What one reviewer said about The Monastery - Part 1 (The Works of Sir Walter Scott - Volume 18) by Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott:
In the afterward, the author himself calls this book a failure. Is there more to be said?
The timeframe of this book is roughly 1550-1575. The place is a distant catholic monastery at the end of a haunted canyon, all situated far south of the new and fiercely Presbyterian Scots and well north of the English court, somewhat at the middle frontier of the rapidly expanding spread of Protestantism from the court of Queen Elizabeth. The central figure of the book is the fiercely Catholic Sub-Prior Eustace of the monastery, whose old school friend, a devout Reformist minister, later appears in the book to dispute the "false" Catholic faith with the Sub-Prior. While this contention between the two faiths is the reason for the book, it is much overspread with the military factiousness of the times, where powerful men care little for faith but much for power and arms.
In the second half of the book, armies bearing more the names of their lords than the oaths of their religious sentiments encroach upon the monastic demesnes to settle their rights by contests of arms(another motif of the book being just this sort of assumption of church revenues and properties by powerful lords).
An enchanted and supernatural White Lady of Avenel continues to appear throughout the book, frequently invoked by an incantation by a young hothead who strives to win a young lady (supposedly) of the catholic faith, whose mother had read to her since her youth from a copy of the Bible in common English. This was a new innovation at the time, which the Catholic clergy violently opposed. In a duel with an English dandy, the lad runs him through, leaving him for dead (seemingly consistent with the White Lady's foretelling). He later appears miraculously healed and his wound cauterized. These fantastic images are enough to make one sick, but I believe Scott used them to express the fantastic nature of Catholic spirits and miracles and to expose the seemingly idolatry of worship before effigies of saints. The book exposes the Catholic idea that priests were expected to pray for souls, to know the Divine word, not the layman, who was to enrich the church so that the brothers could pray for their souls (this being the Catholic idea of "good works"). The book also ridicules the calling upon and worshipping before saints and using signs rather than the inward prayer directly to one's Savior as the only appropriate manner of practicing religion.
In the end, neither the dispute between the opposing faiths, the arguments between the old school fellows, the warring nature of the barons, nor the inflexible mind of the Sub-Prior maintain a consistent cohesion in the book, which ends in a loose coalescence, whereby Scott might have plenty of room to redeem himself in the book's sequel, The Abbot.
The characters are poor and unexciting, the theme seems too obvious and one can guess every argument, and the inclusion of so many enchanted visions and superfluous motifs to ridicule of the times and the "other" faith are as empty of merit as the book is in general.
The Monastery is not one of Scott's greatest works but it has many virtues. Scott thought it a failure because it failed with the critics and the book-buying public
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