Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland by Katherine H. Terrell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland by Katherine H. Terrell Emily Wingfield Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland. By Katherine H. Terrell. (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2021. viii+ 232 pp. $99.95 ISBN 978–0–8142–1462–6. Katherine H. Terrell's richly inventive study positions a range of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Scottish chronicle material alongside the works of poets connected to the court of James IV, and she deftly explores how this material both appropriates and subverts English literary and historiographical models in order to assert—often simultaneously—literary and territorial sovereignty. Indeed, Terrell's work is unique in juxtaposing—and demonstrating the close relationship between—Scotland's historiographical tradition and the works of those writers commonly labelled 'Scots Chaucerians'. Scripting the Nation significantly advances scholarship in both areas as a result. Terrell begins by outlining the War of Historiography which accompanied the physical battles of the period's Wars of Independence: Edward I and Edward II both seized upon Galfridian myths which traced English origins to Brutus and the Trojans in order to bolster their claims to lordship and ownership of Scotland; to counteract this, and prove Scotland's independence and superior cultural status, Scottish historians instead traced their origins to a Greek prince, Gaythelos, and his Egyptian wife, Scota. Terrell's theoretically informed readings of John Hardyng's Chronicle are a real highlight here: in focusing on his forgery of evidence to support England's claims to Scotland, and on the role in certain manuscript witnesses of additional maps and marginalia that assert and document an interest in the same claims, she demonstrates how Hardyng created a past tailor-made to serve the imperialist interests of his monarchs' (p. 24). Having observed that Scottish writers of the period regularly 'engage in a complex dance of deference to and defiance against their English models' (p. 5), in Chapter 2 Terrell explores how John of Fordun responded in his late fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum to Geoffrey of Monmouth's use of the Trojan origin legend. She articulates how Fordun deliberately set Geoffrey's narrative against the alternative and genealogically focused Greek Scottish origin legend, whilst simultaneously leaving open the contradictions of his various source materials, in order to reveal 'history as contested political ground' (p. 61). In next demonstrating how Walter Bower found ways to assert the superior morality and hereditary lineage of the Scots in his mid-fifteenth-century Scotichronicon, and carefully attending to the text's actual and ideal readers, Terrell makes a strong case for viewing Bower's project as the 'creation of a textual community' (p. 66); history, she argues, not only provided for Bower precedent and 'a repository for the identity of a people and nation' but also helped to 'forge that identity out of the great deeds of the past and translate it into the future' (p. 87). Chapter 4 looks closely at two examples of the period's actual textual community: the Sinclair manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24) and the Asloan manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS, MS 16500). Terrell here demonstrates [End Page 607] how, just as earlier historians both appropriated and defied English historiography (p. 38), so too do we find in the latter manuscript a 'scribe and reader [who] was able to value both Anglophobic history and Anglophile literature' (p. 103), and in the former a homage to Chaucerian poetry and a proud Scotticization of that poetry. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on William Dunbar's attitudes toward national identity and cultural heritage. The first offers some astute close readings of some of Dunbar's best-known poems and further demonstrates how he sets about defining himself both alongside and against Chaucer. The second focuses on Dunbar's less studied petitionary poems, and suggests that, by manipulating traditions of courtly love poetry, Dunbar attempts to establish a new era of Scottish court poetry. Chapter 7's study of Gavin Douglas's Eneados is a fitting culmination. Terrell here concentrates on Douglas's attitudes to the Scots vernacular and self...