Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year

A survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages.

What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun: living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many vaunted the superiority of the present to the past...