“You really ought to give Iowa a try…”

Fireworks! Barbecues! The Fourth of July approacheth, and as Americans dwell on traditions, origins, and independence from the Old World, it’s a fine time to reconsider American Gothic. Everyone knows the painting, but few people really look at it—but when you do, you’ll find that Grant Wood uses serious medievalism to find humor in a 200-year identity crisis.

Wood based his painting around a modest house in Eldon, Iowa, whose only flourish was a Gothic window he found both delightful and pretentious. Wood’s sister and a local dentist posed as the sorts of people he imagined would live in such a house; most of the time, Wood insisted that his characters were father and daughter, not husband and wife. The painting was a smash at both a 1930 Art Institute of Chicago exhibition and the 1933 World’s Fair, and in 1934 the entire country saw American Gothic in full color in Time magazine.

Art historian Thomas Hoving has pointed out the painting’s clever composition: how the top of the middle pitchfork tine marks the center of the painting; how the three tines are echoed in the stitching of the man’s overalls and in the window tracery; how the bulb at the top of the lightning rod echoes the button on the man’s collar; and how the lines of the peaked roof point directly to the man and the woman. “The house and the couple are utterly unified, like the statues on thirteenth-century cathedrals,” Hoving writes—which is appropriate, because it’s remarkable how European American Gothic actually is.

Grant Wood’s name normally evokes the Midwest, not the Middle Ages. After a stint in France and a fling with Impressionism, Wood hurried back to his Iowa home and happily let the press turn him into the champion of a new regionalism in American art. He donned overalls, sought out local subjects, and created an icon of Americana that either enshrines or mocks its subjects, depending on your point of view. “The farther a critic lived from the Midwest, the more predisposed he or she was to read the painting as satire or social criticism,” one art historian quipped about American Gothic—but what if most viewers for 80-odd years have focused way too much on the “American” and not nearly enough on the “Gothic”?

Quoth Wood biographer R. Tripp Evans: “Wood’s attraction to the Arts and Crafts movement—which advocated hand craftsmanship, rural simplicity, and even the revival of the guild system—had led him from an early age to associate his work with that of medieval artisans.” Yes, but Wood didn’t just imitate the medieval past; he found humor in comparing the Middle Ages and modern America. Last year at the Cedar Rapids Art Museum, I got a kick out of Wood’s “Mourner’s Bench,” a medieval church pew that stood outside the principal’s office at the local junior high. (The tops of the posts are faces: two disciplinarians and a wailing student.)

“The lovely apparel and accessories of the Gothic period appealed to me so vitally,” Wood wrote, “that I longed to see pictorial and decorative possibilities in our contemporary clothes and articles.” One art historian points out that Wood was fascinated by late Northern Gothic painters, especially 15th-century German-born Flemish artist Hans Memling. When you put some Memling portraits alongside Woman with Plants, Wood’s painting of his mother, it’s clear what he was imitating—the landscape, the poses, the stark black clothing and cloudless blue skies—with humor implicit in the comparison.

Other art historians have listed Wood’s many medieval and early Renaissance influences. Biographer R. Tripp Evans finds that the tiny bathing figures in Arnold Comes of Age (below left) look like miniature depictions of Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise in the backgrounds of Nativity and Crucifixion scenes on medieval altarpieces, and he points out that Wood’s huge Dinner for Threshers evokes the Last Supper and mimics a medieval triptych. In Adoration of the Home (below right), Wood expert Wanda Corn sees a medieval altarpiece with a Madonna and Child surrounded by saints.

After Wood died in 1942 at the age of 50, trendier critics condemned him as nationalistic and reactionary, and some ludicrously likened his work to Nazi art. The joke’s on them: They missed the centuries-old motifs that linked Wood’s “regionalism” to traditions more venerable than most of the century’s fads.

Then again, they were only doing what most of us do: obsessing over the American while ignoring the Gothic. Photographer Gordon Parks was the first to parody the painting in 1942, and since then it’s become a boon for lazy political cartoonists, ad agencies, movie-poster designers, and anyone who wants to suggest that a stuffy, old-fashioned sensibility is being tweaked, surpassed, desecrated, defied, or redefined. Nothing is more establishmentarian than parodying American Gothic.

…and while everyone looks at the people in the painting, no one considers that silly little window behind them.

According to his recent biographer, Wood focused on arched windows and doors in his early French paintings, and he specifically said that American Gothic was meant to feature “American Gothic people” whose features complemented architecture that emphasized vertical lines. “These particulars, of course, don’t really matter,” Wood wrote in a 1941 letter. “What does matter is whether or not these faces are true to American life and reveal something about it. It seemed to me that there was a significant relationship between the people and the false Gothic house with its ecclesiastical window.”

Wood toyed with the idea of a companion painting that would have put squat Americans in front of the horizontal lines of Mission architecture, but of course he never created it—because he was beguiled by the Gothic, as two generations before him had been.

By 1930, America was coming off a multi-decade Gothic Revival bender. Since the second half of the 19th century, architects across the country had been dreaming up American Gothic buildings: churches, cathedrals, college campuses, prep schools, factories, skyscrapers, courthouses, apartments, at least one synagogue, and even crummy “Carpenter Gothic” houses like the one in Eldon. Their neo-medieval look was sometimes democratic, sometimes aristocratic, sometimes religious, sometimes secular, old and European but American and new. It’s a fine, precarious ambivalence: Are we making a New World here, or not?

Wood’s painting is satiric, but it pokes fun at pretensions that weren’t (and still aren’t) confined to the Midwest. Sometimes, Americans aspire to be medieval; other times, we’re medieval by accident. What’s great about American Gothic is that Grant Wood, however fond he is of his subjects, exposes them to democratic judgment. Each of us gets to look over the heads of two imaginary Iowans and decide for ourselves whether our collective pretensions are noble or foolish, or if we really are late Gothic people just posing in latter-day garb.

“Brand-new dandy, first-class scene-stealer…”

Civitas amoena, Wynlicburh—whatever faux-archaic nickname Baltimore deserves, the city has much of the medieval about it. The Walters Art Museum has a wide-ranging medieval collection, medieval Poles appear on an anti-Stalinist monument, countless neo-Gothic churches linger in varying states of neglect, and in Druid Hill Park, there’s a statue of a Scottish superstar.

That’s why it’s easy to miss the obvious example of Charm City’s ersatz medievalia: the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, a major downtown landmark. When he leads tours, the current manager of the place calls it “the world’s only novelty clock tower built to advertise a tranquilizer-laden hangover cure.” I don’t doubt him—but the Bromo-Seltzer Tower is also Bawlmer’s monument to America’s love for medieval-ish architectural follies.

Built in 1911, the Bromo-Seltzer Tower originally had a factory at its base. Now there’s a parking deck and a fire house, while the tower provides studio space for artists who invite the public to peek inside on Saturdays. Bromo-Seltzer founder “Captain” Isaac Emerson, a flamboyant and famously insufferable businessman, built the tower to advertise his wares: Until 1936, the tower supported a ludicrously huge and glowing blue bottle with a crown on top.

Emerson’s aesthetic was passing strange. A few years earlier in Florence, he’d seen the Palazzo Vecchio and apparently thought to himself, “I want one.” Architect Joseph Sperry, known for light eclecticism, did what he could to bring 13th-century Tuscany to the corner of Lombard and Eutaw Streets.

(Left: the Palazzo Vecchio, from Wikimedia Commons. Right: a photo I took this weekend.)

The Bromo-Seltzer Tower is clearly more of an omaggio to the Palazzo Vecchio than an exact replica, but it is closer to its source than the squat “Palace of Florence” Apartments built 13 years later in Tampa, Florida.

However, stepping inside on a summer day leads you not to medieval Italy, but back to the sweltering days of early 20th-century office life, while the timeworn interior of the clock tower looks like a cross between a Coen Brothers movie set and a vintage superhero lair. (I’ve always remembered the tower for its role as a sniper’s nest on a 1996 episode of “Homicide: Life on the Street.”)

When the Bromo-Seltzer Tower went up in 1911, H.L. Mencken was the first to hate it. “All Baltimoreans may be divided into two classes,” he wrote. “[T]hose who think that the Emerson Tower is beautiful, and those who know better.” Like Mark Twain, Mencken couldn’t see that something deeper was going on with America’s love of pseudo-medieval stuff—that we used this kind of architecture in our churches, colleges, prep schools, factories, and office buildings to brag, to be trendy, or to claim some link to the past.

Nostalgia later makes some aesthetics irresistible. Almost every brick or mechanism inside the clock tower is black, white, or gray, which makes the room seem art-directed and hyper-real. Like the tower itself, the huge, clattering, circa-1964 computer that still runs two tiny, nerve-wracking elevators is now a fascinating relic rather than an eyesore.

Facilities manager Joe Wall, a Baltimore native who’s full of great stories, told me that at some point, repair work on the tower’s rooftop cupola-thingie meant that someone added two levels of castellated ramparts that clearly weren’t there in 1911. As a result, the Bromo-Seltzer Tower is now less Italianate, more generically medieval, and a bit more like the palace-fortress that inspired it. No longer a monument to crass commercialism, it defends the notion that indulgent medievalism ages well—after the inevitable hangover.

“You should know, time’s tide will smother you…”

“You watch ‘Game of Thrones,’ right?” I often hear this question not only because people assume that medievalists are transfixed by pseudo-medieval fantasy, but also because everyone is weirdly hungry to talk about the show’s intense scenes of violence—a subject that medievalists eventually ought to confront.

Innocents nailed into spiked barrels and chucked off cliffs, prisoners of war with their eyes gouged out, tortured saints described in such awful detail by poets like Prudentius that some of my classmates got queasy—as a grad student, I couldn’t escape stuff like this, but our teachers laughed it off. One Penguin Classics edition of the Song of Roland showed a mounted knight chopping his adversary cleanly in half to expose his insides, a fate one of my professors dubbed “the bagel treatment.” We snickered at lurid maimings in the Historia Francorum and the wry post-dismemberment quips in Icelandic sagas. We were rarely invited to imagine how we’d feel if these horrors had happened to us.

All week, the Internet was abuzz over the blood-drenched “Red Wedding” episode of “Game of Thrones”; one YouTube compilation of audience reactions got more than 7 million hits in less than a week. Watch it and you’ll see ostensible adults sobbing over a TV show, a reaction I find harder to fathom as I get older and crankier and methodically work through my “bummer shelf,” which includes books about Maoist famine, Rwandan genocide, the Balkan wars—and, a few weeks ago, Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State.

Karski was a relatively well-to-do Polish military officer who seemed destined for a bookish life—until the Germans invaded. After being taken prisoner by the Soviet army, Karski escaped and joined the well organized Polish Underground. He oversaw several key operations, survived capture and torture by the Nazis, and was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto so that he could describe it to the outside world. “These were still living people, if you could call them such,” Karski wrote. “For apart from their skin, eyes, and voice there was nothing human left in these palpitating figures. Everywhere there was hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children, the desperate cries and gasps of a people struggling for life against impossible odds.”

Karski also recounts his 1942 infiltration of a Nazi transportation hub. Disguised in an Estonian uniform, he was there to bear witness to atrocities before smuggling himself westward to report to the (largely skeptical or dismissive) Allies. The mass execution he saw—a train car lined with quicklime, packed with Jews, and then ignited—is so horrifying that I won’t excerpt his description. After fleeing from guards who cracked jokes and took pleasure in slowly burning people alive, Karski vomited blood and bile all night, but never purged the memory:

The images of what I saw in the death camp are, I am afraid, my permanent possessions. I would like nothing better than to purge my mind of these memories. For one thing, the recollection of those events invariably brings on a recurrence of the nausea. But more than that, I would like simply to be free of them, to obliterate the very thought that such things ever occurred.

For all the horror Karski records, he also shows heroism: not only his own, implicitly, but also that of his countrymen and colleagues who endured torture, braced for arbitrary mass executions, and were ready to commit suicide to help defeat the Nazis. What shines through isn’t some Spielbergian triumph-of-the-human-spirit baloney, but the real, disquieting knowledge that although heroism arises naturally, it’s agonizing, often unremembered, and overshadowed by murder on an unimaginable scale.

When you close a book like Story of a Secret State, if you’ve spent even a little time thinking about the victims as people—not as abstractions or actors or flickering images, but as individuals like you, except that they felt every minute of burning and choking to death over several days—how do you then turn to “Red Wedding” for mere entertainment?

I won’t argue that “Game of Thrones” or shows like it “glorify violence,” an Orwellian cliché, even if I believe they do something strange to our relationship with the real thing. I’m not arguing that anyone ought to shut down violent entertainment, or that the industry should police itself or cater to my sensitivities, or that violence isn’t a vital part of literature, art, entertainment, and games. Often it’s purgative to read or write about violence, and my favorite book of the past year involves two scenes of unnerving brutality. This isn’t a call to action or a political jeremiad. I am not a pacifist.

I marvel, though, that audiences are so bound up in the selective realism of fantasy that they’ll accept the existence of dragons but will obsess, along with a forensic expert from the O.J. Simpson trial, over whether the blood spurting during the throat-slitting scenes was accurate. When an audience cares that much, is it still entertainment, or a stand-in for something else?

Last week, “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin spoke sensibly about “Red Wedding” to Entertainment Weekly:

People read books for different reasons. I respect that. Some read for comfort. And some of my former readers have said their life is hard, their mother is sick, their dog died, and they read fiction to escape. They don’t want to get hit in the mouth with something horrible. And you read that certain kind of fiction where the guy will always get the girl and the good guys win and it reaffirms to you that life is fair. We all want that at times. There’s a certain vicarious release to that. So I’m not dismissive of people who want that. But that’s not the kind of fiction I write, in most cases. It’s certainly not what Ice and Fire is. It tries to be more realistic about what life is. It has joy, but it also had pain and fear. I think the best fiction captures life in all its light and darkness.

I like Martin’s thinking—but it seems to me that the largely comfortable, middle-class viewers who can’t stop talking about his show’s violence find the darkness more beguiling than the light.

When I chat with friends about “Game of Thrones,” they speculate that the series offers a rare and refreshing sense of what the Middle Ages must have really felt like. Martin is arguably the most popular fantasist of the moment, taking up the banners of earlier authors like Sir Walter Scott and Sidney Lanier, who also served up the precise flavor of medievalism their cultures craved. They and their readers believed they had taken laudable steps toward re-creating the “real” Middle Ages, when in fact they were picking through the medieval past according to their own notions of virtue and vice—as we still do.

“No matter how much I make up,” Martin says, “there’s stuff in history that’s just as bad, or worse.” He’s right, but there’s no urgent reason to elevate fantasy by highlighting its historical echoes, and no need to absolve Martin’s work of the most grave accusation leveled at fantasy: escapism. Martin’s readers and viewers are guilty as charged only if they turn away from humanity’s pervasive worst, whether the immediate evils in the daily news or the horrors Jan Karski could never forget. Many obviously do just that, but I’ll give Martin credit for intending his books to accomplish what good fantasy should: not distancing us with flattering amusements from the way life supposedly used to be, but providing a stark, imaginative look at the way it invariably is.

“When I’ve walked in the garden, when I’m walking offstage…”

Spring is a time to remember Walahfrid Strabo: abbot, scholar, tutor to Charlemagne’s grandson, and the best known gardener of the Carolingian age. He’s memorialized at the National Cathedral garden (and got a poem of his own in Looking Up), and his 444-line poem De Cultura Hortorum, “On the Cultivation of Gardens,” intermingles plant lore, political allegory, practical advice, and philosophical musings with an exhortation to get out there and work:

For whatever the land you possess, whether it be where sand
And gravel lie barren and dead, or where fruits grow heavy
In rich moist ground; whether high on a steep hillside,
Easy ground in the plain or rough among sloping valleys—
Wherever it is, your land cannot fail to produce
Its native plants. If you do not let laziness clog
Your labor, if you do not insult with misguided efforts
The gardener’s multifarious wealth, and if you do not
Refuse to harden or dirty your hands in the open air
Or to spread whole baskets of dung on the sun-parched soil—
then, you may rest assured, your soil will not fail you.
(trans. Payne)

In the March and April dankness, I followed Walahfrid’s example—and today I reaped the year’s first harvest from my little realm of dirt.

I checked to see if Walahfrid had anything to say about radishes. Indeed he did:

RAFANUM

Hic rafanum radice potens latoque comarum
Tegmine sublatum extremus facit ordo videri
Cuius amara satis quatientem viscera tussim
Mansa premit radix, triti quoque seminis haustus
Eiusdem vitio pestis persaepe medetur.

Here’s a loose and hasty translation into pseudo-Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse:

THE RADISH

Powerfully rooted, it raises the vaults
Of its broadening leaves and lies waiting,
The radish you find in the final row.
Its flesh-root shortens that shattering cough,
Or grind up a draught and drink the seeds:
That dose often will do the trick too.

Walahfrid died in A.D. 849 while trying to cross the Loire. He was only in his early thirties, but he seems to have grown to prefer plants to politics—an insight rare in places of power, then and now.

(The garden in June 2012.)

“Here comes another winter, waiting for Utopia…”

This weekend, commerce and revelry engulfed the National Cathedral at Flower Mart, the annual shindig that funds the beautification of my favorite Gothic neighbor’s gardens and grounds. Folks shopped for seedlings and dug into fried food, while I stumbled upon this NPR story about Brendan O’Connell, who paints scenes from Wal-Mart based on something he thinks he discerns there:

Wal-Mart stores, he notes, are “probably one of the most trafficked interior spaces in the world.” In the tall, open, cathedral-like ceilings of Wal-Mart’s big-box stores, he sees parallels to church interiors of old.

“There is something in us that aspires to some kind of transcendence,” he told me back in February. “And as we’ve culturally turned from religious things, we’ve turned our transcendence to acquisition and satisfying desires.”

I don’t buy the comparison. Having warehouse-high ceilings doesn’t make Wal-Mart “cathedral-like.” What does make a big box store akin to a Gothic cathedral is more banal: Look up, and you’ll see that the architectural supports in both buildings aren’t covered or obscured. (As for transcendence, Americans seek that elsewhere: sports, Vegas, the movies, and occasionally—mirabile dictu—at actual houses of worship.)

Still, artists and writers love to cast gigantic stores as misbegotten cathedrals. Five minutes on Google turns up unflattering “cathedrals of consumerism” quips in countless news stories and scholarly articles—as well as the work of artist Michelle Muldrow, who paints the interiors of big box stores for her “Cathedrals of Desire” series. Muldrow outlines her goals in a genre that would have vexed even the most patient of medieval exegetes, the artist’s statement:

“Cathedrals of Desire” investigates the experience of the repulsion and seduction of the American landscape. This new body of work incorporates the landscape painting tradition with awe-inducing elements of cathedrals to evoke a contemporary sublime. My paintings of big box stores are intended to elicit fear and awe at the vast American consumer landscape.

[…]

This series is inspired by the theories of Edmund Burke’s treatise on the sublime and its relationship with terror. This, paired with the concept of the divine power of the sublime, heavily influenced my depiction of these consumer spaces as Cathedrals of Desire.

[…]

The obtrusive massive structures built with no attempt at aesthetic beauty reveal the most naked of American consumer desires. The language of American desire can be reduced to vignettes of patio furniture and gingham covered tables set like small picnics.

I like Muldrow’s art, and she’s smart to turn her landscape-painter’s eye toward the vast places where Americans shop—but nothing about “Icon,” her painting of two shopping carts against a jumbled background, actually evokes icons, or implies anything about icons through their absence, or says anything about the absence of icons through the presence of shopping carts. While her lovely “Altar in Orange” captures the bright, asymmetrical beauty of an unmanned Target check-out line, the painting doesn’t fit its title: Altars aren’t like box store check-out stations in location, function, design, decoration, number, or sacrality.

Artists and critics have been down this aisle before. Émile Zola called the grand arcades of 19th-century Paris “cathedrals of commerce,” and Walter Benjamin “spent the final 13 years of his life…trying to fashion a theory of modernity based on the arcades.” A century ago, the Woolworth Building, one of countless American skyscrapers inspired by the Gothic, was approvingly dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce.” By now, the comparison is cliché. It flatters medieval cathedrals by making stores seem all the more crass by contrast—but what a limited view of cathedrals.

Unlike Wal-Marts and Targets, cathedrals were each architecturally unique. They were shrines where people hoped and prayed but rarely sated their earthly desires. They were religious institutions whose spiritual offerings didn’t cater to market demands. They were political centers overseen by men who wielded far more local power than any store manager. As distinctive hubs of pilgrimage and tourism, they attracted seekers from straunge strondes in ways no standardized big-box store could, drawing worshippers from all strata of society.

One point of these art projects is to suggest that shopping is America’s religion, and a degraded one at that—but isn’t it possible that rural shoppers at big-box stores like Wal-Mart are more likely than their countrymen to attend actual religious services and distinguish between shopping and praying? Why focus on modest people who go to unfancy buildings to buy low-priced stuff that meets their earthly needs? What about wealthier people who’d never set foot in Wal-Mart but do make pseudo-religious pilgrimages to ornate boutiques to overpay for luxury goods based on a label or a name?

Two centuries after the Hudson River School painters begged Americans to adore the New World, our artists still seek the cachet of medieval European precedents. Medievalism runs rampant in America, and for six years this blog has chased it, from Gothic synagogues in Savannah to killer queens in New Jersey, from Cajun jousters and the saints of New Orleans to the gargoyles of Perth Amboy, from Oxbridge rivalries on the Potomac to dragons and Vikings at Maryland resorts, from late-blooming scholars on postage stamps to courtly love on General Hospital—but sometimes medievalism just isn’t there, or it thrives only in a critic’s misperception.

Let’s kill this “cathedrals of commerce” cliché. A vast, bustling megastore has little in common with a medieval cathedral either socially or architecturally. The wonders that landscape painters like Michelle Muldrow find at Target—man-made vistas of color and light—are worth seeing for what they are; don’t let Gothic spires warp the view.

“I focus on a face in Samarkand…”

Tom Shippey, Studies in Medievalism XIV (2005), p. 3:

“The issues, however, remain, and no modern reader can quite escape a sense, once again, that the medieval world with all its cruelty and fanaticism has not been entirely buried, is all too capable of returning to haunt us. Medievalisms remain dangerous, and dangerously vital: that is one reason why they require careful and dispassionate study, of the kind they too rarely receive inside or outside the academy.”

Eliza Shapiro, The Daily Beast, April 19, 2013:

Amir Temur, also known as Tamerlane, was a Central Asian ruler and warlord who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries. Scholars estimate that his military campaigns throughout Central Asia, Africa, Europe, and the modern Middle East killed about 17 million people, or 5 percent of the world’s population at the time.

Identifying strongly with Mongol culture, Tamerlane wanted to restore the empire of Genghis Khan and conquered the modern nations of Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Syria, India, and southern regions of Russia. He was a devout Muslim who referred to himself as the “Sword of Islam,” even though he razed many of the Islamic world’s greatest cities at the time.

Although Tamerlane died six centuries ago, his legacy still carries enormous weight throughout Central Asia. The Tsarnaev brothers are Chechen, and Tamerlan, the older of the two, fled Chechnya with his family in the early 1990s to escape the bloodshed that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. He came to the United States with his family in either 2002 or 2003 under refugee status from Kyrgyzstan.

“To say Tamerlane evokes mixed reaction across Central Asia would be an understatement,” Justin Marozzi, author of Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, told the Daily Beast. “Respected as a national hero in Uzbekistan, site of his imperial capital of Samarkand, he is regarded with loathing—with good reason—by the country’s neighbors, who remember, more than 600 years after his death, the numerous outrages he committed against them.”

Tom Shippey, Studies in Medievalism XVII (2009), p. 52:

“There are . . . many medievalisms in the world, and some of them are as safe as William Morris wallpaper: but not all of them.”

“Look, a golden-winged ship is passing my way…”

My Garden State relatives and friends survived Hurricane Sandy with incredible stories to tell about living in darkness, dealing with looting and theft, and almost being flattened by trees. Over the weekend, while hanging out with family in my great homeland, I drove down the shore to see the worst of it for myself.

The ride along Route 35 was as heartbreaking as I expected, but Jersey attitude is a universal constant. On a sunny April weekend, one of the surviving chunks of the Seaside Heights boardwalk was so busy that a carny let down his guard to marvel at how “jumpin'” it was.

Folks were there to wander around, chow down on pizza and pork roll—and yes, to gawk. If you’re from New Jersey, then someplace you love was likely destroyed.

For example, beyond this sign, there used to be a 200-foot pier.

I’m not about to share gratuitous disaster photos; this blog is about finding medievalism. Even in the aftermath of Sandy, Dame Medievalism staggers drunkenly up and down the Jersey Shore—as long as you know where to look.

Although the storm wiped out Casino Pier in Seaside Heights, its jolly streetside facade survives, keeping out the curious…

…while across the street, a Viking watches and waits.

At Point Pleasant Beach, Jenkinson’s Boardwalk is mostly restored. The tiki bar is open, the zeppoles smell terrific, and the kiddie amusements are whirring away—including this iconic ride that invites you to fling yourself inside a dragon’s gaping chest cavity.

Up the road in Long Branch, my new favorite building defied Sandy: the Church of the Presidents, an 1879 masterpiece of carpenter Gothic that highlights what the Jersey Shore has always been known for: restraint and good taste.

Up in Rumson, on a charmingly landscaped plot around 1,500 feet from the beach, St. George’s-by-the-River looks like a nice, straightforward Episcopal church…

…until you realize that from one corner of its tower looms a gargoyle—the only such monster I can recall with an identifiable, even incontrovertible sex.

This weekend I saw awful sights: oceanside streets still buried in sand, bungalows tossed into piles and smashed, and one of my favorite childhood places destroyed. I also saw residents busy with shovels and saws, workers rebuilding boardwalks with heroic speed, and locals who want the world to know they’re very much open for business. At the risk of irreverence, all I can say is that if a topless gargoyle from 1908 can survive Sandy, the Jersey Shore will too, with the tenacity of medieval myth. It’s amazing what endures.

“You say, ‘ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn…'”

If you’re wont to ask, “Where can I see plays that have rarely been staged for 400 years?”, then hie thyself posthaste anon to Staunton, Virginia, where the American Shakespeare Center reanimates old scripts in a reconstruction of London’s Blackfriars Theater, and under truly humbling conditions: The actors perform in as many as five plays at a time, with multiple roles in each.

We popped down to Staunton this weekend to see The Two Noble Kinsmen, an adaptation of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” by John Fletcher with an assist from William Shakespeare. The play is supposedly “deeply flawed,” but a dozen actors (who directed themselves) made it engaging and sharp. They earned a standing ovation—and propelled the Canterbury pilgrims through the 17th century and onto the sidewalks of a small Virginia town.

With my own ful devout corage, I did what I do in any new place: I hunted for further medievalism. After good finds in other Virginia towns—Williamsburg, Richmond, Annandale, and the imaginary Swallow Barn—I knew Staunton would come through, and it did, just up the hill from the theater.

Welcome to Thornrose Cemetery, designed by Staunton’s own Thomas Jasper Collins, who built eclectic homes and churches throughout his adoptive hometown.

Although Collins never visited Europe, he did (according to James Madison University) study Gothic Revival architecture in Baltimore, Richmond, and Norfolk. Just inside the cemetery gates is a monument to his medievalism: a stocky little keep.

When Collins went medieval by the cemetery walls, his work was striking, if too weighty to be whimsical.

Collins also designed the lovely Effinger family mausoleum, which looks like a stone drawer pulled from the facade of a Gothic cathedral.

One of the weirder corners of Thornrose leads to a monument to the Confederate dead. There’s good reason to associate faux-medieval castle ramparts with Southern chivalry, but look:

A huge neoclassical urn! A chuppah with square stone pillars and Tudor half-timbering! Civil War artillery! The committee-driven incoherence is wonderfully American.

Like Staunton itself, Thornrose grows ever more eclectic. Its wind-worn headstones aren’t lurid or sad; there’s a matter-of-factness here that harks back to The Two Noble Kinsmen:

This world’s a Citty full of straying Streets,
And Death’s the market place, where each one meetes.

A few blocks away, on a gloomy Sunday morning, you might spot the fellows who play Chaucer’s knights leaning into freezing rain and muttering lines that have only been heard from a handful of actors in 400 years. Later, on stage, they’ll offer up a fine reminder for the week before Easter: not everything that dies is gone for good.

“Look down, look down, there’s twenty years to go…”

When you’re young, it’s easy to miss the obvious. Skulking around the University of Delaware in days of yore, I wasn’t unaware of this building on Newark’s Main Street, just footsteps from the campus—but I didn’t appreciate its striking Gothic facade, and until last weekend I hadn’t really looked at…

…the canine gargoyles on either side of the entrance.

Now prospering as Newark Deli and Bagels, the storefront at 36 East Main Street began life in 1917 as the Rhodes Pharmacy. The building was designed by Richard A. Whittingham, an architect of the Maryland division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. (His other works include a now-gone greenhouse on the U.D. campus and the reviewing stand for William McKinley’s 1897 presidential inauguration.)

I’ve not yet found reason to believe that either Whittingham or his client, pharmacist George W. Rhodes, were gung-ho for Gothic architecture—but maybe this cool little building says it all. (It used to have parapets!)

By 1917, American Gothic was passing its prime among church architects even as it picked up steam among the designers of college campuses. Its use on a commercial building is rare enough to earn 36 East Main Street a spot on the National Register of Historic Places—but I’m convinced that the gargoyles of Newark, Delaware, were influenced by a much grander building thousands of miles away.

Notre-Dame de Paris! Its gargoyles are iconic—especially the bitter critter on the cover of this book—but even many medievalists aren’t aware that he and 53 of his fellows aren’t medieval at all, but the products of an ambitious 19th-century restoration.

Michael Camille tells this story well in The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity. By the 1840s, Notre Dame was a ruin; the cathedral had been cursed as a symbol of medieval irrationality, denuded of royal statues and other symbols of féodalité, and wrecked by weather and time. In 1843, in the wake of Victor Hugo’s fictional tribute to the cathedral’s former glory, architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-de-Duc began restoring Notre Dame—which included commissioning sculptors to create the replacement monsters he dubbed chimères. Camille documents how these modern “chimeras” entered European and North American popular culture through engravings, etchings, photographs, postcards, paintings, and books—and how quickly the world forgot that they weren’t medieval creatures at all.

The 54 chimeras are a lurid lot. Partly inspired by France’s 19th-century fascination with Egypt, their fellowship includes demonic birds, a goat, an elephant, a pelican, a wild boar, a two-headed dog, a (now destroyed) unicorn, and (lamentably) a Wandering Jew. Most of them, though, are humanoid animals—which brings us back to the dog-faced beasties of Newark, Delaware.

Look at this fellow, and then consider a few of the chimeras from Notre Dame:

(Above left: Michael Reeve, via Wikimedia Commons; above right: Chosovi, via Wikimedia Commons.)

(Above left: vintage postcard of the “ape-satyr”; right: John Taylor Arms, “A Devil of Notre Dame,” c. 1929)

The Newark grotesques don’t look like any one of the chimeras on Notre Dame, but they’re arguably a loose composite of several of them. Those big, bent arms that allow the creature to lean menacingly forward are common to several of the chimeras, and we could easily build the (relatively tame) faces of the 1917 Delawareans from the ears, mouths, brows, and noses of some of these 19th-century forebears.

So did Richard Whittingham or George Rhodes dream, like Miniver Cheevy, of medieval glory?

Did they see the Notre Dame chimeras in illustrations of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame? Or in the paintings of Winslow Homer? In the photography of Alvin Langdon Coburn? On postcards from family and friends?

Are Newark’s chimeras barking in defiance of home-grown architectural forms? (Weirdly, these creatures came to life the same year the University of Delaware settled on Colonial Revival, a sensible but decidedly un-Gothic style that still predominates across the campus.)

Or maybe Rhodes considered his pharmacy a cathedral and saw his work as a sacred calling?

The fun thing about American medievalism is that there’s rarely a single reason for this stuff. Just as people in 2013 have complicated motives for studying, idealizing, or reenacting the Middle Ages, Whittingham and Rhodes might have offered explanations that combined the personal, the social, the religious, and the political.

Twenty years after ignoring 36 East Main Street for reasons I’ve long since forgotten, I’m glad I looked up. You never know when the place where you first met Charlemagne and Chaucer will reveal to you, just over your head, the bewildering traces of somebody’s medieval dream.

“So we go inside, and we gravely read the stones…”

“[P]ioneering, erratic, and irascible”—that’s how scholar Andrew Wawn introduces a medievalist I’d never heard of, apparently because his spectre haunts only a few narrow stacks in Scandinavian libraries. Although George Stephens published more than 500 books, articles, pamphlets, translations, and plays, his Wikipedia entry is a sorry 120 words long, and it isn’t likely to be lengthened or annotated by legions of Tolkienesque fans. Even so, Wawn’s engaging 1995 article about him—“George Stephens, Cheapinghaven, and Old Northern Antiquity”—makes an amusing but sympathetic case for looking back at scholars of yore-days and seeing not pitiable caricatures, but weird, vivid, quizzical lives.

Wawn calls George Stephens “a fascinatingly marginal figure, an exile by choice, a rebel by temperament, cocooned in his book-lined Copenhagen study glowering across the North Sea at the (in his view) wretched condition of England.” Born in England in 1813, Stephens moved to Sweden in 1834 to teach English before taking a lectureship, and then a professorship, at the University of Copenhagen. (Hearken, jobless scholars! Three years earlier, the enterprising Stephens circulated an English-language pamphlet with the efficacious title Hurrah for Denmark.)

Stephens is one of many unsung souls who hammered out the cogs of the medieval-studies machine. He was an influential collector and classifier of folk tales, his work on runic inscriptions founded a sub-field, and he published the first translation of an Icelandic saga into English—albeit from Swedish. “He translated Icelandic sagas,” Wawn writes, “while contributing to their reoralization by writing saga-based parlor songs; he taught Shakespeare whilst himself writing plays on Viking subjects in Elizabethan style; and he contributed vigorously and unashamedly to popular polemics, finding it no mark of virtue to proclaim the virtues of a democratized literary-critical process in an impenetrable and robotic meta-language.”

He’s also easy to mock. Wawn devotes most of his article to Stephens’ virtually unread 1857 play, Revenge, or Woman’s Love, in which King Edgar of Mercia is waylaid by Vikings while on pilgrimage to Sweden, where he’s forced to summon his wife to be sacrificed to Odin. Wawn is patient with Stephens’ “pyrotechnic display of newly minted compounds, anaphoric elaboration, and (alas) syntactic congestion,” and I enjoyed picturing the climax featuring “the return of the cave-dwelling witch, accompanied by much smoke and many explosions,” but why snicker? “Notwithstanding its breathless and somewhat confusing denouement,” Wawn says, “there is much spirited and good-humored writing in the play, and it would be ponderously sobersided to miss the element of jeu d’esprit which helps to drive the whole work.”

What Wawn does here is humane. Seeing an eccentric medievalist rendered all the more comical by time, Wawn doesn’t “deconstruct,” “interrogate,” “negotiate,” or (good Lord) “problematize” him. Instead, Wawn peers into a bundle of contradictions—”the English Anglophile exiled in Scandinavia, the modern Christian fundamentalist fascinated by ancient paganism, the British Tory radical who translated a treatise in favor of an hereditary Danish monarchy”—and in 40 pages, reckons his humanity.

To my surprise, Wawn contrasts Stephens with another philologist whose life and work were shaped by Mercia. “George Stephens, it need hardly be said, was no Tolkien,” he admits, “and Revenge, it need hardly be added, is no Lord of the Rings. The play could number its nineteenth-century readers in tens, and its twentieth-century ones on the healthy fingers of a severely maimed hand.” I laughed at that line, because it’s tempting to see Stephens as a prevenient Ignatius Reilly bumbling around Copenhagen, crusading for influence, obsessed with tomorrow’s obscurities, repelling his colleagues with political rants. It’s harder, but kinder, to place this minor scholar alongside a famous one, in an article that’s more subtly and sensitively written than anything its subject could have mustered, and not lose him in the shadow.

“That one should succeed commandingly whilst another fails eccentrically needs (and finds) no explanation in the self-preoccupied world of modern literary theory,” Wawn concludes. “We might rather look to the chaos theory of real human lives.” In his choice of subject and through his own example, Wawn affirms something that isn’t always clear: there are people behind the scholarship we read.