Dreaming of the Middle Ages between maple and laurel: A “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” in French Canada around 1900

Abstract

Around 1900, writers and artists in French Canada nurtured a taste for a fanciful medieval aesthetic, in search of a distinct identity suspended between the local “maple” and the classical “laurel.” This shared fascination was taken up by two camps often labelled as regionalists and exotics. On one hand, the national project portrayed Ancien Régime France as a golden age of chivalric values, providing moral legitimacy to the myth of the “French-Canadian vocation.” Images of the past served to nourish a stylized, retrospective syncretism. For the exotics, particularly those associated with the journal Le Nigog, this detour through medieval representations pointed toward the universal – and to a relative modernity.