Medievalism and the Gothic discourse in Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe"

Abstract

Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born only seven years after the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the novel which inaugurated the Gothic movement in the eighteenth century. James Watt argues that Scott began his career as a writer in the 1790s, the apex of the Gothic tradition in literature, when authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis were in full speed of creation (2006, p. 132). This suggests that Scott's personal and professional life was deeply connected with the development of the Gothic as a whole, and his work arguably incorporated characteristics of this type of fiction. Like Walpole, the past also fascinated Scott and he devoted his life to collecting texts and artifacts from old Scotland, knowledge which certainly helped to shape his reimagining of medieval Britain. One of his most famous works is Ivanhoe, published in three volumes in 1820. It narrates the story of a mysterious knight in the kingdom of Richard I, a period when Britain still felt the consequences of the Battle of Hastings (1066), when William I, the Conqueror, defeated the Saxons and Norman customs were imposed on the people. In this chapter, I aim at rereading Ivanhoe seeking to explore its medievalist motifs and to understand how they relate to the Gothic tradition at the latter decades of the eighteenth century and to the movement called Medieval Revival.