Ivanhoe and the Modern Middle Ages

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How did Ivanhoe become a wildly popular school text? And what happened to the interpretation of the text when it did? Across the Anglophone world, Scott’s medieval England became reified as a time and place of chivalric adventure, despite the novel’s often ironic tone and often pointed social criticisms. This episode examines how Sir Walter Scott’s imagined past became something very different as it was reinterpreted in popular culture, in sometimes sinister ways. 

Podcaster: Lucy

Further Reading

American Literary History 22:4 (2010), special issue on “Medieval America”.  

David Butler, dir. Leave it to Beaver, season 3 episode 36, “Beaver and Ivanhoe”.

Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars, 1900.

Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, eds., Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory.

Scott Horton, “How Walter Scott Started the American Civil War,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2007. 

Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies.

Billie Melman, “Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition,” Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1991): 575-595.

Joanne Parker, “Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel,” in: The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, 632-653.

Anne Helen Peterson, “The Problems Solved By Debutantes”. 

Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe.

Walter Srebnick, “Re-presenting History: Ivanhoe on the Screen,” Film & History 29 (1999): 46-54.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.

Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2018.)

James Watt, “Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, 162-174

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Ivanhoe and ​​the Invention of Merry England

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