The correct answer is ...
The nineteenth century.
Scott is generally considered the inventor of the historical novel; his first was Waverly, a story set in Scotland during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. The book was enormously popular, and he followed it with several more novels set in the same era. As demand for historical fiction grew, he turned to 12th-century England and produced Ivanhoe in 1819. This romantic tale of chivalry and high adventure is the first medieval historical novel, and it remains Scott's most popular and well-known work.
