Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

The Romantic period was characterized by a new historical self-consciousness in which history, and in particular the medieval, became an important screen for comprehending the present. Recent Scholarship has proposed contending theories for understanding how the historical is used to symbolize the political in the period. Romantic Medievalism takes an original position in proposing a critical difference in how the medieval was used to interpret the present, arguing that, where as the conservative writers identified with the knight of romance, radical writers identified with the troubadour of the courtly love lyric.