Sir Walter Scott

The Monastery Sir Walter Scott

The Monastery a Romance (1820) is a historical novel by Walter Scott, one of the Waverley novels. Set in the Scottish Borders in the 1550s on the eve of the Reformation, it is centered on Melrose Abbey.





Composition and sources

Scott had been contemplating The Monastery before August 1819, and it seems likely that he started writing it in that month while the production of Ivanhoe was at a standstill because of shortage of paper. He had determined on the title by the middle of the month. It also seems likely that he took up composition again shortly after finishing Ivanhoe in early November. He made good progress, and the third and final volume was at the press by the end of February 1820. Originally the story was intended to include Mary Queen of Scots, but a decision to reserve the later material for a second novel (The Abbot) was probably made before composition resumed in November.




Scott was intimately familiar with the history and topography of the Border region, and there is no evidence that he was following any formal written histories in detail. But two publications were useful to him for particular aspects of the novel. For sixteenth-century monastic life he was indebted to British Monachism; or, Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England by Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke, of which he owned an enlarged edition published in 1817. Shafton's euphuistic speech owes something to Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) by John Lyly, though affected speeches in the plays of Jonson and Shakespeare were more consistently mined.