medievalism by women who were engaged in political discussion in the long nineteenth century. <br> From her very accession, Queen Victoria used the nineteenth-century cultural fascination with medieval and chivalric revival to her own political advantage, to manipulate public opinion in favour of her monarchy and her consort, and to explore the social complexities of her own position. Commentators, poets, and artists similarly used medieval settings and imagery to interrogate the anomalies and impossibilities of her role, with the use of the historical figures of King Alfred and Joan of Arc, and the legendary King Arthur, central to these discussions. <br> This chapter will consider women’s reception and political application of medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism in the nineteenth century, from Victoria’s accession to the widespread use of Joan of Arc as an icon for the suffragettes and suffragists in the late nineteenth century. It will explore the political implications of this consistent use of the language, settings, conventions and constrictions of nineteenth-century medievalism throughout Victoria’s reign: from the powerful impotence of the girl-queen’s accession speech, as explored in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s contemporary poetry; the matron-queen’s casting of her consort as the ideal English knight in portraiture and sculpture, and most obviously in elegiac work after his death. By contrast, suffragists and suffragettes at the end of the century had recourse to medievalism to articulate their struggle for political rights, from the pervasive use of Joan of Arc as the militant woman’s ideal, to the complex historicism of Cicely Hamilton’s <i>A Pageant of Great Women</> (1910). |
| spellingShingle | Broome Saunders, C ‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalism |
| title | ‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalism |
| title_full | ‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalism |
| title_fullStr | ‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalism |
| title_full_unstemmed | ‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalism |
| title_short | ‘Liege lady’: Queen Victoria’s political medievalism |
| title_sort | liege lady queen victoria s political medievalism |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT broomesaundersc liegeladyqueenvictoriaspoliticalmedievalism |