Medieval Detective and Crime Fiction: Religion and Nostalgia in Secular Modernity

Abstract

The medieval detective novel as a literary genre dates to 1977, when Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter) published A Morbid Taste For Bones. Detective fiction is a modern genre that reflects the expectations of the contemporary West: individualism, the detective as a dispenser of order and righter of wrongs (in a post-religious manner), and a liberal understanding of society that has little to do with the reality of life in the Middle Ages. From the origins of the genre in the nineteenth century, the village mystery (the classic exponent of which was Agatha Christie) vied with the harder-edged urban crime novel, where the city plays a major role as setting. The retreat of institutional Christianity, perceptible from the start of the industrial revolution but gaining momentum after the 1850s (a decade of rapid social change, including the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, and the emergence of Spiritualism,) resulted in fewer people believing the theological tenet that life is meaningful and good and evil do not go unpunished, even if that punishment is delayed till after death. The detective, exemplified by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, was one possible replacement for the religious confessor or priest in the process of ascribing meaning to the otherwise random minutiae of existence.  It is thus no accident that some later novelists chose to merge the detective and the religious functionary; there are now multiple series of novels about medieval detectives, religious and secular, male and female, broadly historical and highly imaginative. While these are products of secular modernity, the genre evinces nostalgia for an imagined past when society was safe and filled with faith.