Louise Yeoman, National Library of .. Reportage Scotland: History in the Making. : Luath Press, 2000. xv + 489 pp. $19.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-946487-61-5.

Reviewed by Christopher Harvie

Published on H-Albion (November, 2001)

As someone who has been struggling to write his introduction, the efect is like having shots of a compact for sixth-formers, good malt whisky, from the enlightening to the students and the more enlightened sort of tourist, plain addictive. And Yeoman is the most helpful of Reportage Scotland comes as pure joy. I briefy editors, not interfering with the originals but pro‐ mulled over providing cross-references in my bib‐ viding interlined translations of medieval Scots liography--"particularly useful for the events dealt and separate translations of Gaelic. with on pages 56, 73, 99^Å," and so on. It wouldn't I rather wished she had provided the original really work. Documents have to be included in Latin in some cases: in my own book I used part any history--the Declaration of Arbroath, First of the Epithalamium George Buchanan wrote for Book of Discipline, National Covenant, etc.--which the betrothal of Mary Queen of Scots to the are "static," not covered by reporters, but whose French Dauphin and was enchanted by the pure meaning has to be teased out by historians. Louise classicism of Buchanan's style as well as his un‐ Yeoman's defnition is "news being made," with compromising republicanism. Christopher that old News of the World boast lurking some‐ Smout's dismissal of him as some sort of cultural where in the background: "All Human Life is throwback in A History of the Scottish People There!" (1969) is a serious faw in that otherwise remark‐ That said, the book is a great value: for GBP able book. 10 you get nearly 500 pages of accounts, from Tac‐ One can quibble about Yeoman's policy on in‐ itus on Calgacus facing Agricola's troops at Mons clusions: the Reformation, the Civil War and the Graupius in 84 AD--"They create a desolation, and Forty-Five do well; the Union of 1707 (despite the call it peace"--to 's Matthew Engel centrality of superscribe Defoe), industrialization, (an inspired choice: he really can write like one) and Victorian politics (no Gladstone, Rosebery, or on the opening of the Edinburgh parliament on 1 Crofter MPs) are somewhat thinly covered. The July 1999. As Professor David Stevenson says in rather bald account of the Disruption of 1843--the H-Net Reviews split in the Kirk which was the greatest event in cause it was never news. It reads splendidly--"For nineteenth-century Scots politics--comes from the we fght not for honour nor for glory but for free‐ Whig Henry Cockburn, who stuck with the Auld dom, which no good man gives up but with his Kirk, not from the Free Kirk's Hugh Miller, al‐ life." But its addressee, the Pope, forgot about it, though Yeoman recognises him as "the greatest and it vanished for 300 years, eventually being journalist of the age." No Burns either, though dug out by Stewart political theorists, of all peo‐ "The Holy Fair"--the Bard's sly piece on an Ayr‐ ple. It's important to diferentiate between "news shire mass communion which, for the young folk, stories" and "sleepers," and it's the art of gifted re‐ ended up rather diferently in "houghmagandie" porters, a bunch not all that well-served by Yeo‐ (or copulation)--serves to rank along with William mans, but including James Margach, James Dunbar's splenetic attack around 1500 on the Cameron, and Andrew Marr or Andrew O'Hagan charlatan Father Damian, who claimed to be able in our own day, to bring the latter sort out. Per‐ to fy. haps a future edition could include this. The rendering of Dunbar presents another Finally, the book is perfect-bound. By not be‐ problem that I've been confronted with. Is it bet‐ ing stitched, it will consequently fall to bits pretty ter to give the original Scots, and beside it a bald soon, after the hard wear that it's bound to get. non-rhyming translation, as Yeoman does, or to modernize as sensitively as one can Dunbar's vo‐ cabulary, in order to keep the power and meaning of his verse? My "modernized" version of a stanza runs: Some held he had been Daedalus, Some the Minotaur marvellous, Some Mars's blacksmith Vulcanus And some old Saturn's cook. And ever the peewits at him tuggit, The rooks him rent, the ravens him druggit, The hoodie craws his hair forth ruggit, That heaven might not him brook. This doesn't depart much from the original (like Nevil Coghill's Chaucer) but seems more memorable than Yeoman's Some thought he was Daedalus, some the marvellous Minotaur, some the God of War's blacksmith Vulcanus, and some thought him Sat‐ urn's cook ^Å Yeoman's notes on the extracts are brief, giv‐ ing only the baldest of contextualizations. This is prudent. Reportage Scotland will certainly be used as a teaching resource, and one should never give away in advance the questions to be asked of students. But a brief study is also needed of the generation, transmission, and acceptance of news in Scotland, over time. The Declaration of Ar‐ broath (1320) doesn't fgure here, quite rightly, be‐

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Citation: Christopher Harvie. Review of Yeoman, Louise; National Library of Scotland. Reportage Scotland: History in the Making. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. November, 2001.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5642

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