Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (17171797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole's Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his Strawberry Committee of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites.
Reeve argues that the new third sex of homoerotically inclined men and the new modern styles that they promotedincluding the Gothic style and chinoiseriewere interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a queer architecture.
Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians, as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies.
List of Illustrations
Preface: Medievalism, Modernity, and the History of Sexuality
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The New Medievalism: Constructing the Gothic in the Circle of Horace Walpole
2. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill
3. Queer Family Romance in the Strawberry Hill Collection
4. Dicky Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor
5. “The Spirit of Strawberry-Castle”: Donnington Grove, The Vyne, and Lee Priory
6. From Strawberry Hill Gothic to the Gothic Revival
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“This book makes a brilliant and substantive contribution to research on eighteenth-century Gothic. In keeping with Walpole’s own interdisciplinary leanings, Reeve cuts through the disciplinary boundaries that have tended to shape previous studies of Walpole and his circle. Rightly, he treats Walpolean Gothic as a thoroughly multimedia enterprise. In so doing, Reeve raises the critical discourse on medievalism and queer aesthetics to a new level of sophistication.”
—Robert Mills, author of Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture
