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

Sebastiaan Verweij introduces his book with William Drummond’s observation, that ‘Brass, Iron and Marble’ will crumble, books merely ‘change Places and Masters’ (p. 2). In seven chapters, Verweij asks questions about the role of manuscripts in the spreading of literary culture; the conditions that allowed the change of ‘Places and Masters’ (especially, where that change occurred, which was not, as in England, the universities, Inns of Court, theatres, and coffee houses); the available modes of publication for Scottish authors; and the importance of Scottish book history for a history of British early modern literature and book history (p. 3).

The first three chapters concern writing and manuscript-making at and pertaining to the court of James VI and I. Verweij starts with careful distinctions between material that is ‘courtly’ in style, genre, or trope, and that which is ‘of the court’, in conception and provenance traceable to the politically and geographically defined space of the royal household (pp. 26–27). He adds that these distinctions can be fluid, pointing to the evidence (of senior retainers’ burgh town houses and estates; of papermakers, bookbinders, printers, scribes) of the ‘variedly populated institution, place, and space’ of the court of Scotland. Discussion of the bibliographic histories of the works of Alexander Montgomerie, Alexander Hume, and Stewart of Baldynneis further exposes the complexity of courtly circulation and its forms.

This is developed in Chapter 2, on royal holographs and single poems of James VI in the manuscripts of king, servitors, and contemporaries. Verweij draws illuminatingly on references in the Cecil Papers to various versions of a now-lost text by James to highlight the King’s attempts to control circulation; and the role, further pursued later in the chapter, played by his household scribes. The gift-culture of this court — pens, paper, ink, and more, such as Lord Ruthven’s gift of ‘ane letteren’ (perhaps not the ‘copybook or style-book’ Verweij posits, but a lectern, or reading stand?) — is sketched, as is James’s ‘practice of epistolary exchange’ (pp. 70–71).

Verweij’s investigation of William Fowler’s manuscripts (Chapter 3) contains perceptive work on a textual court community that included men and women (Elizabeth Douglas, Jean Fleming, Mary Beaton) as co-writers and translators, readers and patrons; on the processes of scribal publication in which the courtier-scribe, John Geddie, is the focus, and the ways, such as study of surviving paratextual material associated with Fowler, by which the history of a work can be traced.

In the next two chapters, Verweij pursues manuscript making in the cities, towns, and burghs. The recognition that no local region is like another; that, nonetheless, the civic, courtly, and regional were interdependent, is important, throwing the spotlight on, for instance, the politically edgy writing, fictional and real, of an urban textual community of female stall-holders; on the councillors, guildsmen, ministers, and lawyers who were benefactors to town colleges; or the notaries public (priests or secular clerks working in shops, churches, booths), essential to community legal matters but also to various forms of book-making, either for patrons or personal interest. Verweij’s study of Glasgow notary, William Hegate, and his linking of George Bannatyne’s ‘Memoriall Buik’ and literary miscellany to similar works across Scotland, are instructive. The detailed investigation and provenance reconstruction of the verse miscellany EUL MS Laing III.44 (Chapter 5) give new prominence to literary and familial interactions of a group of Edinburgh burgesses, the probable compilers, and also provide a rare near-contemporary ‘interpretative framework’ (p. 173) for Montgomerie’s difficult Cherrie.

Chapters 6 and 7 examine regional book culture, once again with emphasis on the need for careful and individualized contextualization. Verweij notices books, manuscripts, and library records of noble families (Sinclairs, Campbells, Gordons, Melvilles); then individual manuscripts from across Scotland, of Margaret Wemyss, Margaret Robertson...