In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1865 potboiler Sir Jasper's Tenant, the Sir Jasper of the title is a widowed baronet with an especial fondness for the art of William Etty, the early Victorian artist best known for his sensuous studies of nudes, both women and men. True to his idol's tastes, Sir Jasper has an eye for the voluptuous charms of a lady visitor who happens to be an evil twin in disguise, but he also likes the brooding manliness of his equally disguised tenant, George Pauncefort. Attempting to persuade George to spend Christmas with him, Sir Jasper promises him, “No country families, no would-be medievalism, – boars' heads with lemons in their mouths, rejoicing retainers, fiddlers in the music gallery, and so on; none of your Christmas-in-the-olden-time absurdities.” What Sir Jasper means is that Christmas will not be in the “Old English style” as famously witnessed (or possibly fabricated) by Washington Irving in his visit to “Bracebridge Hall” about 1818 and as revived by Victorians longing for the supposed old days of medieval jollity. My interest here, though, is in Sir Jasper's use of the word “medievalism”, which is very much in accordance with its modern usage as implying a respect for or revival of the practices and values of the Middle Ages.

The word itself was only a few years old, seemingly emerging about the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and being used in print by John Ruskin in the early 1850s as part of an apology for Pre-Raphaelite art.