Victorian medievalism physically transformed the streets of Britain It lay at the root of new laws and social policies It changed religious practices It deeply coloured national identities And it inspired art literature and music that remains influential to this day Sometimes driven by nostalgia but also often progressive and futurefacing this widereaching movement which reached its peak during the reign of Queen Victoria looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods spanning a thousand years in order to inspire and vindicate cultural political and social change Medievalism was pervasive in Victorian literature with texts ranging from translated sagas to pseudomedieval devotional verse to tripledecker novels It became a dominant architectural mode transforming the English landscape with 75% of new churches built on a 'Gothic' rather than a classical model as well as museums railway stations town halls and pumping stations It was appealed to by both Whigs and Tories But it also permeated domestic life influencing the popularity of beards the naming of children and the design of homes and furniture This landmark study is an attempt to draw together for the first time every major aspect of Victorian medievalism and to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant including intellectual history religious studies social history literary history art history and architecture Bringing together the expertise of 39 experts from different subject areas it reveals the pervasiveness and multifaceted character of the movement in the nineteenth century and explains its continuing legacy today

With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political history, the history of ideas, cultural history and art history, The Victorian World offers a sweeping survey of the world in the nineteenth century. This volume offers a fresh evaluation of Britain and its global presence in the years from the 1830s to the 1900s. It brings together scholars from history, literary studies, art history, historical geography, historical sociology, criminology, economics and the history of law, to explore more than 40 themes central to an understanding of the nature of Victorian society and culture, both in Britain and in the rest of the world. Organised around six core themes – the world order, economy and society, politics, knowledge and belief, and culture – The Victorian World offers thematic essays that consider the interplay of domestic and global dynamics in the formation of Victorian orthodoxies. A further section on ‘Varieties of Victorianism’ offers considerations of the production and reproduction of external versions of Victorian culture, in India, Africa, the United States, the settler colonies and Latin America. These thematic essays are supplemented by a substantial introductory essay, which offers a challenging alternative to traditional interpretations of the chronology and periodisation of the Victorian years. Lavishly illustrated, vivid and accessible, this volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the nineteenth century.

This fully updated sixth edition of a classic classroom text is essential reading for core courses in archaeology. Archaeology: An Introduction explains how the subject emerged from an amateur pursuit in the eighteenth century into a serious discipline and explores changing trends in interpretation in recent decades. The authors convey the excitement of archaeology while helping readers to evaluate new discoveries by explaining the methods and theories that lie behind them. In addition to drawing upon examples and case studies from many regions of the world and periods of the past, the book incorporates the authors’ own fieldwork, research and teaching. It continues to include key reference and further reading sections to help new readers find their way through the ever-expanding range of archaeological publications and online sources as well as colour illustrations and boxed topic sections to increase comprehension. Serving as an accessible and lucid textbook, and engaging students with contemporary issues, this book is designed to support students studying Archaeology at an introductory level. New to the sixth edition: Inclusion of the latest survey and imaging techniques, such as the use of drones and eXtended reality. Updated material on developments in dating, DNA analysis, isotopes and population movement, including consideration of the ethical considerations of these techniques. Coverage of new developments in archaeological theory, such as the material turn/ontological turn, and work on issues of equality, diversity and inclusion. A whole new chapter covering archaeology in the present, including new sections on heritage and public archaeology, and an updated consideration of archaeology’s relationship with the climate crisis. A revised glossary with over 200 new additions or updates.

In the nineteenth century, the ancient world became a very real presence for many writers and their publics, from the theatre-goers of popular pantomime to the intellectual thinkers in the academic and critical journals. The pre-eminence of the worlds of Greece and Rome was challenged by the discovery of Egyptian and Assyrian cultures, amongst other pre-Greek civilisations, and the worlds were brought to life in a series of high profile archaeological excavations and cultural exhibitions. Alongside the growing modernity of the Age of Steam, the whole of society was exposed to antiquity; architecture, painting, theatre, fiction and poetry, drew inspiration from the stories of the ancient writers, whilst the new museums and academies translated newly discovered languages and texts and excavated rediscovered ancient sites. The great civilisations, brimming with their own art and sculpted histories, were, however, contrasted by the traces of local, pre-civilised cultures of the West that existed before the coming of the Romans or in the Dark Ages immediately after their departure. The sense of a barbarity in manâ (TM)s past, a primitivism even, that may also be a survival into the modern age gradually grew in the Victorian mind as it uncovered the ancient sites of Britain and the prehistoric peoples of the Continent. It is during the post-Darwinian era of theories of social evolution, anthropology and ethnology that British and prehistorical archaeology began to find a public audience. This volume provides a series of readings from different disciplines that explore the presence of the ancient in nineteenth-century culture. The chapters demonstrate the range of the Victorian cultural preoccupation with civilisation and its primitive counterpoint and offer a combination of analyses of specific cultural events or traits, readings of particular Victorian texts and documents, and studies of exemplary Victorian figures and their personal engagements with antiquity. The book has been arranged to begin with archaeology and end with literary refashionings of the Classical, but the intertwinings of these elements in the Victorian period, as shown here, made the reaction to antiquity often an anxious and complex one.

Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments. This book seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science.

The major themes of this study include: the development of Palaeolithic archaeology, its relationship with the study of human physical anthropology in Britain and, to a lesser extent, on the Continent; links between these and the study of race and racial origins; links with geological developments in climate and glacial studies.

Journalist Rene Denfeld explains why her generation has become alienated from the women's movement, maintaining that the actions of the movement's current leadership have actually encouraged a return to the kind of sexual repression and political powerlessness challenged by feminists in the 1970s. Here she offers a practial battle plan which includes confronting the issues of child care and birth control, working for equal government representation, and treating sexual assault as a serious crime.

Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era. Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.

Dominated by Darwinism and the numerous guises it assumed, evolutionary theory was a source of opportunities and difficulties for late Victorian novelists. Texts produced by Wells, Hardy, Stoker, and Conrad are exemplary in reflecting and participating in these challenges. Not only do they contend with evolutionary complications, John Glendening argues, but the complexities and entanglements of evolutionary theory, interacting with multiple cultural influences, thoroughly permeate the narrative, descriptive, and thematic fabric of each. All the books Glendening examines, from The Island of Doctor Moreau and Dracula to Heart of Darkness, address the interrelationship between order and chaos revealed and promoted by evolutionary thinking of the period. Glendening's particular focus is on how Darwinism informs novels in relation to a late Victorian culture that encouraged authors to stress, not objective truths illuminated by Darwinism, but rather the contingencies, uncertainties, and confusions generated by it and other forms of evolutionary theory.