Premodern Scotland ─ Literature and Governance 1420-1587. Essays for Sally Mapstone

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.

Joanna Martin, Associate Professor of Middle English and Older Scots, University of Nottingham,Emily Wingfield, Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham

Joanna Martin is Associate Professor of Middle English and Older Scots at the University of Nottingham, having been a Darby Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford. She has published on aspects of Middle English writing, including that of Gower and Lydgate, on Anglo-Scottish literary relations, and on Older Scots literary and book history. She is the author of Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry (Ashgate, 2008) and The Maitland Quarto: A New Edition of Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library MS 1408, published for the Scottish Text Society in 2015.


Emily Wingfield is a Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. Previously she held a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, and completed her D.Phil. on 'The Manuscripts and Print Contexts of Older Scots Romance' at Oxford. She has published widely on Older Scots romance and book history, and completed a monograph on The Trojan Legend in Medieval Scottish Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2014).