W. Scott’s novel “Quentin Durward” is particularly interesting in view of genre issues, as it demonstrates the vivid polemic between two literary traditions. The motives and images considered in thе article make it clear that Scott inherits the tradition of the medieval romance not only in his works devoted to Scottish medieval history, but also in the ones that deal with the later epochs, approaching Scott’s own time. The writer uses the central motives of the medieval romance: the identity test and the motive of initiation, the motive of an unwanted marriage and a rash promise, the image of a “damsel in distress”, makes numerous allusions to the literature about knights, enriching them with the content psychologically and historically plausible for Scott’s contemporaries. Thus Scott builds a distance between genres and epochs and makes the reader feel the gap between the past and the present.