Rothelan

History mingles with romance in John Galt’s only novel set in the English Middle Ages.

This fine edition proves Galt was not only a wryly observant chronicler of quotidian Scottish life but also a first-rate historical novelist. Rothelan richly earns the comparisons it encourages to Scott’s Ivanhoe, and Galt’s multi-faceted portrayal of Adonijah deserves at least as much scholarly attention as Scott’s Isaac and Rebecca. With their confident presentation of this engrossing novel of plots and counterplots in fourteenth-century England, Kozaczka and Simmons have opened another vista for lovers of Scottish literature in general and admirers of Galt in particular.

Adam Kozaczka is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M International University. He has published numerous articles in the law and literature subfield and especially on Walter Scott, in ELH, Studies in Romanticism, the European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Law & Literature among other venues. He is especially interested in character studies both in literature and in legal history. Clare A. Simmons is Professor of English at The Ohio State University, USA. She is the author of multiple works on nineteenth-century English and Scottish literature and on medievalism, most recently Medievalist Traditions in 19th-Century British Culture (2021). With Mark Schoenfield, she co-edited John Galt’s The Entail for the EUP Galt series.