A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry Sally Mapstone A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley Williams, D. S. Brewer: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2006. xii + 234 pp. £45 hardback. ISBN 1 84384 0960 'Companionry is wondrous good,' wrote the theologian and provost of the College of Edinburgh Robert Rollock, in a commentary on Thessalonians c.1606, 'I should do as others do'. Unfortunately, the context of this apparent extolling of good companionship is ironic and critical. Rollock is denouncing drunkenness (which is 'over well knowne in Scotland') and the tendency of the drunk to think that companionability is all. Companions are becoming a staple of the scholarly publishing scene, and it is worth reflecting in this context too, as to whether they should be unambiguously saluted. Companions, handbooks and histories have of late replaced Festschriften and conference essays as the kinds of books that publishers are keen to take on. The year that saw the publication of this Companion by D. S. Brewer also saw the launch of Edinburgh University Press's three-volume history of Scottish literature, the first substantial project of its kind since the four-volume history published by Aberdeen University Press in the late 1980s. These sorts of books are regarded as marketable because they are, or should be, more homogenous and less potentially fragmentary and soon dated than Festschriften or conference collections. This particular companion has a specific focus, poetry in Older Scots (Gaelic and Latin are excluded). It covers the period from Barbour's Bruce (c.1375) to the poetry of Sir David Lyndsay. The latter (d.1555) is included when his contemporary poets like John Bellenden and William Stewart are not, and the prime focus of the volume is really on Older Scots poetry of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. No explicit justification for Lyndsay's inclusion is given, but the chapter devoted to him emphasises the many continuities between his poetry and that of his medieval Scots predecessors. Its author, and one of the volume's editors, Janet Hadley Williams, is a leading Lyndsay scholar, which may also explain this poet's inclusion. One other chapter that goes outwith the main frame of this book is Rhiannon Purdie's on romances, which chooses to include Eger and Grime ('Graysteil') and Roswall and Lillian on the grounds that, though surviving in late and unsatisfactory textual witnesses, these works have a veritable medieval origin. This is sensible. Considerable imagination has been shown by the editors in the shaping of this volume. Predictably, Dunbar and Douglas get chapters to [End Page 233] themselves (by Douglas Gray and by John Burrow), as does Lyndsay; far less predictably, but very valuably, so do Holland's Howlat (by Nicola Royan) and 'Sir Gilbert Hay and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour' (by Joanna Martin). The latter title deliberately points up the fact that The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour in the textual form in which we now have it, two mid-sixteenth-century copies of a poem which at its end gives its date as 1499, may not be the form in which Sir Gilbert Hay wrote his original Alexander romance – a point also made prominently in Martin's introduction to her excellent chapter. Purdie's chapter, however, attributes the poem to Gilbert Hay without acknowledgement of the controversy over its authorship. This is not helpful to readers and the editors should have intervened here. Henryson gets two chapters: an original and provocative one, on the sources and structure of the Fables, by Roderick J. Lyall; and another on Orpheus and Eurydice and The Testament of Cresseid, by Anne M. McKim which, disappointingly and rather oddly, consists only of a survey of critical interpretations of these two poems. Four other chapters deal with material comparatively. In addition to Purdie's survey of romances, James Goldstein writes about Barbour's Bruce, Wyntoun's Orygynalle Chronicle and Hary's Wallace; Julia Boffey deals with the Kingis Quair and other poems, English and Scottish, in its MS, Arch. Selden. B. 24; and Priscilla Bawcutt takes on religious verse. Three other substantial contributions act as book-ends to the volume. At its start, Bawcutt...