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

Joanna Martin begins with the arresting assertion that "the discussion of love and the use of discourses connected with the amatory are fundamental to the advisory, ethical, and political nature of much of the verse writing [in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scotland]" (p. vii). This departs from the more commonly held view, as the author notes, which maintains that little Scottish love poetry has survived and that in the extant literature of the period the moral and instructional content far outweighs the amatory. For her fresh approach, Martin looks again, with an observant eye, at The Kingis Quair, The Quare of Jelusy, Lancelot of the Laik, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice, The Thre Prestis of Peblis, King Hart, and the poems of James V's minority years (Bellenden, Stewart, Lyndsay). All of these works, Martin observes, are influenced by didactic writing in the speculum principis, or "advice to princes" tradition; call attention to the governance of self that is vital for the proper governance of others; and yet are "amatory discourses—love narrative, love lyric, amatory debate, vision or complaint, [or in] the register of fin' amor" (p. 2). The inclusion of religious examples could have given Martin a further dimension to her premise. Poems such as Dunbar's "Amang thir freiris within ane cloister," with its refrain emphasizing reciprocal love, of God for the soul and man's for God, might have had a thought-provoking place in a full discussion of the relationship between the amatory and the advisory. In terms of material, however, there is already ample, and the book has much to offer.

Kingship and Love benefits from the author's several strengths: an (all too rare) knowledge of contemporary English poetry, including the works of Gower, Hoccleve, Clanvowe, and Lydgate (see, for example, at pp. 9, 23, 24 at n. 16, 37, and 81); an informed interest in the responses of early readers, and in their identities (for instance, pp. 31, 33, 76, 80); an awareness that on some occasions the choice of, or change in, stanza form has a thematic significance (pp. 34, 91); a sensitivity to the potential importance of unnoticed details, such as the allusion, in the romance of Clariodus, V, 58–9, to Orpheus as a sovereign (p. 85); and an up-to-the-minute knowledge of manuscript history and contexts (as at pp. 59, 128, or 139). Not all of this is reflected in the index. There are no entries, for instance, for the various stanza forms mentioned, thus no way of gathering Martin's often perceptive comments on their uses.

There are, too, many instances of poor copyediting—"octasyllabic" for "octosyllabic" (p. 78), "Bear's Tale" for "Boar's Tale" (p. 78, n. 54), "taught" for "taut" (p. 86), "Judicial" for "Juridical" (pp. 107, 192), "yews" for "ewes" (p. 156), among them. Using the title provided by Martin (p. 11, n. 36), it is difficult to find Furnivall's Early English Text Society edition in university library catalogues. The given title should have begun "Queene Elizabethes Achademy …" A misquotation of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue damages Martin's argument (p. 145, text and n. 75). The correct quotation is "alter for the worse."

Such matters should not be allowed to overshadow the book's merits. Martin's opening-chapter discussion of The Kingis Quair, The Quare of Jelusy, and the other contents of the manuscript in which they are both found, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, is well-organized and closely argued, especially the discussion of The Kingis Quair. This has benefited (as Martin acknowledges) from earlier work on the poem by Sally Mapstone. Martin is sure-footed as she shows by careful exploration that the narrator's encounters with the three female goddesses are all important stages in the process of discovering that "the experience of love can lead one to sagacity" (p. 25) and that it...