The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing STUDIES in MEDIEVAL and EARLY MODERN CULTURE

Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture Medieval Institute Publications 4-30-2018 The mpI act of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing Alessandra F. Petrina Università degli Studi di Padova, [email protected] Ian M. Johnson University of St. Andrews, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_smemc Part of the Cultural History Commons, European History Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Medieval History Commons, and the Medieval Studies Commons Recommended Citation Petrina, Alessandra F. and Johnson, Ian M., "The mpI act of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing" (2018). Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. 2. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_smemc/2 This Edited Collection is brought to you for free and open access by the Medieval Institute Publications at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing Edited by Alessandra Petrina and Ian Johnson Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture Medieval Institute PUBlications Western Michigan University Kalamazoo Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 9781580442817 eISBN: 9781580442824 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Contents List of Abbreviations vii Introduction: Scottish Latinitas ix Ian Johnson and Alessandra Petrina Part I. Re-Writing the Classical and Medieval Legacy Classical Reception and Erotic Latin Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland: The Case of Thomas Maitland (ca. 1548–1572) 3 Steven J. Reid Mnemonic Frameworks in The Buke of the Chess 41 Kate Ash-Irisarri Part II. Writing the Scottish Nation Defining Scottish Identity in the Early Middle Ages: Bede and the Picts 63 Tommaso Leso Universals, Particulars, and Political Discourse in John Mair’s Historia Maioris Britanniae 85 John C. Leeds vi Contents A “Scottish Monmouth”? Hector Boece’s Arthurian Revisions 105 Elizabeth Hanna Topo graphy, Ethno graphy, and the Catholic Scots in the Religious Culture Wars: From Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia to John Lesley’s Historie of Scotland 127 John Cramsie A View from Afar: Petruccio Ubaldini’s Descrittione del Regno di Scotia 153 Alessandra Petrina Part III. The Vagaries of Languages and Texts Reading Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice: Sentence and Sensibility 175 Ian Johnson Seget’s Comedy: A Scots Scholar, Galileo, and a Dante Manuscript 199 Nick Havely The Inventions of Sir Thomas Urquhart 223 Jeremy J. Smith Afterword 249 Nicola Royan Biblio graphy 263 Index 273 List of Abbreviations DOST Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, www.dsl.ac.uk DSL Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, www.dsl.ac.uk EEBO-TCP Early English Books Online: Text Creation Partnership, Ann Arbor: ProQuest, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/ MED Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michi gan, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Bio graphy, online edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, www.odnb.com OED Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, www.oed.com SND Scottish National Dictionary, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, www.dsl.ac.uk Introduction: Scottish Latinitas Ian Johnson and Alessandra Petrina Lawd, honour, praysyngis, thankis infynyte To the and thy dulce ornat fresch endyte, Maist reverend Virgill, of Latyn poetis prynce: Gem of engyne and flude of eloquens. (Eneados, I, Prologue, ll. 1–4) hus Gavin Douglas opens the Prologue to Book 1 of his Ttranslation of Virgil’s Aeneid, first published in London in 1553, but probably already completed in 1513. Douglas’s version of the Latin poem is doubly representative of a distinctive phase in Scottish literature: his com- pletion of the work coincided with the most glorious moment of James IV’s reign, seemingly promising the dawn of a glorious Scottish Renaissance. In the same year, however, this promise was disastrously curtailed by the Scottish defeat at Flodden, where the King lost his life and Scotland lost its cultural momentum. Just as Douglas represents a poet in limine between a medieval, courtly mode and new humanist interests, so too the Battle of Flodden Field marked the end of a period of great hope for social and intellectual renewal in Scotland. (Only as recently as 1507 had the King supported Chepman and Myllar’s project to set up a printing press in Edinburgh.) In the event, however, things did not turn out so grimly. The apparent setback gave way to a remarkable new literary surge. Indeed, the ninety years between Flodden and the Union of the Crowns (1603) have been hailed as “an impossible, or improbable, first Scottish Renaissance.”1 This stunning but unlikely Renaissance, and the literary efforts of the preceding centuries that built towards it, provide the setting for the present volume, which investigates the crucial role played by Latin culture in the self-identification, affirmation and flowering of Scottish literature. Douglas’s role in the construction of a Scottish literary canon is, as noted above, doubly significant because of his choice of Virgil as a literary model. The translation of theAeneid , contained in both extant versions (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.3.12 and the 1553 printed edition) with the layout and presentation strategy of a critical edition, complete with marginalia or glosses, with rubrics dividing the translation into vari- x Ian Johnson and Alessandra Petrina ous sections, and with explanatory prologues for each book, testifies to a somewhat didactic intent on the poet’s part: it is to be read not simply as a Scottish rendering of the supreme model of Latin epic poetry, but also as a way to discover the continuity between Latin culture and its Scottish counterpart. In choosing the prince of Latin poets and its epic master- piece, a text that survived the transition from medieval to Renaissance in the estimation of its readers, Douglas was also providing a significant addi- tion to Scottish literature — significant in its implications as well as in its literary merits. The Prologue from which our opening lines are quoted develops at some length the praise of Virgil. After praising his eloquence and “dulce … endyte,” the Scottish poet establishes Virgil as “palm, lawrer and glory” of poetry (l. 6); the use of the word lawrer shows an awareness of the image of poetic laurels first codified by Petrarch, then imitated by English poets such as John Lydgate, and by this stage about to be established in English (and Scottish) literary tradition. A few lines later, Virgil will be called “myrrour and A per se” (l. 8), in a conscious allusion to a Chaucerian image (Troilus and Criseyde, I.171–72) developed by the Scottish poets immediately preceding Douglas, such as Robert Henryson (who describes Cresseid as “flour and A per se” inThe Testament of Cresseid, l. 78); and finally, as “maister of masteris” (l. 9), reiterating his status as the poets’ poet. The rhetorical construction is extremely careful and deliberate. We could read the whole passage as a manifesto of Scottish literature in this delicate phase. Although conscious of both the English and the medieval literary inheritance in Scottish writing as shown by the glances at Petrarch, Chaucer, and Henryson, Douglas was clearly highlighting for his readers’ attention a different set of literary models, not only in the fig- ure of Virgil, but also in the humanistic, quasi-philological approach he was bringing to this text. This is also evident in the polemic he inserted in the same Prologue, harshly criticizing the efforts of the English translator of the Aeneid who was closest to him in time, that is, William Caxton. Publishing his Eneydos in 1490, Caxton had made no mystery of the fact that he was working with a French intermediary text, thus allowing him- self ample freedom in the rendering of the poem: a fact that Douglas treats with righteous indignation, highlighting Caxton’s misunderstandings of the original Latin and underlining his own determination “Virgillis versys to follow and no thing feyn” (l. 266). At the same time, he noted that his own work would be “Writtin in the langage of Scottis natioun” (l. 103). The Scottish poet was highly aware of the role his translation might have Introduction: Scottish Latinitas xi played, both in Scottish culture and in a confrontation with Scotland’s awkward neighbor.2 It seems especially appropriate to focus on Gavin Douglas’s project at the beginning of a book investigating and re-evaluating the impact of Latin culture in crucial areas of late medieval and early modern Scottish literature, and the role it played in the development of Scottish writing. In the later Middle Ages and the early modern period it was Latin, and not any vernacular tongue, that was the lingua franca of Europe.

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