The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland by William Calin (review)

The back jacket of The Lily and the Thistle features endorsements by Kate Ash of the University of Manchester and Rhiannon Purdie of the University of St. Andrews to the effect that the book provides “fruitful approaches” to its subject matter and is a “valuable reference work.” Both endorsements of The Lily and the Thistle accurately describe the book’s extremely detailed and revisionary engagement with the recorded literary texts of Scotland’s Middle Ages and their French textual influences. Calin’s objective in The Lily and the Thistle is, broadly, to reconsider the French sources for Scottish literature in the medieval period in light of the fact that, in the last half-century, both French and Scottish literatures of the Middle Ages have benefitted from “new ways of looking at [them].” These new ways of seeing things are the result, notably, of reading practices that rose to prominence with the advent of literary postmodernism, reader-response theory, and gender and women’s studies. Consequently, the corpus of potential candidates for inclusion in the scope of Calin’s literary analysis has expanded or changed in light of the fact that new texts have been uncovered or well-known texts have been reconsidered by specialists in Scottish and medieval literatures.

In order to achieve his objective, Calin divides The Lily and the Thistle into four sections. The first concerns itself with medieval narrative texts in the high courtly mode. Taken together, the constituent chapters in this first section (which treats works by Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, William Dunbar, and John Rolland) are preoccupied with generic designation, classifying as tales of love those texts that have traditionally been seen as Chaucerian. In doing so, these chapters work to broaden the generic roots of Scottish texts beyond the works of Chaucer to the French dits amoureux, “one of the major genres, perhaps the major genre, in late medieval France” (4). The second section again treats works by Henryson and Dunbar, together with David Lyndsay and others whose works can be classified as ecclesiastical, didactic, and satirical, at once appealing to a courtly audience yet not defined by a “courtly ethos.” The third section focuses on medieval romances composed in Scotland, such as Lancelot of the Laik, Golagros and Gawane, The Taill of Rauf Coilyear, and Eger and Grime, which carry the traces of French romance and of the Old French epic. The fourth and final section shifts from the Middle Ages to the Scots Renaissance and contains chapters on Mary Queen of Scots, James VI/I, William Alexander, and William Drummond of Hawthornden. Calin justifies the unconventional inclusion of Mary Queen of Scots in this section by implicitly recalling his objective to treat neglected works. Given that Mary’s poetry is composed in French, “until the last ten years or so [it] was neglected by Scottish literary scholars” (5).

In the introduction, Calin admits that he does not intend for his corpus to be exhaustive. Absent from the primary corpus, then, are direct translations, texts by the Makars which have little to no French connection, history (either in verse or in prose), or chivalric conduct books. In effect, Calin excludes from his corpus those texts that have little demonstrated connection to the literature of France, or those works whose “Frenchness” has been sufficiently discussed or proven. With the exception of Mary Queen of Scots, who wrote in French, the writers considered here wrote in Scots. Despite his acknowledgement of “the continued presence of Gaelic” (8) in the sixteenth century, Calin’s primary focus lies with the growth and development of literature in Scots in the Medieval and Renaissance periods.

Towards the middle of the introduction, Calin clarifies that he is unconcerned with the “microanalysis of Scottish texts and their French sources” (6). Instead, he is concerned with “situating the Scottish books in an enlarged intertextual frame of reference.” The method here is...