Ivanhoe

Walter Scott's Ivanhoe appeared in December 1819 in three volumes, one of the Waverley novels. It is set in England in 1194, two years after the Third Crusade, and it deals with a surviving Anglo-Saxon noble family in a country whose nobility is overwhelmingly Norman. Wilfred of Ivanhoe has been disinherited by his father, Cedric, for following the Norman king Richard the Lionheart rather than marrying as his father intended, and much of the action turns on disguise, on trial by combat and on the loyalty of men still waiting for Richard's return.

The novel places Ivanhoe in a tournament at Ashby, brings him into the affairs of a Jewish moneylender and his daughter, and carries him among the outlaws and royalists who are working to raise the ransom for a king who is believed to be a captive. It was a departure for Scott, whose earlier Waverley novels were set in Scotland or in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Ivanhoe moved into the high-medieval past of the 1190s instead.

Ivanhoe came out in December 1819, in three volumes, as part of the Waverley novels. The cycle of close to thirty books to which it belongs is generally treated as seminal to the historical novel as a form, and Ivanhoe was the first of them to move into the high-medieval past.