![]() ![]() This new version achieved great popularity. The French vogue rolled across the Atlantic to lap the American shores first in Boston, at the time an inter-elite haven for both aspiring bohemians and bookmakers.Įventually the medieval narrative of Our Lady’s Tumbler was transformed radically in an adaptation into modern French prose. These bibliophilic bohemians bought beautiful books, including books about books and about book collectors. France saw a distinctively book-centered bohemianism arise in its upper bourgeoisie. Thanks to the broad circulation, printers, calligraphers, and designers had at their disposal models for inspiration that had earlier been limited or altogether lacking. Reproductive processes such as lithography, chromolithography, and photography disseminated medieval art far more widely among nonspecialists than had hitherto been imaginable. Technologically, the tale came into its own at precisely the right instant to enjoy creation and re-creation on paper and parchment in medievalesque styles. ![]() Owing to the intense historical self-consciousness of the nineteenth century, the year 1900 meant more than had 1800, 1700, or any previous round number of the double-aught sort. Consequently, the narrative was very present in the ferment of the decades on either side of 1900, that great climacteric in the culture of the times. Over the next few decades, it proliferated among the public a little at a time in translations and paraphrases. All these figures and features- jongleur, monks, large church, adulation of a woman, and the Virgin-certify the text as having the right stuff for application in a Gothic revival.Īfter the publication of the medieval verse for the first time in 1873 in a learned periodical, the story attracted notice initially among a restricted readership of academicians throughout Western Europe and North America. They do so even though their service is not strictly chivalric, since the maiden in question is Mary. Every one of the principal characters, most particularly the protagonist, has undertaken a monomaniacal commitment to attend to a single fair lady. Although not a cathedral, the edifice is sufficiently cavernous for a person inside to slip away unobserved to the crypt. In its architectural setting, the story focuses upon a church. Most of the action in the tale takes place within a monastery. As such, he belongs initially to a class of craftsmen who at times were mustered into guilds. The hero is shown as a distinctively medieval type of entertainer. ![]() The narrative in the French poem marshals many important elements associated with the Middle Ages. The worst of the twentieth century began effectively in 1914, with the commencement of World War I. Although in very different ways, the zeitgeist of both periods comprehended openness to medieval cultures and medievalizing tastes, within the context of prewar high life. Both stretch roughly fifty years, from the late nineteenth to or into the early twentieth century. The story of the performer was ideally equipped to appeal to what is touted in the American context as the Gilded Age (the equivalent in French is la belle époque). As a matter of fact, when reactivated, he became even more free ranging than he had been in the reality of the medieval period. Yet the jongleur drew back and balked at being trammeled by boundaries of nation-states. Understandably, since both the history and the philology of individual European languages developed inside the context of nineteenth-century nationalism, attempts were made to infix Our Lady’s Tumbler within the framework of French national identity. Their return to favour at this time forms a curious interlude, quite distinct, of course, from the Symbolist return to favour which immediately followed it, and deserving some mention, despite the fact that it bore no fruit in literature other than the most mediocre and ephemeral. The ever-changing fortunes of the Middle Ages during the nineteenth century took a new turn in 1870. Gradually leaving behind its historical/textual moorings, it diffused into general culture in various combinations, sometimes as a minor component, whether vital or merely decorative. After 1870 or so, medievalism has no single story. ![]()
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