Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture) - Hardcover

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Katherine H. Terrell is Professor of Literature at Hamilton College.

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The Scottish writers that I consider in this book both appropriate and subvert English literary models, creating a complex nationalist discourse that, even at its most fervently autonomous, is always engaged in a dialogic relationship with its sources. For these authors, whose intimate involvement with English texts helps to define their own nationalist projects, writing is always also a process of writing back. Far from being symptomatic of complicity in what R. R. Davies calls the “Anglicization of the British Isles,” the dialogic nature of these Scottish writings resists English cultural and political hegemony through the very act of redeploying English structures for ostentatiously Scottish ends. In turning literary indebtedness to their own purposes, the Scottish participants in this (frequently one-sided) dialogue define and delimit Scottish national identity in terms that differentiate it strikingly from its English precedents. Mingling the literary and historical past into narrative representations that take on the autonomous authority of myth, they reveal sources of nation and culture that they then map onto Scotland’s present and project into its future. Writing back to England becomes indistinguishable from the nationalist project of writing Scotland.

Thus, chroniclers in the tradition of John of Fordun and Walter Bower, while patterning their histories on English chronicles, fashion compelling myths of Scottish origins that refute English assertions of hegemony over Scotland and powerfully influence Anglo-Scottish diplomacy. Similarly, the early sixteenth-century poets Gavin Douglas and William Dunbar devise narratives of Chaucerian inheritance that authorize their attempts to create a uniquely Scottish poetics, capable of surpassing Chaucer’s achievements. These seemingly diverse modes of writing intersect not only in their similar treatment of English models but also in their common concern with (re)scripting history as genealogical myth, a revisionary process that affirms the continuities between the present and an idyllic past imagined as a site of literary and political precedent. Positioning themselves as writers and as Scots in relation to this complex historical terrain, these writers negotiate a sense of identity rooted in history, while actively seeking to intervene in Scotland’s cultural and political future.

As the period during which Scottish culture first began to coalesce around the royal court, James IV’s reign provides a focal point for the poetic texts under consideration in this book. Accordingly, two of the poems most obviously and intimately concerned with Scottish nationalism—John Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Hary’s Wallace—fall outside the scope of this study. Their perspectives on nationalism and their links to the chronicle tradition have already been well explored, most notably by James Goldstein. In choosing to focus, instead, on the court poetry of Kennedy, Douglas, and Dunbar, I address a site of nationalist discourse that is at once more subtle and more complex than Barbour’s and Hary’s poems dealing directly with the Scottish Wars of Independence. While Barbour sought to celebrate and strengthen a nascent monarchy, and Hary to further bolster Scottish nationalism in response to James III’s pro-English policies, the poets of James IV’s reign were concerned with a different set of questions. As Sally Mapstone has argued, “It would be quite wrong to suggest that court life and courtly literature, even the court poet, had the same character before the 1490s as they were to have after them.” James IV’s mature rule opened up a brief space in which Scottish poets could ask not what it was to become a nation but what it was to inhabit one. I contend that this court poetry, written more than a century after Scotland’s reestablishment as an independent nation, seeks to consolidate Scottish national identity through its focus on the court as a site of Scottish self-definition and its persistent concern with marking out a distinct realm of Scottish cultural and poetic achievement.