Walter Scott, the Stuarts, and Stewardship

Well, we want to welcome everyone. We have

special guests here. We have the Churchill scholars,

one of whom Harvard was just admitted to the Harvard Law School.

And we also have a group of Tower Fellows. I’m not sure that many of you

will actually know who and what the tower fellows are.

There are people who come back to the University of Texas, usually at the close

of their careers, to take a full course load four classes each

semester for the whole academic year. Now, if you can imagine this, this

is quite a quite a challenge for us academics to get back into that.

That would be quite a job. I’d also like to point out that we are

on the verge of publishing a new book in the series.

This is a series that is always based on lectures, Friday afternoon

lectures to the British studies. And it began in nineteen ninety five with adventures

to Britannia. We’re to more adventures with Britannia, still more adventures

with Britannia, yet more adventures with the Ternium penultimate adventures,

Tarnya ultimate adventures. So at that time we had to rejig

the Vinals and it became Resurgent Adventures,

Irrepressible Adventures of Britannia, Lewis Lyndon’s Adventures

or Britannia, effervescent resource-rich Antonia and

the Next, the volume to be published in November. Just to give you something to look forward

to, we’ll be called Serendipitous Adventures Britannia.

Let’s see. Dan, you’re going to introduce the speaker. Yeah. Yeah, for me,

Grace. Thank you, Roger. My name is Dan Burkle’s. I’m from the English Department and it is

my honor and pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague, Sam Baker. For

you today, Roger, when he asked me to say a few words, stressed the few words part

so I won’t talk about Sam’s background at Chicago and Columbia, where he got his degrees or

at Cornell where he was a fellow won’t talk about his monograph written on the Water, British Romanticism

and the Maritime Empire of Culture from Virginia or his publications in

really great journals like E.L. H. English Literary History and MLK. Q. Modern

Language Quarterly won’t get into any of that. The few words that I’m going to stress with Sam

have to do with other kinds of things. I’ve known Sam since

before I started here at U.T. and Sam was recruiting me to come to British studies before

I was here at u._t. And he’s remained in that role for me and

I think countless others around the department and the university. Sam Baker, when I think

of him and what he brings, it is unquestionably

a really rich sense of intellectual collaboration. Sam is the most

vital mind that I that I know. He he he walks around with it with a buzz

of vitality and intellectual ism, and he produces that quality in the people around

him. And so he’s he is an inveterate deliverer of conference

talks. And even more strangely, he goes to talks on campus all the time. You will

see him at whatever symposium is going forward because he’s there and he’s he’s he’s

intellectually a fire. And he brings that quality. He brings those qualities of,

I guess, big ideas and collectivism into a field. The humanities,

which we hear a lot about these days as being something that’s in retreat, that is shrinking, in which we’re all a little

bit shorter, smaller and more timid than we used to be. And what we might want to be in

when we’re around, Sam, we forget about that because he inspires us to talk to one another and to remember why

we got into this again. So whenever I see Sam in the hallway, I come away thinking new thoughts and having

new books to read. And I don’t say it very often to him. He’s probably blushing right now.

And so will I. So will I be soon. But really, it is this old style

intellectual fire that he brings. And so I’m really honored to be able to be the one who brings

him to share that with you today. He takes those qualities to his university as well.

He’s been a part of a lot of groups like the Public Feelings Working Group here. Initiatives like this, Good Systems

Grand Challenge Initiative that’s just recently been ratified by the Howard leadership

going forward. He’s moved into new media studies and digital humanities from his traditional fields of

strengthen British romanticism and Scottish literature. Scott and.

Cliff and folks like that. So he takes the stuff that he’s interested

in and he makes it a group project. And he makes it an intellectual renewal project. And so that’s why I’m so excited

to to see what he has to say. One important, if smaller

group and collaboration that he was a part of many years ago. Now, he and myself and Jerry Woods

are our companion and colleague in in U.T. English. We had the most

rewarding writing group that I’ve ever had. I’ve never had a writing group. Since then, I’ve never had one before

then. But for a period of about five or so years, we met regularly and

and saw that night. And I think that he naturally produces that stuff. So thank

you, Sam. I will be quiet now and see what it is that you have to say. But

please give him your warmest. Welcome, Sam Baker.

Just a moment, we’ll get to Jack Farell podium.

Oh, that’s an allegory of all media. New here.

Thank you so much, Diane. I hope I can live up to that wonderful introduction.

It’s such an honor to share my research with you today, and I’m really looking forward to the opportunity

to converse with you all after my talk. So for some time now, I’ve been nursing a

general interest in the Gothic. Some of you will remember a paper I gave here

almost exactly 10 years ago on the theme of Wedgwood Gothic. Back then, I was imagining

I’d undertake a whole panorama of investigations into the Gothic. These studies would span

the period from the 1756 to 1859. What some of us call the romantic

century moving from Erasmus, Darwin and other contemporaries of Wedgwood

forward through romantic period. Writers like Anne Radcliffe, William WORDSWORTH and Walter Scott to arrive

at Victorian practitioners of Gothic was different from each other as Edgar Allan Poe and

I’d like to argue. Charles Darwin. I saw this landscape in view

as I develop across various set projects and I count over them coming to call spectral

care. My focus now, however, is not so much on this grand but project.

The working title of which is Spectral Care Gothic Stewardship in the Landscape of British

Romantic Media. Increasingly, I find them thinking in portrait mode rather than in landscape

mode and focusing on the somewhat smaller but perhaps even more significant problem

of what to make of the working life of Sir Walter Scott.

For practical and professional reasons. But I think also for proper procedural reasons,

I’m not planning to sit down and write the single author study of Scott. In fact, I’ve begun this monograph

and I’m sharing the first draft of the first chapter with you all starting now.

Who was who is Walter Scott and what makes him so important to me anyhow?

The short answer is that Scott is a once famous Scottish author whose rarely read any more, but who

exerted a decisive influence on Western letters when he popularized the historical novel

as a national art form. Without Scott, there’d be no war and peace,

no gone with the Wind. No Lord of the Rings. Because remember, it’s a book written by

scali Hobbit’s right after the fact. Right. And no, a long time ago

in a galaxy far, far away. So that’s the initial argument for Scott significance that I make

to students when I’m inviting them to read Scott and I stand behind it.

Still, this argument about Scott’s significance for cultural history invites the further question of what

ongoing life, if any. Scott’s works have. So who among you’s right? Has Scott? No.

Who among you has read of Scott novel and you’re under 30.

George. George, you’re here. But where are your students, George?

I barely. I only I barely made it to the river under 30. And it’s like it’s lost

in the over 30 crowd, I think. So it was it Ivanhoe? Did you read some people, people who

raised your hand? Ivanhoe, one of the novels. Yeah, that’s the main of I’ll be talking about. That’s good.

The heart of Midlothian. Yes. Excellent. That’s right. See, that’s the greatest

novel written in English. So you you just. Yeah, that’s that’s brilliant. But there’s still time

for the rest of you.

There are other arguments for Scotsmen off against, and I’ve heard many of them voiced in this room, often phrases

rhetorical questions. Did Scott help inspire the arts and crafts movement?

Yes, he did. Would Scott Scotsmen, who is also self-consciously a patriot of Britain,

support Brexit or Scottish independence or both? Whatever the answer

is, Scott’s thinking about nations and states. The British Isles is a live topic in Scotland now,

where the culture ministry is avidly funding investigations into what Scottish literature tells

us about Scottish and British identity. But did the Brontes make of Scott’s

novels? A great deal and setting Scott can teach us much about literary craft,

but by how he was imitated and about how later writers chose to abjure his example.

When he enforced her for, for instance, wrote his how to manual for fiction writers aspects

of the novel, he made Scott his case study and authorial foolishness.

So for better or for worse, Scott’s deeply woven into the aesthetic and political fabric of British

studies, which is why. I keep bringing him up in Q&A sessions here.

It’s really my habit of doing that. Me feel like I owed you all talk on Scott. So, yes,

the forms of Scott’s historical fiction, subtrend costume dramas, sci fi epics

and works and myriad other narrative genres we enjoy. And if we study how Scott formed his

fiction, we’ll better appreciate how work since has been crafted. But Scott’s importance

is more than a matter of craft. I want to argue that Scott’s achievement marks an event in the history

of thought, especially we take his accomplishments in fiction and connect them with the emergence

of the cultural, political and social institutions that Scott did so much to build.

As an artist and public figure. This event in the history of thought can well

be described, in my view, as the promulgation of a cultural ethos of stewardship, and that

is why stewardship is my theme. You’ll notice that I’ve been at Walter Scott’s stewardship

in the stewards and sort of the other way around because I want to dwell a little bit on stewardship and let’s

pause for a minute to define the term per the OED. The word means

the Office of Steward and the conduct of the Office of Steward Administration Management

Control. The idea that stewardship is an office is, I think, crucial. Stewart

is a social role to which one is appointed. We’re familiar as well with a further

sense of stewardship as the responsible use of resources. This is a sense, interestingly, which I think the

OED fails to do justice. Now, the OED does note this normative sense

of steward and stewardship in plain ecclesiastical contexts, but

only starting in the twentieth century. Regardless of how one date the origins of such

a normative sense of stewardship has resonated. I think some time now in the use of stewardship

for conservation discourse, whether cultural or environmental. And I

do think, as will become clear, there’s already a normative dimension to Scott’s use of the term.

Still, fundamentally for Scott, stewardship quite specifically and materially denotes

the business of a steward in the first place, an official who controls the domestic affairs of a household,

especially supervising his master’s table. The sense, of course, continues the use of steward,

do you know, servants of this kind, but concerned as Scott was with affairs of state.

It matters greatly to him that per the OED after the Norman conquest,

the title had come to designate an office in a royal household held only by a great noble of

the realm. The administrator off with merely nominal duties of certain estates

of the crown. Scotland, particularly a steward, would be a magistrate

originally appointed by the king to administer the crown lands, but moreover, the term named the magistrate

to rule them all. Originally, this was the first officer of the Scottish king and early times

who had control of the royal household, great administrative powers and the privilege of leading the Army into battle.

This office, the OED goes on to explain, fell into the crown upon the accession of Robert Steward

as Robert the second whence the name of the heir apparent. So once the name of the Royal

House of Stuart. All right. So the office fell into the crown upon the accession of Robert

Stewart as Robert the second whence the name of the Royal House of Stewart, but the title

was given to the heir apparent until the union Great Steward of Scotland is

now a title of the Prince of Wales. Now, on the one hand, this idea that the stewards,

we managers for the realm, not its monarchs, seems to contradict the ethos of absolutism

which the family would become known centuries later when James Stewart, King James the 6th

of Scotland became an 2:44 James, the first of England to be succeeded by

Charles, the first with his personal rule. And after the restoration by Charles,

the second, who continue to believe he ruled by divine right. On

the other hand, the idea of the Stewarts as stewards accords with the figurative sense noted by the OED

of the steward as an administrator and dispenser of wealth favors, etc., especially

when regarded as a servant of God or the people. Stewart is

a high office then, but an office redolent of low things. Perhaps this explains why the OED

suffered the feature, what it also dismisses as a serious Atama allergy. Quote,

The assumption that Stigwood originally meant Keeper of the pigs dies.

Just to say, they say, look, here is that apology, which is wrong, but we wanted to print it anyway.

Go figure. So the story then is an officer of the state who oversees its household resources.

If not in the broadest sense, managing its economy still at least sustaining its elite.

Ultimately, for better or worse, Scott, as an author styled himself such as Steward Superintending

a virtual realm of national culture. Now, I hasten to add, I’m ambivalent about

the social forum and habit of mind I call stewardship and about the emphasis that Scott places

on it. Such ambivalence helps explain my interest, and moreover, I would argue

Scott’s own interest in considering stewardship in relation to the Stewarts family known

for its absolutist if an absolute miserable failures. Was

stewardship self-evidently the one job that the stewards had to do? You had one job

stewards and the job which they failed or is the task of

stewardship assessed a fee and task at which no one can ever succeed completely?

Perhaps the role of a steward is ultimately a Gothic curse that inevitably ends in a haunting.

Maybe every steward is at least to some small extent caretaker of their own personal

overlook hotel. I thought of a slide for that spirit you slide.

Maybe stewards are always in danger of killing with their kindnesses. The periphery is Walter

Sobchak, however. Say what you want about the tenants of stewardship, dude. Least it’s an ethos.

And personally, well, I try to be humble and self-critical about it. The ethos of stewardship is one that I’m proud to transmit.

Appointed as I am to work for the state as an educator, minding how my students care for their culture.

Turning to Scott, what is it about Scott’s life and art beyond his art itself that makes

him such a significant figure for the history of culture? Understood, as I’m starting to suggest,

as an ethos of stewardship. Supportand understand, I think the synthetic

work that Scott did in his life and art to knit together so many strands of contemporary experience.

He was, as mentioned to Scott and a Briton married to a French woman with a brother,

emigrated to Canada and children who worked abroad. The Empire. He was a poet, as

well as a novelist and as a man of letters and man of his times, he had many other roles

besides. Let’s enumerate some of them, placing them in relation to our theme.

Well into his thirties. Scott supported himself and his family practicing law, and he

continued to work as a lawyer long after he’d achieved literary fame. Practicing law

in early modern Edinboro entailed detailed historical knowledge of Scottish English and British

legal history and procedure, which helps explain why matters of government at every scale

figure so significantly in Scots literary works. Scott also hold

government office as a sheriff, depute for Selkirk Shire from 1799 until his

death. In Scotland, by that time, a sheriff was not an officer of the

law in our sense, but a local judge does care for a specific community formed part

of Scott’s broad range of responsibilities. Concept of an office was central

to another aspect of Scott’s persona. His little publicized but constant devotion to Episcopalian

ism. In Scotland, this denotes the minority practice there of adhering

to the Church of England’s form of ecclesiastical organization with its hierarchy of bishops

in a land where Presbyterianism worship governed from the pews had long since been settled

on as a national denomination. Hi, Anglicanism, often to a beyond

the point of crypto Catholicism was long a faith championed by the Stuarts and

in politics, Scott said it definitively with the church and state wing of the Whig Party that coalesced

around William Pitt, the younger. The facts that come to be known first, derisively and then definitively

in Scott’s time as the Tories. Of the original trees,

Scott knew much, not just as a legal historian, but as first an amateur and then a professional

antiquarian and folklorist. This work informed his fiction in ways that I’ll explore.

First time up, perhaps more spectacularly, it informed his poetry.

After publishing miscellaneous translations, mostly from the German and ballads, German and Scottish.

In the 1790s, Scott’s initial major literary success was an extraordinarily

ambitious undertaking, a two volume compendium of the minstrelsy of the Scottish border.

You followed up this collection of actual ballads with a supercharged, imaginative pastiche,

a hybrid ballad romance called. The late last minstrel,

which created a sensation in Scotland, England and America, making Scott a literary superstar.

That’s why I appreciate the feedback from the microphones. The talk started would’ve been good if I’d

been reading the live less minstrel, which I will do a little bit of right now. This poem contains Scott’s most

famous lines, which are worth glancing at for an idea of his strong commitment to a poetry that would

sustain national culture in the ACT romantic mode of blood and soil.

You know it’s coming right? Breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself have said,

This is my own, my native land. Scott. Scott.

Meanwhile, wherever the nation is, the state is never far behind is equally

popular. Follow a poem. 6:42 Marmion opens with twin eulogies for two

recently deceased former prime ministers, Pitt. And although we did not employ his

office quite as Scott had wished he would. Also the wig. Charles James Fox.

A couple of quick asides about this. Fox’s father was an old Tory, something of a Jacobite,

hence Fox’s Stewart names Charles James Fox, which would become

a kind of historical irony, like a conservative talk show host named Kennedy. Also,

speaking of Marmion, it is this poem that features Scott’s other most famous lines, often attributed

to Shakespeare. Scott,

even while he was achieving fame as a poet, Scott saw his true calling as a man of letters to be the antiquarian

preservation of literature of the past. In that vein, he added crucial

editions of the works of Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, Dan Riffaut and the C-word,

and our friend and colleague Lisa Moore, as recently published edition of C-word is the first in Scott’s edition of I think

penned by Scott. And Scott was no less attentive to documents of politics and statecraft.

And Scott fell behind a competitor in the race to edit the Harley manuscripts, an important cache of literary

other documents in which Dan buchholtz is a resident expert. He abandoned an effort to focus his attention

on bringing out a new edition with updated head notes of the papers and state of affairs known as the summer’s

tracts. I had a for a

kind librarian Scotland bring me out the full set of the Summers tracts and Scott really did,

you know, work through all these volumes of material and write new head notes for all these pieces. It’s

extraordinary, the productivity of writers and the age before television and

smartphones. All told, Scott did more than perhaps even Samuel Johnson to

invent the modern role of the editor as curator. Learning as he did so much about both the old

Government Office of Stewardship and its modern cultural practice.

Scott was an innovator in business as well, vertically integrating his activities by investing in this publisher,

an initiative that would eventually bring about his financial ruin. Not adverse to conflicts

of interest, Scott published frequently as a critic and helped found one of the main critical organs of the day,

the quarterly review. 1814 Scott published his debut novel,

Waverly Anonymously, and many of its reviews surmised that he was the author, but he used

his presence in the critical arena to disavow his responsibility for a work in a genre

considered somewhat beneath a gentleman. At the same time, as a novelist, Scott

surpassed himself, intensifying at once as he did so fiction’s quotient of

realism and romance. It was his fiction that would secure his reputation as

a romantic genius, especially as other authors primarily Lord Byron eclipsed him

as Britain’s leading poet and SC. fiction and consideration of stewardship in the Stuarts

that I want to consider today in relation to Scott’s antiquarian editorial work in the time

that remains to be.

So. Here’s a picture of the twenty six novels, more or less that because

they’re for the most part published anonymously attributed to the author of really became known

as the Waverley Novels. I like to take this opportunity to thank Roger Lewis in British studies

for the grant that enabled me a while ago now to purchase the superb Edinburgh edition

of Scots Fiction. At a time when, having written an essay for Edinburgh University Press Vol.,

I had a window on which I could get these at a 40 percent discount, said Roger. I need help. I need to

make this happen. Actually, only the novels really made a huge difference to me personally and professionally. I’d

always be grateful for this resource. The novels first appeared in waves

made 14 until Scott’s death in early 1832. There are, of course,

all works of historical fiction, although a few of them are set during Scott’s lifetime and a few

of them, especially the medieval novels Scott wrote. Layton’s life strayed so far

from history as the verge on romance fantasy. More than half

of Scott’s novels are set in Stuart realms or involves Stewart’s or their political enthusiasts

known as Jacobites as characters. Those are the

novels highlighted in right here. These are the good you call the Stewart novels, although

perhaps because of Ivanhoe, we think of Scott as a chronicler

of the Middle Ages. Only four of his novels are set in medieval Britain is other medieval novels are

set in the continent, and only Ivanhoe in the same mistaken depicts England in

medieval times. So before I began trying to substantiate my argument,

I mean, we said it once more and it’s strong for him in his novels, Walter Scott Droz and his antiquarian

studies propose an ethos of stewardship for artists and statesmen. Thus, Justice

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was urging in his late sermons that literary authors constitute a classy

that’s kolaches term. A body of traditional spiritual leaders. But working late feels

like literature. Scott, writing his novels, was assuming the mantle of a purveyor

of what I call spectral care. Scott ruud’s culture in the state

narrating the history of Scotland, England. Britain has a series of lessons in political theology

at the center of which lie the ultimately tragic, if entertainingly gothic failures of the Stewart

monarchs. The Stuart the Nation. Now,

the very best evidence I have this argument comes from two quite obscure Scott novels, The Fair Made of Perth,

set in medieval Stuart Scotland and Woodstock, a tale that represents the Stuarts in hiding

during the Commonwealth. Talk briefly about Woodstock and the fair fermata of Perth and talk

for longer. But Ivano novel that more of you will know why. I also think we can see

stewardship and even the Stuarts Pines on Scott’s mind.

Woodstock, which appeared in 1826, is named after the Royal Hunting Lodge outside

Oxford, where Scott sets his narrative, a sprawling Norman Castle, well known

as the site of Henry the second’s intrigue with his mistress, Rosemonde. Woodstock

lodge was ruined in the civil war and torn down in the 18th century. In the course of the landscaping of Blanton

Palace, I don’t know if we’ve ever tried to do this, but I wandered around the grounds of Blenheim

looking for traces. Woodstock Lodge. So 200-year tradition.

Now Scott frames his novel with a preface, claiming it’s been redacted from the papers of a high

church minister, royalist agent and antiquity named Rowcliffe. Supposed

to have had the living in Woodstock of the Charles the first and again after the restoration, to have witnessed

a celebrated series of incidents of ghostly haunting that occurred at Woodstock Lodge in the Commonwealth

interregnum and actually were documented. There are articles about the ghosts of Woodstock

in the popular press. The ghost, it turns out, was Prescott,

actually Charles, the second in hiding. The novel NEARY told her Charles the second escapes

the clutches of Oliver Cornwell, affording both historical figures, sympathetic portraits, while

showing the both learning lessons in there is back due to ancient properties like Woodstock Lodge.

Once Craughwell is appointed stewards of the Woodstock estate or chased off Charles, the second

in hiding, there becomes after a fashion the estate steward. This finding,

if only ever innocently the mode of kingship, stewardship over sacred antiquity

property him has a steward. Meanwhile, the steward

off their antiquity within Scott’s novel, Rowcliffe, the Royalist Divine, is literally at the center

of Woodstock. A secret agent spinning his webs of intrigue from a hideout accessible

through a trap door, hidden in a portrait that lies secreted deep within the lodge’s labyrinth. Its awesome

novel, The Portrait that Hides, which depicts or Henry’s ancestor Vernon Lee, notable

as a D spoiler of monastery’s, a legacy that various characters Riley ionize

upon. Now that Woodstock is threatened in its turn with the solution. Remembering that Sir

Vernon was said to have brought a malediction on his house through his pension for sacrilege.

But the cleric hidden behind subversions portrait works busily to counteract this legacy. If he

can hope to rescue the building itself, at least he may prove able to translate its legacy into a new

era. Roach clips, medium as they’re written messages he sends

and receives more study that being described as both an army and a library has to be imagined as the

emblem of Scott’s own state of Abbotsford at the time, undergoing a siege of a different kind.

So much golf is kind of a virus figure if you know a Game of Thrones. Also,

this figure of him is a web weaver is Scott’s fear, not mine. He’s repeatedly described

a spider like until I read Woodstock. I had long wondered why George Eliot and the chapters

of Middlemarch concerned with Fred Vinci is somewhat unfortunate. Infatuation with the Waverley novels. No, he spends

all his time reading Scots part of his problem.

In those chapters, Elliot likens Scott to a spider. It’s a beautiful epigraph, but Scott

Webb, as he weaves right, which I think is an allusion to the web as we we first

we practice to deceive, but also to this idea, this character Rowcliffe,

especially since Rowcliffe is not only modeled on antiquity agents such as Scott studied, but

it’s clearly meant as an avatar of the novelist himself. Just finally on Woodstock.

This is actually a portrait of Walter Scott’s dog, but he writes his dog and the Woodstock’s, if you like, dogs

and literature. Woodstock’s Anello for you. And if you win, we go back to the slide

of Scott with his dog, right. Is this her famous pose of Scott and his dog?

Which individual illustrations of Woodstock? Right. They would have trolls the second

sitting there with his dog in the same pose. It’s kind of a kind of a rhyme between the two of them.

All right. So in the fermata of Perth, which I’m just going to touch on quickly,

we find what we might call Scottish Gothic hair articulated through a patient exploration

of the difficulties of Stuart stewardship in medieval court in a Catholic epoch

facing the difficulties of managing the clans of Scotland. The Stuarts frame the dilemmas

as problems and stewardship. Are we both not sons of the same Stuart

of Scotland? Says one of the store, a princess to the other as they

think about their. The problems that

beset them. In 14th century Scotland, unmanageable

profits or close to it. I could go on expounding on this little red medieval

novel, but for the rest of my time today, I want to focus on a more familiar text

legend. On then to Ivanhoe, a romance by the author

of Waverley, etc., published by Scott in 1820 at the height of his popularity and powers.

Ivanhoe is set in the East Midlands, somewhat north of the environs of Nottingham. We’ve come to look

at our idea of Sherwood Forest. Novel is set

in 11 94 after the third crusade in England, where Normans and Saxons

are still not quite reconciled. And I’ve got a little handout here, just a bit

of a bit about Ivanhoe. So I don’t have to.

I’ll have to. You’d have to get out your phones and look up the plots of reviving home while

you listen to me. Whenever I take out my phone in British studies, by the way, I’m always looking up pertinent information. Now as

background the talk. But I wanted to keep you from having to do that.

So novels set in 11:34 after the third crusade in England were Normans and Saxons are still not quite

reconciled. The cast of characters includes the Saxon thayne Cedrik, his Ward Rowena,

his son Wilfred of Ivanhoe Strange from him because he followed Engrish the Lionheart to the Crusade,

King Richard Prince, John Fryer Talk and Robin of Locksley, the whole Robin Hood crew and the Robin

Hood movies. Pecoraro FLine movie, you know, fairly close to Ivanhoe in plot almost

no maid. Marian and Ivanhoe is abrasive, evil churchmen, various Knights

Templar and otherwise Isaac, the Jew of York, and his daughter Rebecca, and from Cedric’s

household girth, the swineherd Wamba, the Gesture and Oz while the cupper

and to save time. I’ve put the whirlwind plot summary on my next few slides on that handout that I’ve given

you, and join you all to burn the hand out after reading it so as not

to spoil one of history’s great plots for any student, you might find it discarded and accidentally proves its

contents. I’m an obvious problem for us today as you look to Ivanhoe

is the question of. Where are the stewards and for that matter, where in 11 ninety

four in England are the stewards? So let’s start our search. The novels

are very beginning. What do we find?

We just that the very first chapter commences with an epigraph in which pigs

are compelled, reluctant to the several STI’s. Here and Alexander

Pope’s translations of Homer literature’s greatest skyward Ulysses faithful

servant UMass proves himself able also to be the only if account worthy of the office

of Steward. Upon the return of the disguised Ulysses, you may as unknowingly buy perspicacious

Lee sets a table for the king whose cleansing of the realm he will soon help to effect.

The immediate reference is to the first chapter set piece with Gerth, Cedrik swineherd

and the Fool Wamba. More broadly, however, Scott is indicating a theme of the proper stewardship

of a singlets realm. Each their own way, characters from Fire talk to Robin Hood

to Cedric Rebekka and Ivanhoe will prove their worth by carrying out offices of care

without knowing that in so doing, they’re restoring the state to its proper balance.

So I think the OED have put the etymology in there. I need to do my research into this, but I think that

there may have been the traditional MLG of Stewards stye ward

that is playing with with the, you know, the pig imagery in Ivanhoe.

Think for a moment. Who is the king’s attorneys long for in modern British consciousness? After

Ivanhoe that iconic can be on the water becomes Richard the Lionheart. But before Ivanhoe,

it had been King James, the old steward pretender whose own return in 1715

failed spectacularly, and whose son Bonnie Prince. Charlie’s tragic 1745 adventure in British

soil furnish the topic that, as the subject of his first novel, made the very name

of the author of Waverley, which appears and knows title page.

Where is restoration in this novel in Ivanhoe taking place?

In that pleasant district of Mary England, which is water by the river, Don. All right.

Right about here. And more particularly in extensive would.

Scott tells us the remains of which are still to be seen. The noble seats of Wentworth

of One Cliffe Park and around Rotherham. So where are we?

Looking back at the text, one top in which is also a family name, should jump out

to scholars and friends of British studies. Anybody see it? This name,

the subject of lectures in this very room by Michael Charlesworth and Janine Barcus is Wentworth.

And note that Scott quite deliberately makes reference not just to work with Woodhouse

or to the work with families, one corporate body, but quite particularly to the noble seats of Wentworth.

This is because, as those who have heard or read, Michael or geneen and the Wentworth’s know,

the family underwent a spectacular Scism act. The Glorious Revolution, which saw one of its palaces

with Woodhouse become a center of Whig power, the base of the Rockingham WIG’s,

while another newly styled Wentworth Castle would be the site for a pseudo sex and follies

that Michael has convincingly argued were formative experiences for Horace Walpole, helping catalyze

the emergence of a Gothic aesthetic in 18th century brick.

Here’s a map that shows the propinquity of rent with Woodhouse, with Kassell

to each other and the kind Weisburd Castle on which Torkel Stone and Ivanhoe is modeled.

All three lying at some distance from Ashby Diller’s hootch, which is where Scott sets the novel’s

famous tournament sequence. So there was Ashby down there. Sure. Forest

is right here. Of course, you’re on Nottingham, right? Plus, the action. The novel is up here

in this zone where you went with Castle with House, kind of Sobero Castle in Doncaster.

So with a subtle twist of syntax, Scott sets Ivanhoe across the contested historical political terrain

in which the fate of the Stuarts would be settled. A reference to the seat of Wentworth

or to the noble seats of Wentworth one Clift Park, and rather him would simply have ambiguous

reference. Pluralized concedes that adding additional prepositions, however,

Scott makes it clear these invoking both went with Holmes. And note that long

before Scott wrote Ivanhoe, the Jacobite Tory branch of the Strafford family, Ensconce,

worked with Castle, had chosen Densify Saxon England in particular with legitimacy,

it invested in the Stewart cause. And this to illustrate this from

Go and beautifully published article

of Michael’s. Here’s a photograph from what we counsel with the moon, the moon,

the daylight. Right. The kind of particular Saxon architecture that

went with Family Prize, their adult, Moora, the Tory family, that is.

Despite my slide show, I have a number of slides that explain how Scott uses the contents of Saxon’s and Norman’s

as it plays out imaginatively in Ivanhoe to work through problems of legitimacy,

spiritual practice and romance. I’m not going to go through

all of this. I received wisdom about Ivanhoe for you. Let’s

just say that, Scott. Has long been said to raise

these problems intentionally with solutions and view what solutions he

advances, however, remains in dispute. What we might call rival Weygand

Tory theories being advanced of Scott’s intentions.

Some say Scott Nereus emergence of liberal McGarrity. Others say he glorifies a cruel, reactionary

nationalism. Some say that Scott Champion’s tolerance has with

what’s seem like a sensitive treatment of Rebecca. Others say he’s secular as his religion only a

sublimated into an evangelical imperialism to which Rebecca consigned

to pre inquisition. Spain may be thought of sacrifice. And, you know, you can also think of Rebecca’s

all the attempted rape scenes ever back in the novel as being a creepy, spectacular ization

of of otherness in Scott’s time.

Some experienced Scott as a psychological realist and, you know, actually, I’ll say that I do.

Others, notably Mark Twain, have charged him with the looting whole populations into patriarchal war.

This is the famous argument that Twain makes in life in Mississippi, that it was reading Scott and reading Ivano

in particular that gave rise to the ethos of chivalry and the old self

that brought on the civil war. I rushed to these debates because

while they’re fascinating, my aim is to move beyond them by discerning a different principle at work

in Scots art. Arguments in Scott run athwart these old lines of battle.

Scott may inherit both Scottish Labor ministerial theory and Burkey and skepticism about

the human capacity to manage change, but does he transmit to us something besides conservatism

and progressivism? I’ve been suggesting that for Scott, the idea of

culture furnishing a vehicle for conceptualizing self-organizing change at multiple scales of government.

The idea that we might think of as homologous with the theory of evolution developed by Charles Darwin, who

as a student of Edinburgh University likewise inheritable SCADDEN Enlightenment said your theory and

burkey and skepticism, but even capacity to manage change. For

once, however, did Scott develop his idea of culture? What stakes the

interest did he understand the story? The story of prophy of the Saxon’s and the Norman Yok

to have had the fortunes of those later dynasties. The Stuarts and the head of Variance.

To what extent was his interest in historiography essentially political? To what extent

was that driven by cultural or even theological motives, which, while they may have had political ramifications,

were understood by Scott to be more elemental? So my last couple paragraphs

here, I want to give my tentative answers to these questions, which involve research I’m conducting

into Scott’s affinity for the 17th century antiquity. Henry Stollman.

This edition of The Soldiers Tracked Scott reprinted an essay attributed to Henry Spellman, whom he tells is

famous for his learned researches. Spellman’s, Scott writes, was well known by

his works upon the antics. Sorry. Spellman’s, Scott writes, was well known by his works

upon the antiquities of the English law. His history of English councils. And

very significantly, I think his Saxon glossary Spellman’s and the great saxophonists

of the 17th century. So it was a man of high church principles,

most notoriously on display in his the history and fate of sacrilege. The beginning of

the world continually to this day written into Charles the first.

This track was not published till the end of the 17th century, and then only quietly,

notably in eighty nine. Scott would write to his publisher. He was contemplating an addition of spelman’s the

history and fate of sacrilege in its own right. This book was Spellman’s is well known to a

certain stripe of scholars of the Gothic. In it, Spellman catalogs all of the major instances

in English history of the despoil ization of churches of any church, Catholic

or Protestant. Although he writes as an Anglican and the putative unfortunate

consequences of the sacrilege for its perpetrators. Spellman lingers

first and William the Conqueror is desecration of Saxon churches and the disaster that that brought

on Williams family. And then, of course, moves to the depredations of Henry

the eighth before some gleefully cataloging the evils that befall the families involved in such

desperation under a harbor many generations at least until those families repent of this act

religious activities and take up the mantle of the pastoral care of the

people that once had been the office of the churchmen and the displaced.

Now, Ivanhoe has a project in and about the conservation of sinks and linguistic and cultural heritage

not only aligns itself with Spellman’s recuperative project. It also dramatizes it

with its plot full of exactly corrupt churchmen being displaced by political leaders and common

people allying as stewards for the people here. Right. The

scene of hospitality where the Lionheart and fire truck fire, fire

truck drink together. Right. Could be seen as emblematic of this alliance of common

outlaws, renegade churchmen and political leaders against.

Both the old corrupt church and the corrupt leaders who would despoil it and neglect

the people. Rowcliffe, the antiquarian author Stuart Figure

at the heart of Woodstock. Also, I think seems model on Spillman antiquities of his stripe.

To this day, Spelman remains an important figure for intellectual historians, less because of his obviously

eccentric views. The culpability of sacked religious aristocracy then because of his central role

in the formulation of the idea of feudalism as a distinct historical epoch.

JJ Praecox first book, An Investigation of Ideas of England’s Ancient Constitution, published

in some eight in 1957, features extensive discussions of Spelman is a legal theorist

champion feudal relations as an alternative to the common law theory of ancient

rites that would have to Coke and others achieve Germany

with the Whigs. Real interests of civilians work for Scott Scholars.

Perhaps lies in the way that’s antiquarian form suggests the afterlife for that third lost strand

of English jurisprudence canon law. Sullivan’s whole antiquity enterprise is devoted,

after all, to charging property persons. However, Martin the data their possessions

with ancient spiritual responsibilities. Last paragraph,

let me say one thing more to the appropriate areas of churches that happily they hitherto have not dreamed of.

Right. SPELLMAN And one of his tracts. And that is that by having these procedures,

they are charged with the cure of souls and make themselves subject

to the burden that lies so heavily upon the head of every minister to see the service of God performed,

the people instructed and the poor believed. It is this

charge of spectral care, this idea of Gothic stewardship, as I believe that Scots are bound up

with the fate of the stewards of his own role as a steward of national culture for the 19th century

and beyond. Perhaps even to Britain today, where just yesterday,

The Guardian quoted the former head of the civil service as saying that

we are reaching the point where the civil service must consider putting

its stewardship of the country ahead of service to the government of the day.

Could this be the true revolution in which Scott, my dream. Thank you.