Introduction

Abstract

The reception of the legend of Arthur in the Tudor era presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Arthur featured prominently in pageants and public spectacles throughout the period, and at times played a surprisingly important role in foreign policy. On the other hand, chroniclers found it increasingly difficult to defend Arthur’s historicity, and the period failed to produce a major work of Arthurian literature beyond Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which the British prince cuts a perplexingly elusive figure. With its complex and conflicting attitudes to the Arthurian tradition, the Tudor era seems to constitute a bridge or way-station between the Arthur of the Middle Ages and the Arthur of more securely post-medieval (and, hence, medievalist) eras.

A Home in Rome: Villa Mills and the Palatine Hill

“…This article reveals that this Gothic Revival mansion, known as ‘Villa Mills’, should be renamed ‘Villa Smith’, as primary evidence suggests that Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Smith (1787–1873), a former official of the East India Company, acquired the property from Mills (in 1846) and pursued the medievalist makeover (Figs 4 and 5). The intervention might not seem surprising in the age of Victorian medievalism and Gothic (Parker and Wagner, 2020). Yet Villa Smith was not located in Britain, nor in any of its formal or informal colonies, but, surprisingly enough, in Rome, where the Gothic Revival might appear as a striking, and sporadic, anomaly.…”