Bloody Records: Manuscripts and Politics in The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) famously begins when a giant medieval helmet plummets from the sky and fatally crushes Conrad, the only son and heir of Manfred the Prince of Otranto, on his wedding day. This event is a harbinger of things to come as more supernatural objects from the past descend in various ways on the castle to reveal the true history of Manfred’s ill-gotten rule over Otranto. As Manfred plots to divorce his wife and marry Conrad’s fiancée, Isabella, he stalks Isabella through a castle increasingly characterized by its medieval malevolence: a giant, armored hand appears on a banister; an army arrives bearing a colossal, ancient sword; a figure walks out of an old, musty portrait; a skeletal monk speaks. The novel reaches its climax when, in a case of mistaken identity, Manfred accidentally stabs his own daughter in a fit of rage. In the tumultuous denouement, the spirit of Alfonso the Good, the original Prince of Otranto and ghostly owner of the giant spectral objects that have mysteriously appeared throughout the story, materializes. He breaks the castle into ruins, reveals a seedy history of murder and forgery, and names a local peasant, Theodore, the rightful heir to Otranto before ascending into the sky in a giant fireball alongside St. Nicholas. Otranto’s wild supernatural machinations would become stock features of the Gothic novel, as would its medieval setting. In fact, critics have frequently treated the novel’s historicity as its most important formal feature. By setting Otranto in the murky medieval past, Walpole would seem to remove characters and readers alike from the empiricist ideologies of the Enlightenment and the demands of realist fiction, facilitating the Gothic’s unbelievable plot devices and sentimental effects. Understanding the
Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole's Gothic Historiography
The “antiquarian” attitude is not an imperfect approximation to something else—which would be the maturity of scientific, professionalised historiography. It is a specific, lived relationship to the past, and deserves to be treated on its own terms.1
Inference and Evidence in Archaeology: A Discussion of the Conceptual Problems
Publisher Summary This chapter dicsusses the general features of scientific inference and explains the way inference has been discussed by archaeologists. It presents an explication of current problems in the various areas: (1) the justification of archaeological conclusions, (2) the concepts of archaeological evidence, and (3) the undeveloped relations between archaeological theory and archaeological evidence. The chapter defines these problems and explains the way to resolve them. To resolve many of the problems surrounding uncertain links between inference and evidence, archaeologists should develop a rigorous model that specifies the way information about the past is transmitted to the present via material remains. The chapter presents the structure of such a model. However, establishing relevant data to support conclusions about past phenomena is only part of the overall process of generating archaeological knowledge. Some of the processes responsible for producing the material remains that archaeologists manipulate in assembling evidence to support claims about past phenomena are described in the chapter.