Gothic history and historical ethnography

It is difficult, for an Austrian, to pass judgement on the Goths. Anyone concerned with the history of the Goths must be resigned to being misunderstood, falsely praised, or rejected. This is hardly surprising, since the subject is so heavily laden with the ideological burden of an age-old tradition of identification with this people. It is almost impossible to separate Gothic history from the emotions aroused by the process once termed “The decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, and which is not yet universally known as “The transformation of the Roman world”.     

Gothic history and historical ethnography

It is difficult, for an Austrian, to pass judgement on the Goths. Anyone concerned with the history of the Goths must be resigned to being misunderstood, falsely praised, or rejected. This is hardly surprising, since the subject is so heavily laden with the ideological burden of an age-old tradition of identification with this people. It is almost impossible to separate Gothic history from the emotions aroused by the process once termed “The decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, and which is not yet universally known as “The transformation of the Roman world”.     

Death at St Bernard's: Anti-vivisection,Medicine and the Gothic

Displaying a Gothic fascination with the misapplication of science, Edward Berdoe's St Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) was one of a number of novels in the 1880s that repackaged the horrors of vivisection for public consumption. Although the novel can be dismissed as derivative, it departed from standard themes found in other anti-vivisection texts. Through the device of a hero struggling with the moral implications of science and the reckless treatment of patients, St Bernard's challenged the legitimacy of the teaching hospital. The present article moves debate about the Gothic, literature and science beyond well-known texts by Stevenson and Wells to examine how St Bernard's combined ‘the methods of science with the methods of romance’ and shifted the anti-vivisection narrative into the hospital. In locating the novel within anti-vivisectionist uses of fiction and late-Victorian anxieties about experimental medicine and the teaching hospital, the article explores the novel's relationship with other anti-vivisection texts and Gothic fiction, and examines what it says about scientific practices and mentalities. St Bernard's fashioned a very different hospital from existing representations to warn readers of how brutish students and cruel doctors tortured patients. In doing so, the novel recast the teaching hospital as an uncanny and dangerous place.     

The Choir of Auxerre Cathedral and the Question of a Burgundian Gothic Architecture

Despite criticisms, the classification of the choir of Auxerre Cathedral as Burgundian persists in recent literature. Yet the cathedral’s choir, begun c. 1215, demonstrates the problematic nature of the existing regional categories for French medieval architecture. Based on the 19th-century idea of progress, the conceptual model that conceives Gothic France as consisting of ‘centre and periphery’ and notions such as regional styles or period styles are deeply at odds with medieval concepts of innovation as inclusive of tradition, as evidenced in the biography of Bishop William of Auxerre (1207–20). Indeed, 20th-century studies in support of the classification are contradicted by recent archaeological findings, and neither the historical evidence nor the architectural evidence support a Burgundian label for the choir. The architecture’s distinctly trans-regional character with a mixture of both traditional and up-to-date architectural elements as well as the fact that patronal identities were strongly based on local affiliations and not attached to the duchy of Burgundy, invite a profound reconsideration not only of the position of the choir in the architectural landscape of the early 13th century but also of Gothic architecture of north-eastern France in more general terms.     

Barbadian Gothic: The Moving Coffins of the Chase Vault in Socio-Cultural Context

Abstract

The Chase family vault (Oistins, Barbados) is widely known as the setting of a macabre nineteenth-century story of moving coffins. On several occasions between 1812 and 1821, on opening the sealed vault to add a new burial, the neatly stacked coffins were found scattered. This legend has never been examined within its contemporary setting, including the Gothic literary and cultural movement. This article seeks to show that the episode reveals much about the negotiation of power in an island society on the edge of slave rebellion, where the planter class were fearful of the enslaved peoples’ continued practice of the banned spiritual and healing rituals known as Obeah. The article further examines how the story reflects notions of otherness, death, materiality, and memory in early nineteenth-century Barbados, where the ordered Protestant world of the planters clashed with what they perceived as the elemental worldview of the enslaved African and Afro-Barbadian population.     

Justinian's Novella 11: memory and political propaganda in the build up to the Gothic War

This paper will examine memories of a fourth‐ to fifth‐century western Balkan past in Justinian's Novella 11. Announcing the appointment of a new northern Illyrian archbishop at the city of Justiniana Prima, this decree refers nostalgically to an earlier period of late antiquity, prior to the invasions of Attila, when Sirmium, rather than Justiniana Prima, had been the administrative and ecclesiastical capital of Illyricum. Published in April 535, on the eve of the Gothic War, it thus suggested that Gothic‐held Sirmium belonged to the eastern Roman state. In this way it contradicted rival political propaganda emanating from the Gothic kingdom of Italy, according to which it was the rightful Roman heir to the western Balkans.     

Avorio d'ogni ragione: the supply of elephant ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era

This article accounts for the hitherto unexplained increase in the availability of ivory in mid-thirteenth-century France through an alteration in the medieval trade routes that brought elephant tusks from Africa to northern Europe. A newly-opened passage through the Straits of Gibraltar allowed a small amount of luxury goods to be shipped together with bulk materials necessary to the flourishing textile industries of northern Europe.     

Avorio d'ogni ragione: the supply of elephant ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era

This article accounts for the hitherto unexplained increase in the availability of ivory in mid-thirteenth-century France through an alteration in the medieval trade routes that brought elephant tusks from Africa to northern Europe. A newly-opened passage through the Straits of Gibraltar allowed a small amount of luxury goods to be shipped together with bulk materials necessary to the flourishing textile industries of northern Europe.