SOURCE: "Novels of the Broken Years, 1817-1819," in Scott, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance: A Study in Sir Walter Scott's Indebtedness to the Literature of the Middle Ages, University Press of Kentucky, 1987, pp. 108-37.

In the excerpt that follows, Mitchell discusses such narrative parallels between medieval literature and Ivanhoe as Ivanhoe's palmer disguise, the Jewish quest, and the witchcraft trial, among others.

The background to Ivanhoe, Scott's most famous novel, has already been admirably discussed by Roland Abramczyk in one of the finest German dissertations from its period that I have ever examined.¹⁴ Abramczyk goes into the historical as well as the literary background, and in his hunt for literary sources he casts a wide net; in addition to parallels in Chaucer and medieval romance he is interested in the influence of ballads, especially the Robin Hood ballads, and of later writers such as Goethe, "Monk" Lewis, and Samuel...