The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction Book

The genre called "gothic" is notoriously shifting anyway, but of course I've always been curious about why it's called that (it never really seemed to have much to do with the visigoths). Well, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) was the first book officially termed "gothic." It was subtitled "a gothic story." It also pretended, at first, to be a found manuscript from the medieval time (I finally read The Castle of Otranto a couple years ago, and it's very fun). So what did the word "gothic" mean in the 1760s? Archaic, exotic, and Roman Catholic as opposed to Protestant. Catholic church architecture as opposed to the more modern classical style. One of the hallmarks of gothic as a genre is the past returning (and creepy old buildings) so all this makes sense. So it went on after Walpole, the term was taken up and run with, and led to the modern use of the word "gothic" which, now, is it's definition.