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In ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ the black book was a volume of spells belonging to magician Michael Scott which caused havoc when taken from his tomb. Walter Scott used another black book, the Bible, which is also presented as a magical object to mediate the Reformation in his 1820 novel, ‘The Monastery’. This paper seeks to argue that the supernatural white lady’s playful use of the Bible as enchanted is in the service of a specifically Anglican mode of the Reformation and a mediated access to the text. Writing in response, the Presbyterian James Hogg parodies this view of the Bible in ‘The Three Perils of Man’, where the Friar’s (anachronistic) opening of the English Bible to a female readership proffers a more earthy and radical interpretation of the text and Reformation project. In both novels the Bible is Gothicised as a dangerous, enchanted object, which speaks to the Reformation as liberation from Catholic superstition (as both writers see it), but involving in that act of separation from the past a sense of loss.
All are warmly invited. Refreshments provided.
