Scott was an almost exclusively historical novelist. Of his 27 novels only one ("Saint Ronan's Well") has an entirely modern setting. The dates of the action in the others range from 1794 in "The Antiquary" back to 1096 or 1097, the time of the First Crusade, in "Count Robert of Paris". Sixteen take place in Scotland. The first nine, from "Waverley" (1814) to "A Legend of Montrose" (1819), all have Scottish locations, and 17th- or 18th-century settings. Scott was better versed in his material than anyone: he was able to draw on oral tradition as well as a wide range of written sources in his ever-expanding library (many of them rare, and some of them unique copies). In general it is these pre-1820 novels that have attracted the attention of modern academic critics—especially: "Waverley" with its presentation of those 1745 Jacobites drawn from the Highland clans as obsolete and fanatical idealists; "Old Mortality" (1816) with its treatment of the 1679 Covenanters as fanatical and in many cases ridiculous (which prompted John Galt to produce a contrasting picture in his novel "Ringan Gilhaize" in 1823); "The Heart of Mid-Lothian" (1818) with its low-born heroine Jeanie Deans who makes a perilous journey to Windsor in 1737 to secure a promise of a royal pardon for her sister, falsely accused of infanticide; and the tragic "The Bride of Lammermoor" (1819), with its stern representative of a declined aristocratic family Edgar Ravenswood and his fiancée as the victims of the wife of an upstart lawyer in a time of political power-struggling preceding the Act of Union in 1707.