Nostalgia in the 14th century

In the 14th century we can also find a striking sense of longing for a time gone by. We do not find the word nostalgia, nor any single word that quite captures the idea, but we do find related phrases such as “the good old days” or “the former age,” and a series of vivid quotations about how much better things used to be. One of my favorites is from a French writer who said, “In my day, when I was young, the kingdom was as rich and as full as an egg.”

What is really interesting in the 14th century is that alongside this wave of longing for a couple of generations prior – 50 years or so – there was also a longing for an unspecified golden age, a kind of ur period: a former time when things were less corrupt; people were less greedy; people dressed properly; children behaved properly; wars were not being fought all the time; prices were reasonable; politicians behaved properly – a series of tropes which probably sound quite familiar to us. I think the early 14th century is a particularly interesting period because this is the moment of the first stirrings of humanism as well, when people are more emphatically referring to a classical golden age and picking up on writers like Horace, Virgil and Ovid and the sorts of nostalgias that they were expressing. We get this very personal nostalgia for the days of my grandfather overlaid onto this rather intellectualized classical nostalgia.

There is a wonderful set of pastoral poetry, which was discovered in a lost manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania. It contains a series of poems in which the speakers are elderly shepherds talking about how much better things were in their youth. In one of these poems, one of the old shepherds says, “Quant je fu jouvenceaux [...] Je suis de vous li plus aisnez / Mais on ne vi tel desraison”, so, when I was a young man – and then he pauses – I am the oldest of you all, and I never saw such terrible things as now. They go on to describe the ways in which the wolves are eating the sheep now, and everything has been lost. Of course, they are making a series of political points about political turmoil and what has been lost in terms of stability in France.

We have the Black Death wiping out as much as 50% of the population. That alone — cataclysmic climate change, pandemic and harvest failure — might have been enough to make people quite nostalgic for what had come before. Alongside that, however, we see a series of interlinked changes as well. We see very rapidly shifting socio-economic structures. The differential mortality rates resulting from bubonic plague and harvest failures, in particular, mean that the poor disproportionately suffer, which in turn means those who survive can demand slightly better conditions. This leads to a certain amount of flux in the social hierarchy and certainly a perception of more social mobility.

Then, alongside all these huge structural changes, we also find a growth of public discourse generally, a growth of the public sphere. We see a context in which the public is drawn much more explicitly into political discourse, and people across the social spectrum are able to express themselves more loudly than ever, through political petitioning, through poetry and complaint literature, through sermons. There was a sense in which marketplaces in this period became very public arenas for people to speak out. If people were getting nostalgic because change was happening so fast, they were also able to express that nostalgia more loudly than ever.

John Gower was a late 14th century English writer. He was also extremely exercised about the subject of clothing, which he saw as epitomizing everything that had been lost in modern society. He wrote, “Now the knave is clothed as was formerly the knight,” then there is an interesting gender dimension when he goes on to write, “and the servant girl as her mistresses.” Interestingly, in an Italian context, these kinds of comments were much more overtly concerned with sexuality: in the past, people dressed much more modestly, whereas in the modern period, as in the late 14th century, people were obsessed with displaying far too much of their sexuality. Nostalgia also has a really radical edge to it; it can be extremely subversive. In this period, we also find nostalgia being used and mobilized by those who were protesting at the ways in which their expectations and their longings for slightly better conditions were being stifled.

The Peasants Revolt in 1381 in England is a fabulous example of nostalgia being mobilized for very radical ends by those involved in the revolt, who look back to a golden age in which people were treated fairly, respected for what they were doing and in which people were given their just deserts for their work. That kind of nostalgia was just as loud and just as powerful in that period.

Nostalgia was a thread running through much of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. For example, he wrote a poem called The Former Age, which draws on classical tropes of a golden age but picks up on contemporary concerns and overlays a 14th-century nostalgia onto that. He wrote of "a blisful lyf, a paisible and a sweete, ledden the peples in the former age. They helde hem payed of fruites that they ete, which the fields gave them by usage."

The 14th-century preacher Bromyard fulminated against contemporary mores. In one of his tirades, he said, “Who has been heard to praise or could praise any of these modern knights for their strenuous battling with the enemy or their defence of the country or church, as Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver and other knights of antiquity are commended and praised? But rather for this they have a helmet of gold worth £40 and other external insignia of the same style and even greater price.”

There is also a sense in which that kind of chivalric nostalgia can be used politically. In England, we find a huge number of references to King Arthur and the Round Table in the 14th century. It is a longing for a period when knights were fully absorbed in the true values of chivalry in a way that has apparently been lost.

The Italian chronicler Villani was highly nostalgic in the 14th century for the 13th and 12th century, which he felt represented a time of great noble values. He wrote, "They were loyal and faithful, they did greater and more virtuous deeds than are performed in our own time.”

Sometimes the pace of time seems to pick up; sometimes it slows down. For Hartmut Rosa, part of the experience of modernity, as brought about by industrialization in particular, was what he calls this social acceleration of time — that societies began to experience time faster because change was happening so fast. Things were changing beyond recognition very, very quickly. He says that it was this which stimulated a longing for a stabler, gentler past. I think we can find something very similar in the 14th century. This does not have to be a feature of a post-industrialized Europe. Actually, the changes in the 14th century were happening so rapidly, partly just in the sense of the terrifying levels of mortality. This sense of rapid pace of change was really what stimulated this longing for a gentler, stabler, more predictable past. That in itself has big implications for how we think about medieval versus modern. If we can find this sense of a social acceleration of time in the Middle Ages, as well as in post-18th century Europe, that starts to break down the ways in which we distinguish modernity from other periods of history. It suggests that perhaps we should approach the experiences of medieval people with a little more nuance and subtlety.

It is also a collective emotion, and it is a collective mode of response to feeling that change is going faster than one can keep up with. In that sense, it is very dependent or very contingent and manifests differently in different periods. I am not myself engaged in a huge comparative study of nostalgia, but I do think that if one thought about this across an even bigger sweep of time, one would find waves of nostalgia at particular moments. Those waves do seem to correspond to moments at which the pace of change picks up very noticeably.

For example, in first century AD Rome, I think you find a wave of nostalgia. Obviously, that is a period of huge regime change and paradigm-shifting ways of thinking politically. If one moves into the early Middle Ages, around the seventh, eighth centuries, I think you find a wave of nostalgia when there is a huge sense of change sweeping across Europe. The 14th century we have discussed. You would then find a big wave of nostalgia in the late 16th century, partly stimulated by the Reformation (and some wonderful work by Alexandra Walsham and Harriet Lyons in particular on that). Then, moving into the modern period, we do have these waves of nostalgia provoked by industrialization and the acceleration of the pace of change that one finds in those periods. Like so many emotions, I think nostalgia is both universal – we all feel the passage of time, so we all feel the loss and the hope that nostalgia carries with it – but it is also something which is profoundly contingent, particularly in its collective sense.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025