Although largely forgotten today, Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth when it first appeared in 1861 “struck the reading public as well as the American and English press like a tidal wave.” It was particularly popular in the United States, where it went through eight editions in the first few weeks and was universally hailed by the leading newspapers as “a masterpiece of historic fiction.” Indeed, many critics regarded it as the perfect historical novel, superior even to Sir Walter Scott, well into the twentieth century. Reade drew his original inspiration from the opening pages of a brief autobiography by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) known as the Compendium vitae, where the famous humanist describes the circumstances of his birth and the ill-fated relationship of his parents. The story was then richly embroidered by Reade with the wildest inventions of romance and a wealth of vivid historical detail gleaned from scrupulous research in a host of primary sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Given the recent sesquicentennial of the novel's original publication, it seems worthwhile to revisit The Cloister and the Hearth and assess how well the novel stands up today, both as a historical representation of life in the later Middle Ages and as a monument of Victorian medievalism.