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

William Calin is the doyen of studies of medieval French literature and poetry, Breton, Scots, and Occitan, an ‘internationally recognized Maker of the Middle Ages himself’ (Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery in their preface to a recent festschrift). He encouraged and developed the research of most of the best-known scholars in the field, to whom he expresses his gratitude in the Introduction to this work. The footnotes alone serve as a guide to all the studies that have been made of the individual medieval and Renaissance Scottish poets considered. These are, with the exception of Mary Queen of Scots, people who wrote in Scots. Works in Gaelic are not considered although they might cast some interesting light on the sources. The problem of oral usage is only touched on. Because these poems are now accessible only when a written version survives, it is the literary texts that determine Calin’s understanding and interpretation.

Calin’s identification of French works that parallel or may have inspired the Scottish poets and his consideration of the traditions to which they belong casts light on the ways in which narratives were adapted, embellished, and extended to meet contemporary Scottish needs. He shows how the Scottish poets belonged to the whole European tradition in which embodied entities such as Philosophy, Nature, or Fortune played a critical role in poetic exploration of reality and reflections on subjectivity, morality, and time. The effect of translation and quotation on the ways in which ideas are transmitted filters through what are a series of snapshots of the works of poets who wrote in Scots from the time of The Kynges Quair to James VI. These are divided into four parts, distinguished by genre, each of which makes the case for the Scottish writer using that genre and being directly influenced by or borrowing themes from contemporary French poetry. The choice of genres results in some important writers like John Barbour being omitted.

Some of Calin’s analogies are more convincing than others. Considering that the constant symbolic use of the rose and lily goes as far back as Walafrid Strabo in Charlemagne’s time and was common everywhere, and taking into account the context in which it was written, surely William Dunbar’s Rose in The Thrissel and the Rose must be the Tudor Rose?

The tightly inward looking nature of this scholarship restricts explanations that look beyond the literary context. It is wholly focused on the texts. The historian looks in vain for the more general contextual explanations for French influence in Scotland. Where is the Auld Alliance, the significant presence of French merchants in Scottish towns, the notice of students going to Paris for their university education, the structuring of the court and the patronage of monarch and noble?

This leads this reader to have reservations about his wisdom in including Mary Queen of Scots’s writings in French that surely have a very different background from the rest. Treating the Casket sonnets as authentic opens a further can of worms that surely contributes little to an analysis of the role of the French tradition in Scotland. Relating them to the work of Louise l’Abbé can only create further doubt if recent French scholarship that seeks to demonstrate that l’Abbé’s works are male creations is accepted.

Calin’s whole underlying conviction, as is made clear in his conclusion, is that the French literary tradition was the most influential and pervasive in the period throughout Europe and very obviously in Scotland. Even the humanist turning back to classical texts that had been newly revised to eliminate error is given a French ambience. The implication is that ideas and forms must have a single point of generation and a clear path of transmission. As a result his amazing scholarship is unidirectional. But are the French sui generis...