Fresche fontanis


Book Description

Fresche fontanis contains twenty-five studies presenting major new research by leading scholars in Scottish culture of the late fourteenth and fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The three-part collection includes essays on the prominent writers of the period: James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, John Bellenden, David Lyndsay, John Stewart of Baldynneis, William Fowler, Alexander Montgomerie, Andrew Melville and Alexander Craig. There are also essays on the Scottish romances Lancelot of the Laik, Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, The Buik of Alexander, Golagros and Gawain, and the comedic Rauf Coilyear, and the Scottish fabliau The Freiris of Berwick. Chronicles of Fordun, Bower, Wyntoun and Bellenden receive fresh attention in essays concerning Margaret of Scotland, and imperial ideas during the reign of James V. Essays on anthologies, family books, and collaborative compilations make another notable group, providing in-depth analysis, with findings not previously reported, of The Book of the Dean of Lismore, the Maitland Quarto manuscript and The Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum. These studies are enlarged by others on key contextualizing topics, including noble and royal literary patronage, early Scottish printing, performance, spectatorship, and translation. Together they make a significant contribution to a full understanding of the continuities and shifts in cultural emphases during this most imaginatively productive period.




Imagining Spectatorship


Book Description

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Imagining Spectatorship offers a new discussion of how spectators witnessed early drama in the various spaces and places in which those works were performed. It combines broad historical and theoretical reflection with closely analysed case studies to produce a comprehensive account of the ways in which individuals encountered early drama, how they were cued to respond to it, and how we might think about those issues today. It addresses the practical matters that conditioned spectatorship, principally those concerned with the location and configuration of the spaces in which a performance occurred, but also suggests how these factors intersected with social status, gender, religious commitment and affiliation, degrees of real or felt personal agency, and the operation of the cognitive processes themselves. It considers both real witnesses and those 'imagined' spectators which are seemingly figured by both dramatic and quasi-dramatic works, and whose assumed attitudes play-makers sought to second-guess. It also looks at the spectatorial experience itself as a subject of representation in a number of early texts. Finally, it examines the complex contract entered into by audiences and players for the duration of a performance, looking at how texts cued spectators to respond to specific dramaturgical tropes and gambits and how audience response was itself a cause of potential anxiety for writers. The book resists the conventional divide between 'medieval' and 'early-modern' drama, using its focus on the spectators' experience to point connections and continuities across a diverse range of genres, such as processions and tourneys as well as scripted plays, pageants, and interludes; a variety of different venues, such as city streets, great halls, and playhouses, and a period of about 150 years to the Shakespearean stage of the 1590s and 1600s. It seeks to offer routes by which inferences about early spectatorship can be made despite the relative absence of personal testimony from the period.




The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland


Book Description

This study presents a history of the literary culture of early-modern Scotland (1560-1625), based on extensive study of the literary manuscript. It argues for the importance of three key places of production of such manuscripts: the royal court, burghs and towns, and regional houses (stately homes, but also minor lairdly and non-aristocratic households). This attention to place facilitates a discussion of, respectively, courtly, urban or civic, and regional literary cultures. Sebastiaan Verweij's methodology stems from bibliographical scholarship and the study of the 'History of the Book', and more specifically, from a school of manuscript research that has invigorated early-modern English literary criticism over the last few decades. The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland will also intersect with a programme of reassessment of early-modern Scottish culture that is currently underway in Scottish studies. Traditional narratives of literary history have often regarded the Reformation of 1560 as heralding a terminal cultural decline, and the Union of Crowns of 1603, with the departure of king and court, was thought to have brought the briefest of renaissances (in the 1580s and 1590s) to an early end. This book purposefully straddles the Union, in order to make possible the rediscovery of Scotland's refined and sophisticated renaissance culture.







Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World


Book Description

Ranging from devotional poetry to confessional history, across the span of competing religious traditions, this volume addresses the lived faith of diverse communities during the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Together, they provide a textured understanding of the complexities in religious belief, practice and organization.




Nine Centuries of Man


Book Description

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries?Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ahard man has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of what masculinity actually means for men (and women) in a Scottish context. This interdisciplinary collection explores a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, examining the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour.How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romance, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men a work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce a the book also illustrates the range of masculinities which affected or were internalised by men. Together, they illustrate some of the ways Scotlands gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how more generally masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history.ContributorsLynn Abrams, University of GlasgowKatie Barclay, University of AdelaideAngela Bartiem University of EdinburghRosalind Carr, University of East LondonTanya Cheadle, University of GlasgowHarriet Cornell, University of EdinburghSarah Dunnigan, University of EdinburghElizabeth Ewan, University of GuelphAlistair Fraser, University of GlasgowSergi Mainer, University of EdinburghJeffrey Meek, University of GlasgowCynthia J. Neville, Dalhousie University Janay Nugent, University of Lethbridge Tawny Paul, Northumbria University







Premodern Scotland


Book Description

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.




The King and Commoner Tradition


Book Description

King and Commoner tales were hugely popular across the late medieval and early modern periods, their cultural influence extending from Robin Hood ballads to Shakespearean national histories. This study represents the first detailed exploration of this rich and fascinating literary tradition, tracing its development across deeply politicized fifteenth-century comic tales and early modern ballads. The medieval King and Commoner tales depict an incognito king becoming lost in the forest and encountering a disgruntled commoner who complains of class oppression and poaches the king’s deer. This is an upside-down world of tricksters, violence, and politicized feasting that critiques and deconstructs medieval hierarchy. The commoners of these tales utilize the inversion of the medieval carnival, crowning themselves as liminal mock kings in the forest while threatening to rend and devour a body politic that would oppress them. These tales are complex and ambiguous, reimagining the socio-political upheaval of the late medieval period in sophisticated ruminations on class relations. By contrast, the early modern ballads and chapbooks see the tradition undergo a conservative metamorphosis. Suppressing its more radical elements amid a celebration of proto-panoptical kings, the tradition remerges as royalist propaganda in which the king watches his thankful subjects through the keyhole.