Reviews for The May Flower And Miscellaneous Writings

The average rating for The May Flower And Miscellaneous Writings based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-20 00:00:00 Christine Larson The Monastery (1820) is not one of Scott's better known novels, but I found it one of his most engaging to date. (I have read quite a few over the past decade, drawn in by a memorable Lucia di Lammermoor at the ENO in 2010'in order, The Bride of Lammermoor, Waverley, Ivanhoe, Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet.) The Monastery is set in Scott's beloved border country, in around 1550. The monastery of the title is the fictional Benedictine Kennaquhair'based, it seems on the real, Cistercian abbey of Melrose, which survives in ruins. Scott portrays this great monastic house on the brink of its extinction (which we see enacted in the sequel, The Abbot, also 1820). This gives a special poignancy to his representation of its age-old rituals and powers and indulgences (indulgences in every sense). I find the religious history of this period fascinating, and I liked Scott's representation of it here. His characters are pretty much split between Catholics and Reformers, with a majority of the former at the beginning, but a few converting along the way. The narrative voice tends to be fairly decided in its preference for the 'true' and 'rational' faith of Protestantism, but Scott is too empathetic to be fully sectarian, and the Catholics get their fair say. One thing that Scott captures very evocatively is the way in which religious sympathies are bound together with personal and family and historical loyalties. The main characters in the novel are a family who are tenants of the monastery, living in a remote tower on the ancient monastic lands. This serves well as a reminder of how closely meshed the religious and the secular were in this period. One vivid scene shows the bon viveur Abbot Boniface stirring himself to visit his feudatories for lunch (and some light political scheming), bringing with him not only the entire monastic kitchen staff and larder, but also his own armchair, just in case. Some other pleasures of this novel: first, there are some excellent characters here. I liked the subtle, tortured-intellectual sub-prior of the monastery, Father Eustace, a good foil to Abbot Boniface. The two love-hate brothers of the tenant family, impulsive, martial Halbert Glendinning and his studious brother Edward, are both also well drawn. Among the female characters, another nice, contrasting pair were the wispy, abstracted, aristocratic universal-object-of-desire, Mary Avenel, and the foxy, enterprising miller's daughter Mysie, who steals quite a number of scenes. Most effulgently resplendent of all (as he might put it himself) is the effete, Euphuistic Elizabethan-courtier-in-exile, Sir Piercie Shafton, who washes up at the Glendinnings' windswept tower after getting caught up in a Catholic plot. Sir Piercie was not a great hit with Scott's contemporaries, in a way that seems to have sent Scott into a tail-spin of self-justification (he notes defensively in a subsequent edition that satires of social types specific to one period are probably not going to work for readers of another age). I don't know about that. Sir Piercie certainly did it for me, and I laughed when I saw a reader on this site describing him as a "metrosexual knight," confirming my feeling that his type is not 100% dead. One final merit of this novel: it has a very fine satire in its frame-tale of the novelistic device of the "found" manuscript, as exploited from Don Quijote onwards. I was also amused to realize that the fictional name for Scott's monastery, Kennaquhair, means "know-not-where" in Scots'i.e. Utopia, more or less. This confirmed the impression I have always had, reading Scott, that he is a far more sophisticated novelist than the rollicking surface of his fictions suggest. He thinks very subtly about history and romance and the novel, and the ways in the three interact.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-18 00:00:00 Christian Goetz I enjoyed The Monastery and look forward to reading The Abbot. The story is set in the 1550s on the borders of England and Scotland. It is a time of when Elizabeth 1 is on the English throne and her cousin Mary on the Scottish one. The setting is around a monastery based on the Melrose monastery. The battle between the Protestant reformers and the incumbent Catholic clergy is raging. I liked the story of the two sons Edward and Halbert brought up together with Mary a heiress of a castles that was usurped by her uncle Julien Avenel. The character of the knight Piercie Shafton a comical gallant windbag on the run from England after a failed Catholic plot where he was set up as the patsy. The supernatural element is interesting and entertaining as well as the poetry the White Lady of Avenel uses in her prophecies. A duel, escape, broken hearts, villainy, a battle and political intrigue make a wonderful yarn.