A chilly spring?
March 27, 2014
Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte doolie: doleful; dyte: story Suld correspond and be equiualent. Suld: should. So begins Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, a story of what happened to Cresseid (or Criseyde or Cressida, depending on your preferred version) after she left Troy. Henryson’s …
Literatures of Older Scots and Middle English
February 25, 2014
If there are challenges in establishing Older Scots and Middle English as different languages (see previous blog) those are matched equally in attempting to define an Older Scots literary tradition. The Middle English literary tradition is so multifarious that to insist on separateness for Scotland seems doomed to failure. We can see, for instance, that …
Older Scots and Middle English: mutually comprehensible dialects?
February 24, 2014
The witticism that Britain and the US are countries divided by a common language might equally apply to Scotland and England. To avoid too much controversy, I am neither going to attribute the thought, nor am I going to discuss contemporary linguistic matters, but instead limit my discussion here to the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth …
Love: not for the faint-hearted?
February 14, 2014
The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne, Th’assay so harde, so sharpe the conquerynge The dredful joy, that alwey slyd so yerne Al this meene I be love, that my felynge Astonyeth with his wonderful worchyng So soore ywys, that whan I on hym thynke, Nat wote I wel wher that I …
Past identities: medieval differences between Scotland and England
January 21, 2014
The photo attached to this blog can be replicated in many family albums. The girls here happen to be my goddaughter and her sister, on their way to visit friends and family in Scotland, but they might equally be my children on the same mission north. There remains a slight sense of travelling to a …
Comparing technologies of publication
July 25, 2013
About five and a half centuries ago, printing with moveable type became possible, a result of Johannes Gutenberg’s inventiveness, but also because the necessary materials, including the right kinds of metal to make type, became available. Over the subsequent fifty years or so, this technology spread and became commercially viable: more printed books circulated, especially …
The drama of good government
June 3, 2013
Next Friday (June 7), I will be attending an extraordinary performance next Friday: an uncut production of Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis at Linlithgow Peel. Ane Satyre is the first surviving play text in Older Scots: it is a personification play, most akin to Mankind , Everyman or even Magnificence. The …
An earlier Iron Lady?
April 10, 2013
Baroness Thatcher is not the only Margaret to have had a significant impact on the history of Scotland. There is Margaret of Denmark, wife of James III, who seems to have kept the peace between her husband and her eldest son, James IV; there is also her daughter-in-law, Margaret Tudor, who provided her great-grandson (through …
Rehabilitating Macbeth
March 21, 2013
Apparently inspired by the exhumation and identification of Richard III, there has been a call from a Member of the Scottish Parliament to re-examine and revise the Shakespearian view of Macbeth. This has provoked all kinds of comment, some of which you can see here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-21421001, here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21483159 and here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/rehabilitate-macbeth-scotland-shakespeare?INTCMP=SRCH. That the Shakespearian image …
What books reveal about us
February 11, 2013
If, for some unimaginable reason, all that remained of the culture of 2012 in 2512 was a battered and annotated copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, a printed programme of the Olympic Games, and video footage of Have I Got News for You?, what conclusions about us would our descendants reach, and how would they …