The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland: Manuscript Production and Transmission, 1560–1625 by Sebastiaan Verweij (review)

Scotland’s Renaissance is still something of a recent discovery. Although movements in literary criticism tend to have only very arbitrary starting points, a new era in the study of early-modern Scottish literature may be said to have opened in 1997 with the Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature, 1375–1707, and in particular, the critical introduction by R. D. S. Jack. He argued for a reconceptualising of Scottish writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in doing so, reclaimed a Renaissance, with all of the cultural implications of the word, for a period of time which had typically been understood as a long and flourishing Middle Ages followed immediately by a dour Reformation. In the twenty years since Jack’s essay, a fruitful generation of scholars has been establishing and redefining a Scottish canon, uncovering lost works in manuscripts, and tackling the vexed question of what might constitute a national literature around the years of the union with England. Despite their substantial body of work, this is still a new field, and so Sebastiaan Verweij’s important new monograph represents the first book-length study of Scottish manuscript culture in the early-modern period.

The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland is grounded in the discipline of book history, which south of the border has provided so many insights into conditions underlying the writing and reception of texts – but crucially, it reinterprets these insights for the Scottish context. As Verweij points out, Scottish literature will inevitably look meagre if scholars come seeking a parallel to the rich manuscript collections of the English universities and Inns of Court: Scotland has a distinct paucity of literary works associated with these communities. On the other hand, Verweij’s account highlights other thriving centres of manuscript production. His book is arranged around three sets of literary spaces: the royal court; urban centres, including the households of burghers and institutions like song schools; and regional or rural households. Although he says that the numbers of manuscripts do not compare with those available to scholars of the English Renaissance, he makes a strong case for their richness – and since new manuscripts are unearthed all the time (Jamie Reid Baxter’s discovery of Elizabeth Melville’s considerable oeuvre is a case in point) we can expect the roll of Scottish works to continue to grow.

Verweij’s approach is one that he describes as ‘fine-grained’: in other words, close scrutiny of a single text, or even a single poem. This often yields insights into broader trends and textual communities. His analysis of Alexander Montgomerie’s Cherrie and the Slae (pp. 171–74) in the context of the Laing Manuscript in which it is recorded radically unsettles the consensus that the poem was a crypto-Catholic work consumed by Catholic readers. The devotional poetry of the Laing MS is all firmly Protestant, suggesting that, whatever Montgomerie’s own intentions, his allegory was not necessarily received as subversive by his Calvinist contemporaries. Analysis of works by William Fowler and James VI proves equally illuminating.

This is not to say, however, that Verweij is a miniaturist. One of the great strengths of this book lies in the overviews which open each chapter. The author’s deft summaries of the state of scholarly play in relation to the issues at stake in his various sections would be worthwhile on their own, even without the Scottish case studies which follow. His lucid précis of a wide range of existing research in book history, and the clear-sighted perspectives he brings to bear when applying this research to the matter at hand, speaks of his real mastery of the subject. It would be hard to say which came first – this theoretical subtlety, or what must have been tireless years of archival work – but manuscript studies has profited hugely, either way.

Verweij makes for an unassuming and modest guide...