View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Scholar Commons - Institutional Repository of the University of South Carolina Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 39 | Issue 1 Article 9 8-31-2013 The Renaissance Uses of a Medieval Seneca: Murder, Stoicism, and Gender in the Marginalia of Glasgow Hunter 297 Theo van Heijnsbergen University of Glasgow Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation van Heijnsbergen, Theo (2013) "The Renaissance Uses of a Medieval Seneca: Murder, Stoicism, and Gender in the Marginalia of Glasgow Hunter 297," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 39: Iss. 1, 55–81. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol39/iss1/9 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. RENAISSANCE USES OF A MEDIEVAL SENECA: MURDER, STOICISM, AND GENDER IN THE MARGINALIA OF GLASGOW HUNTER 297 Theo van Heijnsbergen This paper analyzes a Renaissance Scottish reader’s inscriptions and annotations in a medieval French manuscript of Seneca’s tragedies and discusses what those annotations tell us about early seventeenth-century Scottish literary culture, especially about the culture of northern Scotland. In responding both to Seneca’s texts and to the turbulence of the early seventeenth century, these marginalia reveal a coherent set of values related to Renaissance Stoic thought, expressed not through explicit philosophical discourse but through combining selected commonplaces with quotations from a near-contemporary poem by Thomas Overbury that describes the ideal wife and that was already famous for its association with a deadly court scandal.