Contesting Fiction in Gavin Douglas’ Eneados

Abstract

H istories of fiction—tracing fictionality as idea and as literary mode across time—are often told as narratives of epistemic progress. Modernity, so the story goes, brings with it more sophisticated distinctions between fact and fiction. Zones of mixed referential truth, of legend and lore, are gradually rationalized, and literary authors both participate in and offer consolations for the course of disenchantment. Given this pattern, it is small surprise that the early modern period has loomed large in iterations of fiction’s grand récit. The era’s rhetorics of epistemic rationalization, of a newly clear-eyed distinction among error, fact, truth, and narrative fiction, dovetail smoothly with later accounts of our modern age. Yet such gestures of rationalization can best be interpreted, I suggest, not in terms of the retrospective, teleological narratives they are made to fit— but as local experiments, charged with polemical energy and entangled with the counter-possibilities they define themselves against. This essay explores one early-modern attempt to rationalize fiction, or justify a particular model for fiction’s meaning-making against competing paradigms. This occurs in the pages of the Eneados (1513), a translation into Middle Scots of Virgil’sAeneid by the Scottish poet, nobleman, and eventual bishop Gavin Douglas (c.1475–1522). Douglas’ groundbreaking work of earlymodern vernacular classicism, or “vernacular humanism” as some have called it, seeks to establish Virgil’s poem as a self-authorizing, self-referring work, in part by making polemical arguments about who, and what,