The Enduring Past
June 27, 2013
Last Friday the Nottingham Medievalists celebrated the 25th anniversary of our Institute and it was a great opportunity to talk to colleagues and students old and new, but it was especially wonderful to see so many people from outside the university. It is very obvious that medieval matters to many people despite the inaccurate ways …
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 …
Frost and Famine
March 28, 2013
The ongoing cold weather continues to dominate our news. March in Old English is hreðmonað ‘rough/cruel month’ and this March certainly plays up to its medieval title. With a fear of energy shortages we may perhaps understand why winter and early spring were difficult times for our medieval ancestors. Most of the food that had …
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 …
Robin Hood and Arthur
August 11, 2012
Arthur and Robin are salient figures in our imagined medieval world; they are international; and they appear both to be symbolic of significant values; but somehow they are different. Arguments rage as to the ‘reality’ of both Robin and Arthur. With Robin, however, these arguments are more acute, because the legends associate him with a …
Older Scots
I’ve just returned from the launch of Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader, edited by Jeremy Smith, at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. This work has loomed large in my life over the last few years because it is published by the Scottish Text Society, of which I am now president. In all honesty, however, …