ABSTRACT
Religious medievalism is neither adequately nor properly described as a romantic phenomenon, since romanticism was fundamentally a rejection of Europe’s traditional “Christian religion-culture”, while religious medievalism was at least an attempt to return to that heritage. If pre-Romanticism is the initial protest stage, then Romanticism is the secondary protest stage, combined with the attempt to construct new, personal, mental or cultural “rituals”; but “personal ritual” is oxymoronic. The Protestant emphasis is on the superiority of spiritual over material, which is “to insist on the liberties of the individual and to imply a political programme to free him from unwelcome constraints”; and it is noticeable that revolution was a feature of Romanticism. The elements of religious medievalist “ritual”, of their “language”, were obviously images, themes and subjects taken from medieval Christianity, which had the advantages of being Christian, varied, comprehensive, pan-European and “poetic”.
