91 4 Medievalism and the ‘Flayed-Dane’ Myth: English Perspectives between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries Mary Rambaran-Olm T he fascination with the Middle Ages has a lengthy tradition which, arguably, began shortly afer the period ended. For centuries the popular view of the age was based on the claim of the fourteenth-century Italian scholar Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) that the medieval period was one of literary and cultural ‘darkness’.1 Whereas the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘medievalism’ were frst used in the nineteenth century to denote the intermediate period between the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ eras of history, for centuries the post-medieval English fostered images of a ‘dark’ and ‘savage’ past to support the Petrarchan view of pre-Conquest England and the Continent.2 Tis anachronistic view has long been abandoned by scholars; however, the concept of the ‘Dark Ages’ became frmly established among English diletanti and scholars alike, beginning in the Renaissance and 1 Writing of the period afer the fall of the Roman Empire, Petrarch explained that: ‘Nullo enim modo divinarum rerum veritas apparere illis poterat, quibus nondum verus sol iustitie illuxerat. Elucebant tamen inter errores ingenia, neque ideo minus vivaces erant oculi, quamvis tenebris et densa caligine circumsepti, ut eis non errati odium, sed indigne sortis miseratio deberetur’ [Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom; therefore they ought not so much to be hated for their erring but pitied for their ill fate]. See: Francesco Petrarch, Apologia cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias (Defence Against the Calumnies of an Anonymous Frenchman) in his Opera Omnia (Basileæ: Execudebat Henrichus Petri, 1554) p. 1195. Translation from Teodore Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages” ’, Speculum 17 (1942): 226–42 at p. 227, n. 9. 2 Te broad term ‘post-medieval’ is used interchangeably with any subsequent period in English history afer the Middle Ages. Te OED states that ‘medieval’ was frst used by T. D. Fosbroke in 1817, and ‘medievalism’ was coined by John Ruskin in 1853. ‘Medievalism’ has become identifed with the study of the on-going construction of the idea of the Middle Ages. See, for example: David Mathews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015); Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Karl Fugelso, ed., Studies in Medievalism XVII: Defning Medievalism(s) (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009); and Michael Alexander, Medievalism: Te Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).