In George Eliot's Adam Bede, published in 1866 but set in 1799, the young estate heir Arthur Donnithorne declares that he will have his bookseller send him no more books with “ism” in their titles. Eliot would have known of medievalism if, as Alexander suggests, it was invented in 1827 (though a form of chivalry could be said to have reemerged with Digby's 1822 publication The broadstone of honour) (90), and her wry comment is a valuable one, plagued as the world was becoming with -isms.

Modern medievalism has taken many forms, including the literary, visual, and physical. Alexander examines the development of these during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and his book is a masterpiece in the analysis of this extremely long period. It would seem that for such a long time period, an in-depth investigation of particular issues is not possible. Alexander, however, does manage to achieve some detailed study of some of the main points of medievalism. What he could have perhaps included is some examination of the three kinds of medievalism in the present day, namely, the artistic and imaginative genre of popular medievalism, the academic medievalism of the last thirty years or so, which has generated such tremendous academic scholarship—and why this continues to thrive in such bodies as the yearly Leeds International Congress, to name but one academic medieval gathering—and the third kind, in which academics investigate their own medieval scholarship in a multidisciplinary way.

The strength of Alexander's book is in its careful tracing of the origins of nineteenth-century medievalism from its eighteenth-century “Gothic” forms. Using, as a starting point, such texts as Thomas Percy's Reliques (1765) and Thomas Gray's The Bard (1757), Alexander moves on to more invented Gothic works, including Macpherson's Óssianic verses, published in 1760, and Horace Walpole's infamous Castle of Otranto, published in 1764. All these texts, together with emerging architectural structures such as Walpole's Strawberry Hill, formed a historical matrix for the emergence of a new kind of retrogressive view. These views of the past had a multidisciplinary approach, including literature, visual arts, and physical forms.

According to Burke in his 1790 publication Reflections on the revolution in France, the age of chivalry was over in France though still alive in Britain, as Alexander notes in Bishop Hurd's letters of 1765. For Alexander, the Romantic Walter Scott's writing embodied the very chivalry that Burke, the Whig Irishman, wanted to preserve in Britain. Alexander provides a detailed chapter on chivalry embodied in the person of Scott's Ivanhoe, among whose heirs he includes some extraordinary modern figures such as Kevin Costner's 1991 Robin Hood, and Tony Blair. Alexander's treatment of Augustus Pugin and William Cobbett is comprehensive, covering as he does their nostalgic retreat to feudalism as a solution for the harshness of the Poor Laws and nineteenth-century poverty, and the well-known idea that Pugin was an English Catholic who deplored the dehumanization and the systemization of society that was occurring during the industrial revolution.

Alexander sees John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, and John Henry Newman all as writers who, like Cobbett and Pugin, were looking to the Middle Ages for a better society, but for the future rather than in a past system. Alexander sees these writers as embodying the idea that “The principles of dignity of labour, economic justice and mutual obligation between different ranks of society had been overthrown by the systems of modernity, industrialization, laissez faire economics and the cash nexus between man and man’’ (87). It is this radical dichotomy that drives Alexander's book and that makes medievalism continue to be popular for a postmodern, Foucaldian informed readership that seeks to find the imbalances in contemporary society and that strives to return to a greener, more caring world.

These ideas flow into Alexander's next three chapters, which deal with the Arthurian, historical, and pre-Raphaelite themes. Alexander calls his sixth chapter ‘‘The death of Arthur was the favourite volume,” and this encapsulates all the ideas expressed above. Chivalry, a noble death, and a better world all appealed to the Victorian sense of medieval nostalgia. The values of stewardship and a caring relationship between peoples expressed in Tennyson's Idylls of the king, first published in 1859, embodied underlying threads that flow into Alexander's ninth chapter on the working man and the common good. This includes the work of Ford Madox Brown, William Morris, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Ruskin. Revd. Frederick Dennison Maurice's Working Men's College, which opened in 1854 (when Ruskin's chapter “The true function of the workman in art,” based on his 1849 The Stones of Venice, was sold to raise funds), Ford Madox Brown's painting Work (1852–65) and William Morris's work on initiating socialism and translating Nordic legends as well as Beowulf could all be seen in the same beneficiary way.

For Alexander, Victorian medievalism, which could be viewed as the high point of his narrative, lost its impetus before the deaths of Tennyson in 1892, Morris in 1896, Burne-Jones in 1898, and Ruskin in 1900. However, he is of the opinion that a second revival rather than continuation commenced in 1900 (211), driven by knowledge of the Middle Ages, and the system of “medievalism” greatly increased through academic learning from the twentieth century and through popular awareness up to the present.

Alexander sees the inklings, including the fantasy writers J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, as the inheritors of romance rather than a specific medievalism, purveying as they did in their writing the values of self-sacrifice, fidelity, love, and poetic justice. J. K. Rowling is for Alexander not a medievalist, although she endorses similar ideas as those embodied in the popular culture of medievalism, such as those of facing evil and defeating it (267). The underlying themes of mutual dependence, care of each other, and the environment still remain, and even though they might be contextualized in the genre of romance, still drive the fascination with medievalism, especially in popular culture, such as visual media like cinema. Overall, Alexander's book gives a fairly consistent overview of the long and persistent development of this trend in a glossy and beautifully illustrated book.