Men, Women and Guitars in Romantic England
The Guitar and the Romantic Vision of the Medieval World by Professor Christopher Page. Between approximately 1750 and 1850, interest in the Middle Ages was fed by many activities with porous boundaries, including the antiquarianism of those who collected coins, seals and armour and the collection of poems generally called 'ballads' regarded as the core materials of nascent national literatures. In poetry, and the many new publications offering serialised fiction in the Regency period, the guitar was often associated with a vanished medieval past, imagined as a time of Catholic ignorance but also of political stability and fluent minstrelsy. Here, as in other respects, the associations of the guitar ran counter to nineteenth-century industrialism and the encroachment of new brick-built suburbs into green land, and even to Anglicanism, since the guitar was strongly associated with Catholic Spain and an imagery of warm nights, vesper bells, and elderly duennas nodding over their books of hours. (from gresham.ac.uk)
| The Guitar and the Romantic Vision of the Medieval World |
Go to the Series Home or watch other lectures: