William Morris sought to combat the rise in industrial consumerism by embracing the handmade mediums of the medieval period. Augustus Pugin saw a national purity in Gothic architecture absent in the classical tradition, so used the medieval style as inspiration for the Houses of Parliament. John Ruskin encouraged a return to the romance of the medieval as a means of gaining ‘truth to nature’. For the suffragettes, however, the women they foregrounded displayed two essential medieval attributes: they were challenging societal norms by achieving power and influence despite their sex, and they
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