Scottish Text Society Fifth Series – serie

Offers a comprehensive linguistic exploration delving into the intricate evolution of vowel sounds in the Scots language during its earlier stages. The author scrutinizes historical texts and phonetic changes, offering valuable insights into the development of vowel systems and their impact on the linguistic landscape of Older Scots. This scholarly work provides a meticulous analysis, making it an essential resource for linguists, historians, and enthusiasts interested in the rich linguistic heritage of Scotland.

Edition of an important collection of ballads, taken down in the eighteenth century from a female singer.It is generally acknowledged that no Scottish ballads are superior in kind to those recited by Mrs Brown of Falkland (1747-1810). Her ballads date from an earlier age and contain the themes and motifs of medieval romance and folktale, a world full of kings and queens, knights and ladies, love and betrayal and encounters with the otherworld. They are entirely from an oral tradition, passed down a female line of transmission from her mother, grandmother andaunts; they thus provide a unique glimpse into the collective memory of Scotland in the age of enlightenment.This edition presents Mrs Brown's collection entirely in the order in which she preserved it, prior to the intervention of (male) ballad collectors such as Walter Scott, Robert Jamieson and `Monk' Lewis. It provides the texts of all Mrs Brown's manuscripts; where a ballad is recorded in more than one version, it presents the different recensions in facing page format, enabling an easy comparison. Music from the original manuscripts is also given in modern notation. A full introduction and notes complete the volume.Professor Sigrid Rieuwerts teaches at SiegenUniversity.

A full introduction to Older Scots language and literature, with a wide selection of copiously annotated texts from the period.This book enables both students and more advanced scholars to develop a comprehensive understanding of Older Scots, the form of Scots which survives in records up to around 1700. It provides the means of understanding the language's essential characteristics, and enables readers to engage with the fascinating textual and linguistic problems which it presents. The volume contains an extensive set of annotated texts from the period, inviting closer engagement with the detail of the language, which are preceded by a comprehensive introduction to and discussion of the subject; it also looks at the linguistic detail (in the broadest sense) of the reception and afterlife of medieval andearly modern Scottish texts. Those interested in literary form in Older Scottish literature will find it a "kit" for stylistic analysis; book historians will appreciate the detailed studies of processes of production and reception, and be reminded of the importance of integrating disciplines such as textual criticism, codicology, paleography and philology; and for linguists, there is access to an unrivalled body of up-to-date textual information, previously hard to find in a single place.Jeremy J. Smith is Professor of English Philology, University of Glasgow.

First modern edition of a highly provocative Scottish drama.Written at the very end of the seventeenth century, The Phanaticks (previously known as The Assembly) satirises in dramatic form contemporary political and religious affairs, presenting some well-known figures in thethinnest of disguises. Overtly a comedy about two young women opposed by such forces as the Governer of Edinburgh Castle (Lord Huffy), it is an excoriating attack on the hypocrisy and political chicanery of Scottish religious sects, alongside its romance and sexual innuendo. The author, Archibald Pitcairne, was a celebrated physician and wit; this work demonstrates his talent for controversy (he was ejected from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, an institution which he helped to found, after a dispute about his theoretical approaches to medicine). Indeed, so provocative was it deemed that despite being printed in 1722 and 1752, there is no record of any contemporary performance.This first modern edition is based on an early manuscript, with corrections possibly in Pitcairne's own hand; it is presented with full contextual and historical notes.John MacQueen is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Edinburgh.

First modern edition of four romances from the medieval Scottish tradition.The four romances in this collection have been unjustly neglected. Indeed, Florimond, King Orphius and Sir Colling were entirely unknown to modern audiences - despite some late-medieval references to the first two -until fragmentary copies were unearthed in the National Archives of Scotland in the 1970s: all three are researched and fully edited for the first time here. King Orphius, closely and significantly related to the famous Middle English romance Sir Orfeo, is supplemented here with the Laing fragment discovered by the present editor in 2010. Roswall and Lillian survives in later prints and was a favourite text of Sir Walter Scott's - he owned at least three copies of it - but it has not been edited since the nineteenth century. Each text is supplied with comprehensive explanatory notes and an introduction, including full discussion of extant witnesses and circulation history; linguistic and other evidence for date and provenance; literary context; analogues and influences. There is a combined glossary, and an Appendix presents the text of the English Percy Folio ballad "Sir Cawline" as derived from the Scots Sir Colling.Dr Rhiannon Purdie is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English, University of St Andrews.

First edition of a lively medieval romance.The author of the fifteenth-century Older Scots romance of Rauf Coilyear may be unknown, but the popularity of this comic king-in-disguise tale is undisputed; it is cited by William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas at the turn of the century, and again in the mid-sixteenth century Complaynt of Scotland. The disguised king in this case is Charlemagne, and the hero a bluff collier called Ralph, who unwittingly plays host to him for one stormy night and teaches his bemused guest some rough lessons in his own version of courtesy. When Ralph is lured to court, the mistaken identities continue as he encounters the great Sir Roland and battles Saracens. Throughout, the scrappy hero maintains his dignity, as indeed does his king: both parties finish the tale immensely pleased with each other and with the bond they have forged.The text survives only in a 1572 print by Robert Lekpreuik (whose own career seems tohave been only marginally less exciting than Rauf's: he printed it in St Andrews while attempting to evade imprisonment in Edinburgh, ultimately without success). It is edited here with an introduction and notes.RALPHHANNA is Emeritus Professor of Palaeography, University of Oxford.

First modern scholarly edition of a number of late medieval Scottish poems, in the comic tradition.This volume contains eleven Scottish examples of particular kinds of humorous writing - comic, parodic, and satiric - of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Previously unavailable in modern scholarly editions, these worksare freshly established from diverse sources, including the manuscript that is the earliest extant of John Knox's "Historie of the Reformatioun of Religioun". A manuscript owned by the Campbell of Glenorchy family is the source ofthe volume's most substantial work, Duncane Laideus Testament; the poem's bicultural outlook provides an important reference point for historians, as well as scholars of early Scottish and Gaelic literature. Other texts include David Lyndsay's The Complaint of Bagsche and the anonymous "My gudame wes a gay wif".To assist study of the development of early Scottish writing, and to chart historical, especially religious, change, the poems are arranged in their probable order of composition. Each is introduced separately, with consideration of witnesses; evidence for date of composition and authorship; title, metre, and genre; and full apparatus. Explanatory notesexamine matters of interest or potential difficulty, including the sense of contemporary expressions, wordplay, legal and Latin terms, and debts to earlier writers.The volume also includes a full Bibliography, Glossary, and Indexof Names and Places.Dr Janet Hadley Williams is Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University.

New edition of one of the most important collections of sixteenth-century Scots poetry.The Maitland Quarto Manuscript was compiled in c.1586 in the circle of the Maitland Family of Lethington, East Lothian. It is a highly significant and rich collection of Older Scots poetry. It contains the most complete collectionof the poems of Sir Richard Maitland, judge, privy counsellor, and Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland under Mary Queen of Scots, together with poems attributed to Maitland's heir, John Maitland of Thirlestane, Chancellor to James VI, and to leading writers and intellectuals, including the king himself, Alexander Montgomerie, and Alexander Arbuthnot. It attests to new developments in Scottish literature in the late sixteenth century by including many unique examples of Calvinist lyric, the earliest known British Country House poem, and Sapphic verse, as well as poems influenced by Italian and French sources. It also provides evidence for the role of women in the composition, collection and copying of Older Scots verse.This critical edition offers fresh access to the fascinating contents of this important manuscript. It provides an authoritative text, with full modern annotation and glossary. Itsintroduction and notes address the textual transmission of the poems, and offer detailed contextualization of them in both historical and literary terms.Joanna Martin is Lecturer in Middle English at the University ofNottingham.

New edition of a collection of songs and ballads from sixteenth-century Scotland, shedding important new light on the English and Scottish Reformation.The Gude and Godlie Ballatis is a collection of religious lyrics from the early years of the Scottish Reformation. It was a highly popular, if controversial, volume, was often reprinted, and is considered one of the most important literary works of vernacular Scots from the period. It contains translations of a number of Psalms, but most of the contents consist of shorter songs and ballads, many of which have been adapted from a secular to a spiritual use.The previous edition of the collection dates from 1897. The new edition not only revises the information given there, but presents the text of the earliest print (1565), which was unknown to the previous editor. The textual development of the collection through the various printings is studied, and is related to the changing historical, political, literary, cultural and theological contexts of Reformation Scotland. The editor addresses questions of authorship, transmission, source material, and the use and significance of these lyrics. Drawing on recent work in book history and English psalmody, as well as a deep knowledge of Older Scots lyric, he demonstrates the close connections between the collection and Continental hymnody, as well as interactions with English and Scots lyric, both sacred and profane.Alasdair A. MacDonald is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literatureof the Middle Ages, University of Groningen.

First volume in a new edition of Douglas's "Eneados", providing a comprehensive introduction and commentary.Although Virgil's Aeneid was one of the most widely admired works of the European Middle Ages, the first complete translation to appear in any form of English was Gavin Douglas's magisterial verse rendering into Older Scots, completed in 1513, which he called the "Eneados". It included not only the twelve books of Virgil's original, but a thirteenth added by the Italian humanist scholar Maphaeus Vegius, and lively, original prologues to every book.D.F.C. Coldwell's four-volume modern edition of it was published in 1957-64 for the Scottish Text Society, but for some time now has needed revision.This new edition will provide a corrected version of Coldwell's text and variants in subsequent volumes. The first volume, here, the Introduction and Commentary, offers a wealth of new scholarship, comparing Douglas's text to his exact Latin source (first identified by Professor Bawcutt in a 1973 essay reprinted here); vastly expanding the Commentary; offering detailed new analysis of the manuscript and print witnesses to the text and its early reception and circulation; and surveying modern Douglas criticism. There is also a new Bibliography.

Second volume of a major new edition of Douglas's Eneados, containing a substantially revised and corrected text of Books I-VII plus appendix of textual variants.Although Virgil's Aeneid was one of the most widely admired works of the European Middle Ages, the first complete translation to appear in any form of English was Gavin Douglas's magisterial verse rendering into Older Scots, completed in 1513, which he called the "Eneados". It included not only the twelve books of Virgil's original, but a thirteenth, added by the Italian humanist scholar Maphaeus Vegius, and lively, original prologues to every book. This new edition, the first for over sixty years, is based on Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS O.3.12 and presents a substantially revised and corrected version of the previous version's text and variants. Following from the first volume, containing a vastly expanded Introduction and Commentary, Volume II provides the text and variants for Books I-VII; Vol. III will provide the text and variants for Books VIII-XIII.

Third and final volume of a new edition of Douglas's Eneados, containing a substantially revised and corrected text of Books VIII-XIII plus appendix of textual variants.Although Virgil's Aeneid was one of the most widely admired works of the European Middle Ages, the first complete translation to appear in any form of English was Gavin Douglas's magisterial verse rendering into Older Scots, completed in 1513, which he called the "Eneados". It included not only the twelve books of Virgil's original, but a thirteenth, added by the Italian humanist scholar Maphaeus Vegius, and lively, original prologues to every book.This new edition, the first for over sixty years, is based on Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS O.3.12 and presents a substantially revised and corrected version of the previous version's text and variants. Following from the first volume, containing a vastly expanded Introduction and Commentary, and volume II, providing the text and variants for Books VIII-XII, Volume III completes the edition with the text and variants for Books VIII-XIII.