Professor Michael Alexander, former Berry Professor, current Honorary Professor of English Literature, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Walter Scott imagined the past in settings which owe more to history than to fantasy. The word “medieval,” first recorded in 1827, began to replace “Gothic.” Shortly after Scott’s death, Parliament chose to rebuild its Houses in “the national style”: a style which reasserted the medieval origin of the English monarchy, church and government. The lecture will draw its illustrations from the texts of Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Keats, Hardy and Stevenson.