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

In her impeccably researched book, Joanna Martin makes an important contribution to our understanding of both canonical and less frequently read Scottish texts of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by concentrating on the relation between the themes of royal governance and love. The preface describes her approach as "historicist and cultural," explaining that "the amatory content of each work is related to the intellectual and political context . . . or to the interpretive context(s) provided by the manuscripts or prints in which it survives." Among the most valuable aspects of her study, in fact, are the detailed analyses of codicological matters that shed light on the production and early reception of each work. The most important political context that she identifies is the uninterrupted succession of royal minorities from James I through James VI. Given this troubled history, it is significant that the texts she studies witness "a recurrent concern . . . with the youth and consequent vulnerability" of the king "to personal misgovernance." The "advice to princes" genre is so central to the literary culture of medieval and early modern Scotland, and sexuality such a perennially worrisome issue, that Martin's sharp focus on the love-life of young kings—both fictional and real—lends coherence to her study.

This brief review can only touch on the main outlines and conclusions of the book. The introduction convincingly argues that "love is fundamental to the advisory and ethical" (1) concerns of many works from late medieval Scotland. Although some of the poetic texts she studies were composed with royal readers in mind, the surviving manuscripts and early prints were often produced or circulated outside the court, in households that were politically active. Thus Chapter 1 treats The Kingis Quair and The Quare of Jelusy from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B.24. The former text turns out to be the most "optimistic" work Martin studies, presenting the young king's "reasoned love as efficacious in an unstable world" (28). The Quare, however, is more disturbing in its "suggestion that there can be no effective resistance against tyranny" (36), though it remains hopeful about the possibility of the reader's self-reformation. Chapter 2 examines Lancelot of the Laik (c. 1460-79), an incomplete work surviving in a single manuscript. Based on the noncyclic French Lancelot, the Scots adaptation is more concerned than the original with the relation between sexual desire and governance. Martin remains alert to subtle changes of emphasis in the Scottish text, which "make the conventional collocation of love and chivalry into a way of exploring the ethical order of the self " (60). Chapter 3 focuses on another little-read work, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, an incomplete survival that nonetheless reaches nearly twenty thousand words. Its epilogue seems to suggest that the surviving text is a revised version dated 1499 of an earlier translation by Gilbert Hay from perhaps around 1460. Compared to its French source, the Scottish work gives greater emphasis to Alexander as a youthful king, "a powerful reminder of the work's genesis in fifteenth-century Scotland" (61). Especially striking is the Scottish poet's increased attention to "royal amorousness" (67). Although the young Alexander is presented as a puer senex, he is a more ambiguous figure later in the poem, which "resists clear alignment with either the wholly positive or negative aspects of the Alexander tradition" (78).

Chapter 4, one of the most interesting, turns to Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice, emphasizing that Orpheus is presented as a "young and passionate monarch" (79) in a way that emphasizes the political significance of the legend. The fable offers a "pessimistic end" (102) when the lover-king succumbs to temptation; the moralitas at least offers the hope that the reader can successfully use reason to rule over desire. Chapter 5 discusses The Thre Prestis of Peblis, a text whose immediate historical context is unclear, owing to its late survival in the Asloan MS (c. 1515-30). Yet its "political...