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

It is generally accepted that France impacted less on early Scottish literature than on its English equivalent: if nobles and clergy brought French loan words into the Scots lexicon, there was nothing comparable to the flourishing of ‘Anglo-Norman’ writing. However, William Calin endeavours to show how, in the medieval and Renaissance literature of Scotland, the French tradition offered a wide range of genres and styles, which Scots authors made their own. Breaking with the age-old focus on Anglo-Scottish exchanges, he situates Scottish books in a larger intertextual context, international and European. Beginning with The Kingis Quair, attributed to James I, Calin then shows various French influences on the Makars Douglas, Dunbar, and Henryson. A new approach is offered on intertextual relations between Pierre Gringore’s Le Prince des Sotz and David Lyndsay’s classic Thrie Estaitis. Some of the most interesting pages are devoted to Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI/I. Mary was, ‘if not a great poet, a very good one’ (p. 234): her amatory and devotional verse — whose authenticity Calin vigorously defends — bears the influence of Ronsard and other Renaissance giants. James VI inherited her Francophilia but certainly not her Catholicism: his own verse is shown to be strongly coloured by that of the Huguenot Du Bartas, whom he translated. Calin ends by continuing the recent ‘rehabilitation’ of William Drummond of Hawthornden. A hopelessly out of date Petrarchan who wrote exclusively in English, Drummond had no place in the ‘Scots Renaissance’ Pleiade created by Hugh MacDiarmid and other nationalist intellectuals. Yet Calin argues that the baroque mentality of Drummond’s longer texts shows an unmistakeable French imprint. The question of what remains uniquely ‘Scottish’ in this intertextual web persists. If Calin thankfully rejects the Romantic idea that Scottish literature is ‘close to the Volk’ (p. 299), he does find something specifically Scottish in the flyting and the eldritch: a taste for scatology, verbal abuse, and brawling seems to mark the Scots out from their Sassenach and continental cousins. Calin also claims — this time without any proof — that Scots, compared with the French or the English, discuss the situation of culture in greater depth and with greater passion. Scottish literature, he concludes, is ‘multilingual and multicultural, expansive and ever expanding’ (p. 301). But could this description not be applied to all literatures? And why should literature be approached exclusively through the prism of nationality? After all, as this punchy and well-researched book shows, ‘Scottish’ authors of the period had very much as their references Antiquity and the fierce loves and hatreds of religious warfare.