Reading, Writing and Gender in Early Modern Scotland

Abstract

It is only too easy to extrapolate from the better-evidenced, and so somewhat more scrutable, cultural history of early modern England, and to assume that literacy and print-culture in Scotland developed on roughly similar lines. But Scotland's culture is distinct in a variety of respects, and seems to have presented particular difficulties to women. The differences between the two make it possible to probe the fundamental question of the preconditions which permit, or prevent, creative expression.The work of recovering texts by early modern women writers of English has been going on for more than twenty years now. It is fair to say that the terrain has been mapped, so it is therefore now possible to reflect on the fact that all this work of rediscovery has flushed out remarkably few Scotswomen. So few, in fact, as to prompt the question, 'why?' since it certainly has not been for want of looking.The facts are these. Scotland produced one major published woman poet, Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (?1570s - after 1630). Her vision-poem Ane Godlie Dreame was printed again and again in Scotland after the first edition in 1603, at least thirteen times down to 1737. Lady Culross also left verse in manuscript: most of what survives is written on the last thirteen leaves of a manuscript volume of sermons by Robert Bruce preached in autumn 1590 and spring 1591, now in New College Library, Edinburgh.1 Though Lady Culross's poetry has remarkable qualities of its own, she does not employ the classical tropes, similes and comparanda from ancient history which come naturally to her English contemporary, Aemilia Lanier, or her slightly later fellow-Calvinists, Katherine Philips and Anne Bradstreet.Apart from Lady Culross, remarkably little writing by Scotswomen was printed either in their lifetimes, or posthumously.2 The only other Scotswomen to publish before 1700 were Anna Hume, whose Petrarch translation, The triumphs of: love: chastitie: death came out in 1644 (she also edited her father's History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus)> and an unidentified 'Lady of Honour' who published a broadsheet poem puffing the Darien Scheme in 1699, The Golden Island?Women's writings in manuscript are also scanty.4 Three women's names are associated with the group of poets which grew up round James VI in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, Christian Lindsay, whose surviving poem (if she is not a literary fiction) defends Montgomerie,5 Elizabeth Douglas, who wrote two poems in praise of William Fowler's Petrarch translations, and Lady Mary Beaton, also a friend of Fowler's.6 These women seem to have circulated a little occasional verse within court circles, since their poems made it into miscellany manuscripts. Also from the 1580s, a magnificent lovepoem written by one woman to another survives in the Maitland Quarto Manuscript, possibly by Marie Maitland, one of its compilers, while Evelyn Newlyn has recently argued that other verse in this manuscript may be hers.7 A noblewoman of the next generation, Margaret Cunningham, daughter of the seventh earl of Glencairn, wrote a sequence of three spiritual sonnets in 1606 which survives;8 Lady Grissell Baillie and Lady Wardlaw, both born late in the seventeenth century, are the probable authors of, respectively, a song and a ballad.Other coteries which included women are discernable in Scotland. John Knox was closely involved with Anne Lock, an English woman writer,9 and Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan also point to his involvement with 'a landed literary coterie' in Scotland, that of Cockburn of Ormiston and his wife Alison Sandelandis.10 Sandelandis was the dedicatee of Sir Henry Balnaves's Confession of Faiths sent on to her by Knox and eventually printed in 1584.11In the generation after Fowler, women formed part of the cultural nexus around Drummond of Hawthornden (Fowler's nephew) and his brother-inlaw Scot of Scotstarvet.12 A commendatory poem by Mary Oxlie of Morpeth was prefixed to the posthumous edition of Drummond's works edited by Edward Phillips and printed in London. …