Behind the Castle Gate: From Medieval to Renaissance

by Matthew Johnson

In this engaging book Matthew Johnson looks 'behind the castle gate' to discover the truth about castles in England at the end of the Middle Ages. Traditional studies have seen castles as compromises between the needs of comfort and of defence, and as statements of wealth or power or both. By encouraging the reader to view castles in relation to their inhabitants, Matthew Johnson uncovers a whole new vantage point. He shows how castles functioned as stage-settings against which people played out roles of lord and servant, husband and wife, father and son. Building, rebuilding and living in a castle was as complex an experience as a piece of medieval art. Behind the Castle Gate brings castles and their inhabitants alive. Combining ground-breaking scholarship with fascinating narratives it will be read avidly by all with an interest in castles.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Matthew 2^ Johnson: GR Author, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magic Realism
Matthew 3^ Johnson: GR Author, Fantasy
Matthew 4^ Johnson: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories
Matthew 5^ Johnson: Organic Life
Matthew 6^ Johnson: Biography for Children, History

Reviews

[aleph · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's actually amazing how little of substance this book manages to say. Would work much better as a single article rather than a full monograph

[JJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my review over at Dreamwidth:

Forget 'license to kill' - I want a 'license to crenellate'.

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It may strike you, gentle reader, as a tad absurd to write an enthusiastic book recommendation that one is only fifteen pages into reading. I borrowed a copy [as background reading for a creative project], and unsuspecting begin to casually skim through the preface on the train. Within five minutes I had to stop, laugh, reread the sentence in question, laugh harder, and then go back and read properly from the very start.

I am the first to admit that castles, specifically English castles in the period ~1350 - 1660, and "what happened to castles at the end of the Middle Ages" (1) is not my area of expertise. I have not read a whit of the many authors Johnson quotes or visited a one of the castles referenced as touchstones. I can, however, recognize dry academic wit when I see it buried three layers of footnotes deep, let alone freely gamboling across the page with good humor to ease points of such brilliant intellectual skewering right in the cherished blind spots of certain academic $authorities that I find myself wanting to take notes on almost every page. I haven't had this much fun reading any book, let alone an academic book, in quite some time; in the strength of its insight & deceptive slimness (under 200 pages total), it's like reading Renèe L. Bergland's The National Uncanny Indian Ghosts and American Subjects Reencounters With Colonialism, though Bergland sticks with a degree of tonal gravitas appropriate to pervasive, pernicious issues that harm & hamper living people to this day. (Johnson clearly feels no such scruples when it comes to monumental academic egos and the structures of power - architectural and academical - that they're built on; his judicial deflations are cordially merciless.)

As for the actual nominal subject matter, well - I will leave you with a quote from where I left off reading (12) on the way into work this morning: this is fascinating, thought-provoking stuff.

The view that comes closest to the one I want to pursue here is that described by Philip Dixon (1990) as the 'castle as theatre'. Castles were theatrical in that they served as stage settings. The social identities thus staged were unstable, and the staging itself was constitutive of that status. [...] I want to take this analogy further and deeper than Dixon does. We noted in the last section that social identities were in part the result of performances at an everyday and ceremonial level. Who people were, then, depended on these performances. An eighteenth-century gent who started behaving like a yeoman, adopting a certain lifestyle, behavior, set of attitudes, eating and acting towards social superiors, equals, or inferiors in a certain way, might cease to be a gent. Contemporaries were certainly capable of making quite nuanced judgements about 'civility' in this way (Elias 1978). Similarly, being a medieval knight or a noble was also in part a performative category. Obviously, performances are structured by the world in which they are set, and architecture is a way of manipulating that world.

If adding battlements to your residence-to-be gives you the appearance of nobility independent of your current social status, and thus potentially concrete stone substance to upwardly mobile performance that contradicts cherished social fiction, aka makes apparent that being a lord "was not simply an intrinsic quality of birth and blood", one can begin to see why authorities would want to license crenellation. No castle building for you!

[Martin Rundkvist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several interesting points if you can ignore the era's studiedly non-committal knowledge relativism.