Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival

Abstract

IT WAS A nineteenth-century commonplace that the medieval revival been initiated by Sir Walter Scott, but the commonplace was only half true. Quite as much as poems and novels created much of the medievalism that followed, they were themselves the distillation of more than a century's interest in the feudal past. Newman could say that Scott had first turned men's minds in the direction of the middle ages; Carlyle could believe that he revived the art of history; Ruskin could call himself a Tory of Scott's grand old school. 1 But Scott himself might have said that he was of the school of the graveyard poets and the Gothic novelists, the gentlemen antiquaries and the ballad collectors, the Whig poets and the Tory historians. Mixing both the truths and fantasies about the middle ages that grown up during the eighteenth century, Scott created an imaginary medieval world that most of his readers took for real. So vivid, in fact, was this world that a whole century dreamed and philosophized about it. (If Wemmick's castle is the dream, Carlyle's St. Edmondsbury is the philosophy.) To be sure, medievalism is incomplete in Scott. He does not use the past to castigate and correct the present, as later medievalists were to do; nor does he turn feudalism into a political program. But just as his books would have been impossible without the eighteenth-century rediscovery of the middle ages, so the pervasive medievalism of