Emily Wingfield - Böcker

Premodern Scotland: Literature and Governance 1420-1587 brings together original essays by a group of international scholars to offer fresh and ground-breaking research into the 'advice to princes' tradition and related themes of good self- and public governance in Older Scots literature, and in Latin literature composed in Scotland in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. The volume brings to the fore texts both from and about the royal court in a variety of genres, including satire, tragedy, complaint, dream vision, chronicle, epic, romance, and devotional and didactic treatise, and considers texts composed for noble readers and for a wider readership able to access printed material. The writers and texts studied include Bower's Scotichronicon, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Gavin Douglas's Eneados. Lesser known authors and texts also receive much-needed critical attention, and include Richard Holland's, The Buke of the Howlat, chronicles by Andrew of Wyntoun, Hector Boece, and John Bellenden, and poetry by sixteenth-century writers such as Robert Sempill, John Rolland of Dalkeith, and William Lauder. Non-literary texts, such as the Parliamentary 'Aberdeen Articles' further deepen the discussion of the volume's theme. Writing from south of the Border, which provoked creative responses in Scots authors, and which were themselves inflected by the idea of Scotland and its literature, are also considered and include the Troy Book by John Lydgate, and Malory's Le Morte Darthur. With a focus on historical and material context, contributors explore the ways in which these texts engage with notions of the self and with advisory subjects both specific to particular Stewart monarchs and of more general political applicability in Scotland in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Over two parts, 69 leading scholars, librarians and archivists come together to analyse the development of the book in Scotland from the early seventh century BCE to the 1707 Union, from depictions of books in carved stone monuments to the printing presses of Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow producing pamphlets and receipts used for everyday business at the end of the seventeenth century.Part II: Networks, Collections and Genre focuses on the types of books and printed material that were being made, produced, collected and used in Scotland in the medieval and early modern periods. On a scale not before attempted, Part II includes a survey of the genres of books and written material produced and consumed in Scotland over a millennium of the country’s history. Profiles of individual collectors help to illustrate the wider narratives of individuals, institutions and networks of the owners, collectors and patrons who helped shaped the bookish landscape of Scotland before the Union.

These six poems explore some of the courtly and chivalric themes that preoccupied late medieval Scottish society. The volume includes Sir David Lyndsay's Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum, as well as his Answer to the Kingis Flyting; and three anonymous fifteenth-century poems: Balletis of the Nine Nobles, Complaint for the Death of Margaret, Princess of Scotland, and Talis of the Fyve Bestes.

First full-length treatment of the Trojan legend in medieval Scottish literature, showing the various uses for, and the ways in, which it was deployed.The Trojan legend became hot property during the Anglo-Scots Wars of Independence. During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the English traced their ancestry to Brutus and the Trojans and used this origin myth tobolster their claims to lordship and ownership of Scotland; while in a game of political one-upmanship, and in order to prove Scotland's independence and sovereignty, Scottish historians instead traced their nation's origins to aGreek prince, Gaythelos, and his Egyptian wife, Scota.Despite the wealth of scholarship on the Trojan legend in English and European literature, very little has been done on Scotland's literary response to the same legend,even though a mere glance at the canonical material of late medieval Scotland indicates that it remained equally current north of the Border, a gap which this book fills. Through a detailed analysis of a range of Older Scots textsfrom c. 1375 to c. 1513, notably The Scottish Troy Book, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Douglas' Eneados, it provides the first comprehensive assessment of the Scottish response to the Trojan legend. It considers the way in which Scottish texts interact with English counterparts, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, Chaucer's Troilus, Lydgate's Troy Book, and Caxton's Eneydos, and demonstrates how despite - or perhaps because of - its use in the Anglo-Scots Wars of Independence, the Trojan legend was for the most part neither neglected nor pejoratively treated in Older Scots literature. Rather, the Matter of Troy and related Matter of Greece were used not just as an origin myth, but also as a metaphor for Anglo-Scots political relations, guide to good governance, and locus through which poets might explore broader issues of literary tradition, authority, and the nature of poetic truth.Emily Wingfield is a lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham.