Barbour’s Bruce and its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland ed. by Steve Boardman and Susan Foran (review)

As the title and subtitle indicate, Barbour’s Bruce and its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland offers interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to Barbour’s Bruce (c. 1375), the first fully preserved literary text in Scots. The volume successfully explores new perspectives and also elaborates on existing ideas on the poem. The book is proficiently edited by historians Steve Boardman and Susan Foran, who have skilfully managed to give unity and coherence to a collection which drinks from many different sources.

The editors’ introduction is an excellent preamble to the collection. As well as introducing the chapters, the editors contextualise the contemporary socio-political and cultural atmosphere, the writer’s life and the text itself. They also underline the role and prominence of Sir James Douglas, a hero second only to Robert Bruce himself, somewhat to the detriment of other Scottish leaders. Under note 10, a long bibliography of different studies on The Bruce over the years helps the reader realise the richness of the romance, which has brought about a wealth of research and approaches ranging from history to literary studies and linguistics.

Notwithstanding its eminently interdisciplinary focus, the book can be divided into two main halves: it opens with the more ‘literary-based’ approaches, leaving the more ‘history-based’ chapters to the second half of the volume. Emily Wingfield’s first chapter very pertinently deals with the manuscript history and circulation of The Bruce. This is followed by Rhiannon Purdie’s thought-provoking chapter. Hers is a remarkable contribution, which questions some previous assumptions that proposed that the ideology and dialectics of the romance included all the social classes in its emancipatory vision of Scotland, and not only the upper classes. Purdie convincingly argues against that idea, aligning herself with R. James Goldstein’s conclusions in his seminal book, The Matter of Scotland (1993), despite the very different theoretical methodology used by both scholars. Finally, from a scholastic perspective, Theo van Heijnsbergen examines the readership and rhetoric of the narrative.

From a comparative studies perspective, Chris Given-Wilson’s and Diana B. Tyson’s chapters analyse The Bruce in the broader European context. Generally, scholars have tended to examine the romance in the Scottish context in which it was written or measure it against the historical milieu to which it refers, traditionally known as the Scottish Wars of Independence. Similarly, from a literary perspective, comparisons have tended to be reduced to the neighbouring English, and above all Northern English, romances, or at most to Barbour’s mention of a few Anglo-Norman romances in The Bruce. Nevertheless, owing to the international scope of Early and Middle Scots literature, it is of the greatest importance to situate the text in a broader European reference framework. These two chapters endeavour to fill this gap, which only a few earlier studies have done in the past. The only objection, if any, would be that at times these two chapters draw away from The Bruce a bit too much. As a result, some of the promisingly suggested common features are not completely assessed.

The more ‘history-based’ chapters open with Susan Foran’s discussion on Barbour’s use of chivalric concepts as a ‘political language’ (p. 140) and how chivalry channels the national discourse. Whereas freedom in The Bruce has been examined from many different perspectives, Biörn Tjällén analyses its counterpart, thraldom. He demonstrates Barbour’s use of Aristotelian and scholastic practices in the writer’s presentation of thraldom. Going beyond the confines of the romance, Dauvit Broun discusses the origins of the terms ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scots’ and their evolution from the late twelfth century to the late thirteenth century when both terms probably started to refer to the conceptualisation of Scottish identity as understood nowadays. He also encourages critical approaches which will help...