2. Positive Undercurrents. In this torrent of abuse
two underground trends of more positive character still
emerge, one in England, the other in Spain—two
countries which have always been somewhat periph-
eral to the main currents of European civilization, but
thereby more open to innovation. It was noticed by
English defenders of parliamentary rights as against the
presumed monarchic encroachments of seventeenth-
century Stuart absolutism that the institutions of rep-
resentative government did not in fact stem from the
much lauded era of classical antiquity. Even Tacitus,
that haughty Roman, could be summoned to testify to
the claims of the Germanic tribes to priority in the
invention of this institution. Thus according to the
Parliamentarians, the Germanic peoples of north-
ern Europe had an inbred disposition to free insti-
tutions in ineradicable opposition to tyranny and
privilege.
This happy trait of the northern peoples, as con-
trasted with their less fortunate Mediterranean
counterparts, was sometimes designated “Gothic bal-
ance,” “Gothic government,” or “Gothic polity.” As
Algernon Sidney remarks, “All the northern nations,
which upon the dissolution of the Roman Empire pos-
sessed the best provinces that had composed it [sic],
were under that form which is usually called the Gothic
polity: They had king, lords, commons, diets, assem-
blies of estates, cortez and parliaments in which the
sovereign power of these nations did reside, and by
which they were exercised” (Discourses concerning
Government, London, 1698). In the seventeenth cen-
tury English interest in the national past was not re-
stricted to political theory, nor was it confined to any
particular group—it spread into various circles con-
cerned with diverse realms of enquiry: royalist and
parliamentarian, Puritan and Catholic, aristocratic and
popular. As a result the English did great service in
pioneering in the exploration of various aspects of the
constellation that historically makes up the phenom-
enon of Gothic. This cultural nationalism stimulated
enthusiasm for the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) lan-
guage, as exemplified by the production of various
dictionaries and philological treatises, an activity that
spread to the Continent in the first edition of the
Stockholm fragment of Bishop Ulphilas' fourth-century
version of the Bible in the Gothic language (Dordrecht,
1665), prepared by Franciscus Junius, who had been
the Earl of Arundel's librarian. Furthermore, attention
was directed to the surviving monuments in stone: the
cathedrals and other buildings of medieval England.
The three volumes of William Dugdale and Roger
Dodsworth's Monasticon anglicanum (1654-73) con-
stitute, as Paul Frankl (1960) has remarked, the “first
illustrated architectural history of a medieval style,”
though not surprisingly they provide little hint of the
various ramifications of the style.
Not long after, however, the architect Sir
Christopher Wren was to evolve, despite his primary
allegiance to the Renaissance tradition, a perceptive
account of the style and even to practice actual build-
ing in a late Gothic mode that anticipated K. F.
Schinkel, A. W. N. Pugin, and others. (It is significant
that Wren's Saracenic theory of the origin of the style,
while mistaken, has been revived by serious writers
of the mid-twentieth century.) The English state of
awareness contrasts with the fantastic approach to the
Gothic style that generally (though not invariably)
prevailed across the channel, where alchemical, astro
logical, and generically hermetic explanations were in
vogue, as exemplified by Gobineau de Montluisant's
Explication très curieuse des énigmes et figures hiéro-
glyphiques... de Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris, 1640).
This hermetic approach to Gothic monuments was to
resurface in Victor Hugo's popular novel Notre-Dame
de Paris (1831) and, a century later, in le Mystère des
cathédrales (Paris, 1925, and later editions) by an
occultist who called himself Fulcanelli.
Other temptations, however, lay in wait for seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century Englishmen who boldly
sought to explore the Gothic terra incognita. Apart
from the understandable temptation to exalt Gothic
as a purely national achievement, it could also be
viewed as a response to the salutary rigors of the
northern climate, thus resembling Arnold J. Toynbee's
later concept of “challenge and response.” In this way
the ground was laid for the later notion of “Nordic”
culture traits as contrasted with outworn, indeed
decadent Mediterranean values. In the earlier period
of English investigation and theorizing, however, the
need to defend the so-called “Gothic balance” and
related phenomena greatly diminished after the Glori-
ous Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of the
Hanoverian Dynasty in 1714. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, however, the notion was to enjoy a new lease
on life in the work of such historians as Edward Augus-
tus Freeman and John Richard Green, who traced the
progressive institutions of Victorian England to the
country's remote medieval past.
In Spain, the second exceptional country, the pre-
sumed Visigothic origin of the nobility led to much
speculation, ethnic, political, and social. In his De rebus
Hispaniae (1243) Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo used
Jordanes to prove that the Spanish Goths were related
to the inhabitants of Gothia in Scandinavia. This con-
nection was repeated and embroidered by later Spanish
writers, contributing to an amusing imbroglio at the
Council of Basel (1431-49), where the Scandinavian
and Spanish delegates disputed over precedence on the
grounds of Gothic lineage. Gradually there developed
an extension of the meaning of the noun godo (“Goth”)
to signify “noble, well-born, illustrious” (attested as
early as 1490). In Spanish sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century authors the term acquired an ironic twist, as
in the expression hacerse de los godos (“to claim nobil-
ity, to put on airs”). And it is significant that the art
theorist Vicente Carducho in his Diálogos de la pintura
(1633), while condemning Gothic architecture in the
wake of Giorgio Vasari, takes pains to point out that
this degenerate mode was created by the Ostrogoths
of Italy and not by the revered Spanish Visigoths. In
Spain, then, the concept of the Gothic is bound up
with the emergence of a peculiar sense of national
distinctiveness, for which Cervantes' Don Quixote
stands, in some respects, as the archetypal figure.
