ABSTRACT
The ruins of Newstead Abbey provide Byron with crucial subject matter, from early poems through to the last books, the resting place, as it were, of Don Juan. A map of pilgrimage through these definingly Byronic' works takes us back to the beginning, as monks, friars and abbots loom and evanesce and dissolve on their way to a re-imagined Newstead. The ruins of the Abbey, dispossessed in the Reformation, although emptied both of human inhabitants and of inhabiting meaning, are for Byron animated by the monkish a spiritual practice, human way of life, rendered spectral by the shifts of history. This chapter traces the origin of personal myth, or a puzzling at a family myth, though Byron's tracking of the spectres traverses a public vogue for gothic monk-y business, established by Ann Radcliffe and embellished in The Monk Matthew Lewis's intense and virtuosically fictive meditation on the awkward negotiations of the spirit with bodies variously imaginary, nubile and in decay.
