Middle Scots Research Articles

“for ye vrangus haldyn of thre bollis of beire fra hyre”: Nominal Plurals in South-Western Middle Scots

This paper presents an analysis of plurality markers in the first extant text from the South-West of Scotland, the Wigtown Burgh Court Book (1512-1534). The inflectional endings for the plural are often included among the Middle Scots diagnostic features so it is quite important to establish what form they had in particular areas. The paper begins with an outline of the Middle Scots dialectal divisions. Next, the geographical position of Galloway is taken into consideration, with special attention paid to the alleged persistence of Gaelic and the possibility of including this region into the map of the sixteenth-century Scots dialects. Then, the presentation concentrates on the Linguistic Profile of Wigtownshire in LALME which was compiled using the same source of textual material as the present paper. The research shows that the profile in the atlas should be revised in terms of the {S}-morpheme markers to acknowledge the prevalence of the Scots marking in . The feature , given by the atlas but non-existent as a morphological marker in the textual material, should be removed from the profile.

III Middle English: Excluding Chaucer

This chapter has ten sections: 1. General and Miscellaneous; 2. Women's Writing; 3. Alliterative Verse and Lyrics; 4. The Gawain-Poet; 5. Piers Plowman; 6. Romance; 7. Gower, Lydgate, Hoccleve; 8. Malory and Caxton; 9. Middle Scots Poetry; 10. Drama. Sections 1 is by Juris Lidaka with a contribution by Jennifer Brown; section 2 is by Jennifer Brown; sections 3 and 5 are by Michelle M. Sauer; section 4 is by Kenneth Rooney; sections 6 and 8 are by Kenneth Hodges; section 7 is by Juris Lidaka; section 9 is by Jennifer Brown, with a contribution by Juris Lidaka; section 10 is by Greg Walker.

The True Story of Max and Moritz: Ancient and Medieval Texts before W. Busch

Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) was a German cartoonist and poet whose most famous work was an illustrated dogtrot verse about a pair of little hellions called Max and Moritz. Published in German in 1865, it has delighted generations of German children and their parents and was eventually translated into English by editor and litterateur Christopher Morley in 1932. Knowledge of the Max and Moritz saga had come to Americans earlier, however, through the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” (later “The Captain and the Kids”), first drawn by Rudolph Dirks for the New York Journal in 1897 and long continuing in popularity. (I remember a version of the cartoon in the 1930s as my own childhood favorite Sunday reading.) Katzenjammer is German for a ‘hangover headache’ (literally “cat’s clamoring”), which is presumably what the terrible twosome gave all the adults around them. Manfred Gorlach has continued and much expanded the Max and Moritz corpus by orchestrating the “discovery” for an overexpanding number of versions of the poem in many languages. The present volume brings together fragments and complete versions of the poem, which consists of a preface, seven tricks, and a conclusion. The fragments are from Egyptian, Sahidic, Ancient Greek, Umbarian, Latin, Gothic (in both Moeso and Crimean versions), Old High German, Old Saxon, Old West Norse, early Welsh, early Middle English (in Peterborough and Pershore versions), Anglo-Norman, Old Spanish, Medieval Latin, Middle Dutch, and others. The full text appears in Old English, Middle High German, late Middle English (Chaucerian), Middle Scots, and early Modern English, as well as the Busch recension and a contemporary English translation. The burden of this tongue-in-cheek scholarly display of textual analysis, iconographic description, manuscript history, and critical appraisal is that Wilhelm Busch was not, after all, the author of Max und Moritz but only a latter-day transmitter. Manfred Gorlach’s labor of love in creating this elaborately extensive spoof of linguistic analysis and textual criticism should earn him a special Nobel Prize for

The Entry of Wealth in the Middle Scots "Crying of ane Playe"

Even should it prove worthwhile, disentangling the popular from the official in late medieval urban shows and entertainments would not always prove easy. Rarely do civic records show the festive and the ceremonious standing clearly against each other, nor is there much reason to think of these two tendencies as starkly opposed during the celebrations themselves. After all, planning a celebration in about 1500, the officers of a town or fraternity could hardly ignore the wishes of the townspeople to kick over the traces: a day off with plenty to eat and drink (especially for those of highest standing) thus signifies liberation as well as official generosity. Degree and privilege are unlikely to be forgotten for long when the town fathers give the people a respite. The shows and games associated with civic holidays have often been seen in terms of this doubleness of inclusion and discrimination. According to the social historian R. H. Hilton, such entertainments embodied and extended the gild and fraternity conviviality and solidarity while being equally beneficial to the over-all exercise of authority.l The counterpoise of liberation and control also figures prominently in discussions of the civic holiday as a popular event. In her introduction to a volume of essays on forms and conventions of inversion, for example, Barbara Babcock has noted that during the entertainment itself, there cannot be liberation without rules to channel and contain it: inversions of norms and basic categories function both as a fundamental form of 'play' and as a means of inducing a restrictive or artificial environment in which social threat can paradoxically be expressed without threatening.2

The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland by Roy James Goldstein (review)

288ARTHURIANA and kinship; moreover, it serves to establish mindset similar to the one which provided the basis for nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the time one arrives at chapter 9, a paradigm shift has occured. To explain Blind Haty's displacement ofhistorical 'suthfastnes' with racial mythology, symbolism, and romance elements, Goldstein has gradually augmented the importance ofcontemporary psychoanalytic theory for his study. In a bold (and fairly unproblematized) analogy Goldstein transposes Harold Bloom's theory ofpoetic revisionism (usually confined to post-Enlightenment poets) to Hary's replacement of 'misprision' of sources/masters/ fathers' readings ofScottish history. Thus, Wallace's transgression against king Bruce, just like Hary's transgression(s) against the authority ofhistory, emerges as an antithetical completion ofa precursor/father's work. Goldstein's study obviously follows in the wake ofrecent historicizing investigations in medieval studies. It is immensely learned and employs a concise and lucid language. In addition, it avoids - Pattersonian-style - the danger of applying 'absolutizing, totalizing schemes' to arrive at its social readings (L. Patterson, Chaucerandthe Subject ofHistory. Madison, WI: U. ofWisconsin Press, 1991: 425). Despite a few typos (e.g., Ranke's 'wie es eigentlich gewesen' p. 9, 'Vees[l]er' p. 291, 'Wolfenbüt[t]el' p. 312, 'Geschic[h]te' p. 320), the book is also a fine example of scholarly and editorial exactitude. Mote importantly, it should bear testimony to the quality oftheory-driven readings of medieval texts. RICHARD J . UTZ University of Northern Iowa ROY james Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Pp. 386; index, bibliography, end-notes, illustrations, map. isbn: 0-8032-2144-4. $40.00. Professor Goldstein's difficult but rewarding book is an attempt to explain an explanation. Medieval Scotland, ever The Other to England, deliberately set out to set itself apatt from its neighbor to the south by a series of 'historical' or 'myth-historical' narratives called upon to justify its claimed status as a separate nation within a feudal setting where its independence was repeatedly in conflict with claims to homage by the English crown. The dispute even reached as far as the Pope in Rome, being memorialized in the lines from Dante's Paradiso xix 121-23 which form the epigraph for this book: 'Le si vedra la superbia ch'assetajchefa Io Scotto e l'Inghilesefollejsi che non puo soffrir dentro a sua meta.' (trans Singleton ...'There shall be seen the pride that quickens thirst, which makes the Scot and the Englishman mad, so that neither can keep within his own bounds.) The 'Historical Narrative' of the title, then, refers to these acts of prideful self-definition, brandished in the scriptorial war of words and used as rallying cries in the all-too-real battles which ensued. 'Freedom,' cried John Barbour, author of the Bruce, 'is a noble thing!' Never mind the pun inside the slogan; Scotsmen ofall ranks fought alongside the nobles for this perhaps illusory birthright, and when the Wats of REVIEWS289 Independence were over, took it to heart as their own invention, causing no end of proud trouble to the present day, leading directly from Bannockburn to Flodden Field to Bonnie Prince Charlie to the quarrel over North Sea oil. The original texts ate, ofcourse, obscure to all but the specialist in Old or Middle Scots, and Prof. Goldstein does an admirable job of elucidating and paraphrasing them, placing them in context with one another and with the historical events they were intended to illuminate or define. Here, of course, his confessedly neo-Marxist critical vocabulary may prove something ofa stumbling block for readers reared on the Plain Style. Faced down, however, the difficulties resolve themselves into unfamiliar jargon that becomes at least potentially useful in rethinking, in necessarily different terms, the problems an earlier generation of scholars had left at the margins. Learning to translate this terminology quickly repays itself in a deeper understanding of the ideology and the power relationships in the borders between Scotland and England. Admittedly, sometimes this vocabulary and the conceptual structures it reflects can be heavy going for the unwary or the lightly-armed. The 'semiotic rectangle' deployed to illustrate the...

Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology ed. by John W. Conlee.

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER impact ofvernacular literary practice, and no real frame is provided for the essays that follow. The introduction ends with a sketchy list of "major medieval my­ thographers" and ten pages of bibliography. Each succeeding essay has its own appended bibliography, and the book concludes with a twenty-five­ page bibliography that includes, as far as I can see, all the works already cited and nothing else. The bibliographies take up more than sixty pages, or about 20 percent ofthe book, and there seems to have been no attempt to impose a system, or even eliminate an overlap that causes some works to be listed five or six times. The result is a book that could be forty pages shorter and one that, despite the coherence promised by the title, will be read for its disiecta membra. WINTHROP WETHERBEE Cornell University JOHN W CONLEE, ed. Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical An­ thology . East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1991. Pp. xliv, 329. $38.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. Of the literary genres most dear to the Middle Ages, none has been more generally acknowledged yet, at the same time, morepractically unavailable to modern readers than debate poetry. Admittedly, select exemplars like The Owl and the Nightingale and Chaucer's Parlement ofFoules have been often printed and much celebrated. Nevertheless, largely estranged as these poems have been from their esoteric literary contexts, many of their essential qualities have gone unnoticed and unappreciated. Thus, while sensibly deciding to exclude such canonical works from his scholarly an­ thology, John Conlee has in some ways given the general medievalist even these masterworks for the first time, by beginning to reconstitute the specific genre in which they take their fullest meaning. Such a collection is long overdue, and one can only hope that it and Michel-Andre Bossy's continentally-focused Medieval Debate Poetry: Vernacular Wbrks (1987) will soon be complemented by a critical anthology gathering (and translat­ ing) some of the many Latin poems central to the tradition. Conlee's selection of Middle English texts is judicious and generous, running to twenty-four items. Debate poets were among the most gener108 REVIEWS ically sensitive and inventive of medieval authors, and Conlee provides sufficient examples from most of the identifiable debate subgenres to suggest the evolution and manipulation of traditions involved. Represent­ ing "Body and Soul" poems are two early invective monologues by the soul ("The Grave" and "Nou is mon hol and soint"), two later dialogues between flesh and spirit ("In a )Jestri stude I stod" and "Als I lay in a winteris nyt"), and the gruesomely charming "Disputation between the Body and Worms." An appropriate 100 pages go to the three major alliterative debates, "Winner and Waster," "The Parliament of the Three Ages," and "Death andLife." And of the "Didactic and Satiric Disputations" available, Conlee opts for a good balance of doctrinal and secular concern, resolution and ambivalence, seriousness and whimsy; included are ''.Jesus and the Masters of the Laws of theJews," "A Disputation between a Christian and aJew," "A Dialogue between the Part Sensitive and the Part Intellective," "The De­ bate between Mercy and Righteousness," "Mede & moche thank" (Courtier versus Soldier), "The Debate between Nurture and Kynd," and the curious and arguably feminist "Debate of the Carpenter's Tools." Of the extant "Bird Debates" we are given "The Thrush and the Night­ ingale," Clanvowe's "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," "The Clerk and the Nightingale I & II" (Conlee contending that both fragments derive from a single original), "The Merle and the Nightingale," and "A Parliament of Birds." Carrying on the "gender debate" and filling out the selection are four "Middle English Pastourelles": the Harley "Meeting in the Wood," "As I stod on a day," "Throughe a forest as I can ryde," and the bawdy Middle Scots "Adventure on a Wednesday." If any subgenres are missing from the collection, they are the "demonic debates" (related to the aforementioned "Christian and Jew" and boasting intriguing pieces like the quasi­ pastourelle "Inter Diabolus et Virgo" and the witty "Parliament of Devils") and the "debates" related to courtly games, such as the "Holly and Ivy" carols and "The Floure and theLeafe."Another work one...

Magic in the Middle Ages by Richard Kieckhefer

REVIEWS of Lampeter, Dyfed, appeared in 1990, and my completed edition of University of Glasgow, Hunterian 83 will appear with a new edition of Shirley's Cronycle ofthe Dethe of]amesStewarde. I have recently published "King Arthur and the Medieval English Chronicles" in Valerie M. Lagorio and Mildred Day Leake, eds., King Arthur Through the Ages (New York and London: Garland, 1990), and my contribution, entitled "A Great Divide: Historical Principles in Early and Middle Scots Literature," is forthcoming in ACTA, ed. David Lampe. Such interest in Middle English historical writings can only be enhanced, and future research facilitated and directed, by Donald Kennedy's fine guide. LISTER M. MATHESON Michigan State University RICHARD KIECKHEFER. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. X, 219. $39.50. As one of a new series of specially commissioned introductory texts for teachers and students, Richard Kieckhefer's book on medieval magic should find a wide and diverse audience. It is comprehensive both chrono­ logically and thematically, surveying practices and beliefs, attitudes and responses from late antiquity through the fifteenth century and ranging from the unambiguously magical outward in a number of directions to where magic merged almost imperceptibly with science, medicine, and religion. True to its introductory nature, the book provides elementary background information on every topic covered, but with such great economy that the author has ample room to develop arguments that should stimulate the thinking of almost anyone interested in medieval cultural history. Magic, as Kieckhefer demonstrates, is peculiarly revealing of the char­ acter of medieval life since it occupied a place at the intersections of religion and science, popular and learned culture, fiction and reality, and the cultural streams that flowed into European Christendom from the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, Arabs, andJews. Two late-medieval manuscripts introduced in the first chapter and referred to regularly throughout the book exemplify this point. The first is a vernacular handbook for an estate 213 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER manager replete with prescriptions that freely mix folk medicine, liturgical formulas, pseudo-Greek and Latin letters and words, and ingredients such as bat's blood to cure disease and bolster health. The other is a Latin text that merges "astral" magic and Christian exorcisms in the pursuit of necromancy-the art ofconjuring spirits to do the bidding of a magician. These two manuscripts exemplify as well two basic distinctions that the author would like to maintain-i.e., between "natural" and "demonic" magic and between a common magical tradition that spanned the whole of the Middle Ages and a more specialized tradition that arose among literate clerics after the twelfth century, when translations of Greco-Arabic astro­ logical and magical works provided a new basis for both types ofmagic. The German manuscript, whose prescriptions would not have been perceived by its users asparticularly demonic, belongs to thatcommon tradition. The necromancer's manual is a product ofa secretive late-medieval magical elite and does not attempt to hide its explicitly demonic character. A final distinction, which I am not sure the author has quite managed to maintain, involves the definition ofmagic itself. Kieckhefer rejects the view that an act is magical ifit attempts to coerce spiritual forces into action and religious ifit is supplicatory. His own definitionlocates magic in contradis­ tinction to both religion and science by focusing on the kind of power invoked. Where religion and science call on divine action or the manifest powers of nature, magic relies on demonic aid or occult (hidden) powers in nature. This definition nicely clarifies the difference between demonic and natural magic, but what are we to make of an "explicitly demonic" conjura­ tion like that on pages 166-67, which calls on the power of God to compel demons to do the magician's will? Instances like this point up the difficulty of creating almost any simple definition of magic in the Middle Ages. But that is a minor problem, for, while Kieckhefer's definition may not fit every example he cites, he takes great care in mapping the shifting and overlapping borders ofmagic, science, and religion and often reminds his readers that the handy...

Words and Wordsmiths: a Volume for H. L. Rogers (review)

Reviews 187 (1956) and two supplements by K. V. Sinclair (1978 and 1987), nor with Sinclair's three-volume repertory French Devotional Texts of the Middle Ages (1979-1988). In the section concerned with the technical description of the numerous Wdters manuscripts (pp. 171-225), reference is continually made to the fact that information has been gleaned from the forthcoming magnum opus of LiUian M . C. RandaU, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery. Having had occasion myself to consult this work in proof form, it is very obvious to m e how great a debt is owed her by the organisers of Time Santified. Admittedly, it is one they acknowledge fully. Perhaps a more equitable arrangement would have been for the Wdters technicd accounts to have appeared under her name. Peter Rolfe Monks Townsville Words and Wordsmiths: a Volume for H. L. Rogers, ed. G. Barnes, et al., Sydney, University of Sydney, Department of English, 1989; pp. vi, 173; R.R.P. A U S $10.00. Of the seventeen essays in this collection three ded with Old English. John Gray, in a lucid discussion of the much disputed lines 1080-96 of the Finn episode in Beowulf, offers a simple and persuasive solution to a notoriously complex problem. Alex Jones brings computer analysis to bear on the lexical structure Of The Battle of Maldon. Naomi Robinson demonstrates Aelfric's careful distinction among the various O E synonyms for 'living'. T w o pieces have a historical orientation. Sonya Jensen shows that the two Merlins of Giraldus Cambrensis - 'Abrosius' and 'Silvester' - are in fact 'one and the same' character (p. 48) and John Kennedy asks what can be discovered about the office of a go5i from a study of Egils saga. In the sole essay on Middle Scots, Philippa Bright defends Henryson's figurative technique in The Cock and the Jasp. Middle English is well represented. There are four fine essays on Chaucer: Geralidine Barnes on his manipulation of 'a variety of narrative modes (romance, epic, tragedy, philosophical discourse)' in the Knight's Tale (p. 10); Gary Simes on 'the unhistoricd application' of the notion of bawdy to his writings (p. 112); Margaret Singer on the words aventure and grace in the Franklin's Tale; and Diane Speed on the language and background of the Physician's tale. T w o pieces deal with mystery plays. Lee Jobling offers a detailed discussion of the character of Pilate in the York cycle and Margaret Rogerson shows, through an examination of the late medieval civic records at York, that the number of episodes presented in the cycle may have varied from year to year. Betsy Taylor, 188 Reviews in the remaining essay on Middle English, finds positive reasons for Malory's reluctance to show Launcelot and Guinevere abed togydirs. The four other contributions, all deding with the m o d e m period, are a mixed bag. Don Anderson's piece on usage, with which the collection unhappily opens, is a reprinted newspaper article riddled with infelicities grosser than those it pretends not to pillory. ('How can I deplore "quote" being used as a noun when that scourge of the tautology, Alex Buzo, does just that...?' But even those who accept this treatement of being as a participle rather than a verbd noun must wonder what it is that Buzo does. Does he use 'quote' as a noun or does he deplore such a usage? The context requires the former; the syntax the latter.) John Gunn discourses chattily on terms associated with beer-drinking in this thirstiest of continents. Robert Eagleson shows how linguistic evidence was used in a recent homicide trial to prove that the accused was himself the author of a typewritten 'farewell' letter which he cldmed had been written by his wife before her disappearance. This compelling topic cries out for the full supporting evidence -the complete texts of the letter in question and of the accompanying samples of the couple's writings (as opposed merely to the brief quotations we are given from them). Such evidence, amounting to some nine and a half thousand words (p. 22), could profitably have been included instead of Michael...

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Middle Scots Poets: a Reference Guide to James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas. Edited by WALTER SCHEPS and J. ANNA LOONEY. Pp. xvi+292. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986. $55. SALLY MAPSTONE SALLY MAPSTONE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 151, August 1987, Pages 383–384, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXVIII.151.383 Published: 01 August 1987

The Middle Scots expansion of Iesu, nostra redemptio, and a ghost in the Bannatyne manuscript

The Middle Scots expansion of Iesu, nostra redemptio, and a ghost in the Bannatyne manuscript

Affective Style In Middle Scots: The Education Of The Reader In Three Fables By Robert Henryson.

Affective Style In Middle Scots: The Education Of The Reader In Three Fables By Robert Henryson.

King Hart: Rhetoric and meaning in a Middle Scots allegory

King Hart: Rhetoric and meaning in a Middle Scots allegory