Ivanhoe Themes

Set in medieval England—a time and place where society greatly valued knightly heroism—and borrowing from the conventions of medieval chivalric romance, Ivanhoe spends a great deal of time examining the values of men like Wilfred of Ivanhoe, King Richard (the Black Knight), Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and Maurice De Bracy. At one point or other, each one explains what he believes in and what he fights for. And although there are…

As a book, Ivanhoe invests deeply in appearances. It describes in great detail the clothing and physical characteristics of its most important characters, in many cases representing these as key to understanding the nature of each one—for example, in the way it associates Rebecca’s beauty with her moral rectitude or Cedric’s resolutely old-fashioned clothing with his proudly Saxon identity. Somewhat surprisingly, then, the book also features a long list of masked and disguised…

Near the middle of Ivanhoe, after having kidnapped Rowena with the intent to force her to marry him, Maurice de Bracy makes the surprising claim that he is Rowena’s prisoner, not the other way around. Likewise, after kidnapping Rebecca, Sir Brian repeatedly complains about his inability to resist her charms. Despite these claims of male helplessness, it is Rebecca and Rowena who are locked in tower rooms; they alone are vulnerable to violence…

Ivanhoe begins with a “Dedicatory Epistle,” a letter written by its ostensible writer, Lawrence Templeton, to his friend Dr. Jonas Dryasdust. In it, Templeton suggests an opposition between “romance” or fiction and “history,” hinting that serious readers and thinkers will prefer the latter. Yet, ultimately, Templeton and the book itself argue for an amalgam between the two, claiming that one can—and, indeed, should—look to the past to understand the present. Ivanhoe was composed…