Bloody Records: Manuscripts and Politics in The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) famously begins when a giant medieval helmet plummets from the sky and fatally crushes Conrad, the only son and heir of Manfred the Prince of Otranto, on his wedding day. This event is a harbinger of things to come as more supernatural objects from the past descend in various ways on the castle to reveal the true history of Manfred's ill-gotten rule over Otranto. Otranto's wild supernatural machinations would become stock features of the Gothic novel, as would its medieval setting. In fact, critics have frequently treated the novel's historicity as its most important formal feature. Here, Lake examining the contradictions in the preface to the first edition of the novel and claims that those contradictions are intentionally designed to call into question antiquaries and their methodologies. Next, he places the preface within the contexts of manuscript studies and of Walpole's own statements regarding the reliability of archival sources and the political motivations of archivists. Returning again to the novel, he uncovers previously unrecognized allusions to medieval history and to the manuscripts that were presumed to preserve the past's legal legacies, aligning those allusions with Walpole's own political sympathies.