Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 Rhiannon Purdie Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 212. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6273–0. $99.95. The very specific theme of this volume as identified by its title—‘kingship and love’ in Older Scots poetry—belies the great value of this excellent study to all those with any interest at all in Older Scots poetry or medieval advisory literature. The distinctive Scottish situation of a succession of royal minorities through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with all the social anxieties that this engendered, is reflected in the literature of this period by a marked interest in ‘advice to princes’ literature. Martin successfully widens this category to include the ‘strongly discernable body of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scots poetry concerned with the wooing of kings’ (1). She argues that these texts use the lens of amatory discourse to explore ideas about ‘the most profound and challenging aspects of the governance of the self, that prerequisite quality for the rule of others’ (p. 2), thus broadening their significance from the personal or abstractly philosophical to the topically political. The focus of the texts discussed in this volume is, as Martin demonstrates convincingly, on ‘the challenges to self-governance (and thence to political governance) posed by the destabilizing advent of a young ruler’s sexual maturity’ and ‘the impact of desire on royal rule’ (pp. 12–13). Chapter one begins, inevitably, with The Kingis Quair (probably by James I) and the Quare of Jelusy, poems uniquely preserved in that important fifteenth-century Scottish anthology, Bodleian Library Arch. Selden B.24. Readers of Arthuriana will be particularly interested in the second chapter on Lancelot of the Laik. Four more chapters cover Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice (a chapter which provides much incidental insight into the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo via its Scottish cousin King Orphius), The Thre Prestis of Peblis, and King Hart. There is an epilogue on ‘Poetry and the Minority of James V,’ which deals with the much more direct relationship between Sir David Lyndsay and his one-time royal pupil. Underpinning this study is an investigation of the influence of three important works on this body of poetry: the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum; Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum and its vernacular descendents, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Gower, she contends, is an ‘important precursor of the poetic combination of amatory and political discourses, and the focus on the king’s amatory self, in later Scots writing’ (p. 3). Martin’s study is characterized by shrewd and subtle close readings of her primary texts supported by a wealth of contextual evidence drawn from contemporary Scottish writings, antecedent English works (particularly those of Gower and Hoccleve), Continental sources, and the manuscript settings and circulation histories of these poems. This is a deeply scholarly work, elegantly written, highly informative, and an important contribution to the study of late-medieval Scottish literature. [End Page 141] Rhiannon Purdie University of St Andrews Copyright © 2009 Arthuriana