Ivanhoe and the Invention of Merry England

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There are some things that almost any Hollywood film set in the Middle Ages can count on. It will be set in England. There will be a lot of forests. The Norman nobility will oppress the Saxon peasantry. Other things are optional but frequent. There may be a tournament or a siege. There may be a reference to the Crusades. Robin Hood may turn up. There may be a trial for witchcraft. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe contains all of these things, and since its publication in 1819, this runaway bestseller has helped to shape Anglophone ideas of the Middle Ages. 

Podcaster: Lucy

Further Reading

Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” The American Historical Review 79:4 (1974): 1063-1088.

Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.)

Megan Cook, “Dirtbag Medievalism.” 

Umberto Eco, “Return to the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality (Harcourt, 1986), 59-86.

Andrew B.R. Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World (McFarland & Co., 2011.)

Michael Galchinsky, “Otherness and Identity in the Victorian Novel,” in Victorian Literary Cultures: A Critical Companion, eds. W. Baker and K. Womack (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), 403-420.

Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (Oxford University Press, 2020.)

Larry Scanlon, "Introduction." American Literary History 22:4 (2010): 715-23. 

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe.
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Ivanhoe and the Modern Middle Ages

​Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)