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THE
MONASTERY (1820)
by Sir Walter Scott Reviewed by Patrick Killough I. Review for http://www.barnesandnoble.com REVIEWER: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), studying Scott as history, May 8, 2007 REVIEWER's RATING of THE MONASTERY: 5 stars * * * * * TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Death Throes of the Catholic Church in 16th Century Scotland In THE MONASTERY -- 1820 -- Sir Walter Scott uses a compact number of real and fictitious characters to express some of his beliefs about history and Scotland. As in other novels there are winners and losers and the losers would do well to accept their fate. Most of the action takes place in and within ten miles of Saint Mary's Cistercian Abbey -- in real history Melrose Abbey -- close to Sir Walter Scott's manor of Abbotsford. Dates are rather vague, beginning with the English victory over the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh in 1547 and moving into the early years of the Queenly cousins Elizabeth Tudor of England and Mary Stuart of Scotland. In THE MONASTERY, the issue of religion is not yet decided. "That ancient system ... [lay] floating
like some huge Leviathan, into which ten thousand reforming fishers
were darting their harpoons. The Roman Church of Scotland, in
particular, was at her last gasp, actually blowing blood and water, yet
still with unremitted, though animal exertions, maintaining the
conflict with the assailants, who on every side were plunging their
weapons into her bulky body ..." [Ch. 31]
Ultimate victors will be English imperialists, increasingly intent on liquidating Scotland as a separate kingdom, meanwhile promising much to Scots who copy the English Reformation. Winners in the short term will be Scottish Protestants and their fiery, close-to-the-people religious leaders. Two plebeian teen age brothers are torn between the old and the new. One, the athletic, pugnacious Halbert, wins the noble maiden Mary Avenel whom his younger, scholarly brother Edward also loves. Mary's family is protected by a less than angelic sylvan spirit, the White Lady, whose vitality waxes and wanes with the fortunes of the increasingly marginalized Avenels. The Lady nudges Mary to read the Bible and reject the old religion in order to restore her family's ruined fortunes. But by marrying a man beneath her social status, Mary Avenel ends her family's noble history and causes the protecting White Lady to vanish into air. Religious controversies of the 1550s are also shown in two men of the older generation, the sub-prior (later Abbot) Eustace and his onetime close friend at a foreign university, the reforming preacher Henry Warden [formerly Henry Wellwood]. Walter Scott believes that God intended the Reformation to succeed as a truer, simpler form of Christianity. But, ironically, if the novel has a grown-up hero, it is Catholic Benedictine/Cistercian monk Sub-Prior Eustace (once William Allan) who fights for his lost cause as stubbornly and gallantly as Robert E. Lee in the trenches at Petersburg. Scott shows in THE MONASTERY that even during cataclysmic events like the Reformation in Scotland, life goes on. People are silly and foppish like the English Catholic knight Sir Piersie Shafton. Girls fall in love as the tomboy Mysie, daughter of the Monastery's miller, does with Sir Piersie. Barons raid the borders for cattle as does Julian Avenel. Politicians seek church reform primarily to increase their own power and wealth. And so it may well have been. -OOO-. Also recommended: Sir Walter Scott: REDGAUNTLET, OLD MORTALITY. Sinclair Lewis: ELMER GANTRY, THE GOD-SEEKER. Michael E. Schiefelbein: THE LURE OF BABYLON: SEVEN PROTESTANT NOVELISTS AND BRITAIN'S ROMAN CATHOLIC REVIVAL. ==-=-=-=-=- II. Reviewed for amazon.com Title of this review: "THE DEVIL IS NOT SO BLACK AS HE IS PAINTED." Reviewer's Rating of THE MONASTERY: * * * * * (Outstanding) In two novels of 1820 THE MONASTERY and its sequel, THE ABBOT, Sir Walter Scott sketches the coming of the Reformation to the Scottish borderland near his home of Abbotsford and the Benedictine monastery at nearby Melrose. In THE MONASTERY most action takes place between 1547 and +/- 1562 either at Melrose Abbey or ten miles up a steep canyon at the fortified tower of Glendearg or at points in between. In Chapter 31, the Catholic Church is portrayed as a mighty whale into which thousands of Reformer fishermen are plunging their harpoons. The leviathan is already spewing blood but is fighting gamely and postponing inevitable death. In the small portion of Scotland called the Halidome of St Mary's, and in its remote vale of Glendearg lives are lived without incessant attention to the struggles of Reformation and Catholicism or of John Knox and the Pope in Rome. Yet those lives are also drawn into the great struggle between whale and tormentors. And lives are also drawn into the endless struggle between Scotland and England, now officially Protestant, in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. The champion of dying Catholicism is the ascetic Sub-Prior Eustace of St Mary's Abbey. Suddenly into his hands falls a reformer second only to John Knox as effective among the rude Scots: Henry Warden. Years earlier at a foreign university they were best friends and seekers together of knowledge: William Allan and Henry Wellwood. Now divided, they still love and respect each other and try to ward off evil each from the other. Yet the future Abbot tells his captive, "Wellwood ... we can no longer be friends. Our faith, our hope, our anchor on futurity, is no longer the same" (Ch. 31). -- Central to the Plot:
the Avenels, Human and Non-Human --
The noble but decaying House of Avenel is represented by the evil border Baron Julian and his orphaned niece Mary, whom he has deprived of her right to the castle which he and thieving bully boys occupy on an impregnable island. Baron Julian Avenel is indeed appalling. Yet as a henchman puts it to a potential recruit, "the devil is not so black as he is painted" (Ch. 24). [NOTE: that statement is true of every Walter Scott villain, including the Catholic Church: each has some spark of good.] Associated as protectress for centuries now with the Avenels is a less than human spirit of wind and water, the White Lady. She has a sense of the future and hints to Mary that she would do well to find and read the vernacular Bible her mother had left behind and to join the Reformation. This Mary does. But in marrying Halbert Glendenning, a young Protestant convert and commoner with whom she was raised, Mary lowers the social status of the Avenels and causes the White Lady to fade away forever. Edward Glendenning, younger brother of Halbert, also loves Mary. But, losing her, he becomes a Benedictine novice. Religion is portrayed as a subject of theological debate between the Sub-Prior and his onetime friend, the Reformer. It is also a matter of ritual and superstition among the lower classes. The Catholic Church is also presented as wealth and land built up over centuries by cathedrals and monasteries. That wealth is now being carved away by Protestant nobles, despite the resistance of Catholic Queen Mary Stuart and a Catholic hierarchy still part of the common law of Scotland. The "frame" of THE MONASTERY is a fictitious Benedictine manuscript collated in the 18th and early 19th Century by two Scottish monks in exile in France and delivered to Sir Walter Scott for editing and publication. Scott reserved to himself, he tells us in the novel's INTRODUCTION, the right not to present simply the Benedictine version of the Reformation. For Sir Walter believed that God meant the Reformation to be and to come to purify and improve Scotland. But much of what Reformation brought, including fanaticism and iconoclasm, was deplorable and much of what it replaced should have been preserved. -OOO- Your tags: primate of scotland, melrose abbey, the white lady =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- III. Reviewed for epinions.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "No more prayers or psalms to make men cowards!" May 08 '07 Author AOHCAPABLANCA'S Product Rating * * * * * OUTSTANDING Full Review The Reformation arrived differently in the British Isles -- sooner in England, later and taking a very different shape in Scotland. In England, Wales and Ireland, it began as a top-down imposition by an initially merely lustful and then ultimately cruel, tyrannical and half-mad King Henry VIII. But Scotland was then, as almost always, more closely allied to France and the Lowlands than to England. Two of Henry's heirs, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, did, indeed, put pressure on Scotland to accept English-style Reformation -- or else! But Scotland in the 1550s and early 1560s was still an independent nation and the fact that England was Reformed made no convincing argument that Scotland should also walk down the road of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Yet the Reformation did in fact advance slowly and steadily in Scotland. More notably than in England Reformation meant a bottom-up purification that the commons and many nobles increasingly clamored for in the teeth of a monarchy still Roman Catholic and and a still established hierarchy, including scores of abbeys, monasteries and nunneries. In retrospect, Scott tells us that, like a giant whale being harpooned by pygmies, the Catholic Church in Scotland was spewing its death blood. But it fought on and did not go quietly THE MONASTERY, Chapter 31). At novel's beginning, how the religious strife will end is still unsettled in the minds of all participants. Coats will still be turned, notably those of a sullen, usurping Baron Avenel. In two intertwined novels of 1820, THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT, Sir Walter Scott imagined how that slow but often violent Reform might have affected unsung men and women, both commoners and nobility. There is the noble family Avenel. Its baron fell in battle in 1547. His widow and young daughter, along with two servants, fled the conquering English to nearby Glendearg and the fortified tower of the widow Glendenning and her two sons, Halbert and Edward. Keeping young Mary Avenel and her soon to die mother from their small ancestral castle is the brother of the former Baron, Julian, a border rough rider and bully boy. Hovering over the Avenels, however, as she has for centuries, is The White Lady, a preternatural being of mist and fog, who can be invoked by Avenels and their subordinates at times of need. The White Lady is doomed to disappear if and when the declining Avenels disappear. She is also Protestant! And the Lady encourages Mary to read a vernacular bible, eventually to join the Reformation and to marry a rising Protestant soldier, her childhood friend, Halbert Glendenning. Since Halbert is not noble, this ends the claims of the Avenels to social superiority and the White Lady indeed fades away. The tower at Glendearg is part of the lands (Halidome) owned by Saint Mary's Abbey at Melrose. That Benedictine foundation, like Gethsemane, Thomas Merton's "Seven Story Mountain" in Kentucky, was also Cistercian and should have been devoted to silence in ways Scott's Sacristan, Sub-Prior, Abbot and other Monks, did not exemplify. The Sub-Prior Eustace tried to reinvigorate the ancient discipline of Melrose Abbey, generally resented by the easy-going Abbot Boniface (who, like other major characters, will reappear in the sequel, THE ABBOT). Edward, the younger Glendenning son, joins the monastery as a novice and experiences first hand the rising greed of both Queen Elizabeth's English raiders and Reform nobles among the Scots. This is not an action-packed novel. It is a novel of family, church, monks, romance, politics, superstition and the rending of religious loyalties. Most of the action takes place over the ten miles between Melrose Abbey and Glendearg Tower. A jarring antiquarian note is provided by the arrival at Glendearg Tower of the Englishman, Sir Piercie Shafton, relative of the great Northern English Catholic Percy family. He is sought by Queen Elizabeth for treason. He is a "Euphuist," exemplifying a brief fad of foppish, extravagant courtly behavior associated with Queen Elizabeth's retinue. Sir Piercie quarrels with young Halbert Glendenning and is skewered by Halbert in a duel. But the White Lady revives the knight. He in turn is briefly held a prisoner in the Tower, suspected of having killed Halbert. Rescued by the beautiful daughter of a local miller, Sir Piercie flees toward Edinburgh and the Catholic court of Mary Queen of Scots. In the end he is captured by Queen Mary's Protestant half-brother and sent with the miller's daughter into exile in Flanders. The greatest, albeit mitigated, tragedy of the novel occurs in the encounter of two long-ago friends. They had been students together in a continental university, had gone on holidays to the Alps and were inseparable companions. Then they parted. Time passed. One became a monk. The other became a Reformer, second only to the great John Knox as a religious force among the people. Each is now placed in a position to do harm or good to the other. They debate the merits of Catholicism and Protestantism, as they once disputed good naturedly about literature. For her part the mysterious White Lady sings and sings and sings and we are given many hints what sort of being she is, this shadow and chorus of the Avenels. The last male Avenel will fall in battle defending Melrose Abbey against the English. Yet not many days earlier he had welcomed the Reformation, although not with any great theological insight. He had greeted a Reformed preacher whom he is ordered to protect and then cynically reacts to the latter's fervid description of "The doctrine of the Blessed Scriptures": "Well, thou mayest call it what thou
lists, but to me it is recommended because it flings out all those
sottish dreams about saints and angels and devils, and unhorses monks
that have ridden us so long, and spur-galled us so hard. No more masses
and corpse-gifts -- no more tithes and offerings to make men poor -- no
more prayers or psalms to make men cowards -- no more christenings and
penances, and confessions and marriages" (Chapter 24).
Scotland went firmly Protestant and Calvinist. In 1603 Catholic Queen Mary's son, King James VI of Scotland acceded peacefully to the throne of England as King James I. The impact of Scottish Presbyterianism on North America and the United States can scarcely be overestimated. To understand American politics as well as religion we must understand the Reformation in Scotland. Scott's THE MONASTERY is a good imaginative first step toward understanding ourselves as we are today. -OOO- Pros Shows the sometimes worldly reasons why in Scotland around 1560 people swapped their religions. Cons How deal with broad scots words like spence (pantry), kirn (churn) and yett (gate)? The Bottom Line The Reformation in Scotland is alive and well in Presbyterian churches and colleges of the USA. Its theology also permeates Baptists. How it happened is brilliantly fictionalized by Walter Scott. Recommended: Yes -OOO- http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/sirws_monastery.html |