Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland by Katherine H. Terrell (review)

Katherine Terrell’s Scripting the Nation is a detailed, engaging, and authoritative account of the relationship between late medieval Scottish historiography and courtly poetry. This book takes a fresh approach to the well-established subject of Anglo-Scottish literary relations by considering how these two apparently distinct strands of Scotland’s literary culture interweave with one another and with analogous English traditions to define a sense of Scottish nationhood. Terrell observes that ‘the very nature of a border implies a relationship between sides; borders are points of interaction as well as separation’ (p. 49), and the monograph skilfully maps the appropriation and repudiation of English sources in the development of the two Scottish genres. Her detailed account covers chronicle literature composed in the aftermath of the ‘Wars of Independence’ (1279–1328, 1332–1357), in which Scotland’s political integrity was constantly under threat from English aggression, and the vernacular verse of the early sixteenth century, composed before the defeat of James IV by the English at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.

The first three chapters of this book focus on the development of Scottish historiography and its methods of shaping, and indeed ‘actively promoting,’ national identity and ‘Scotland’s political destiny’ (p. 10). Chapter One considers the patronage of historiography as England and Scotland embarked on an ideological battle to define their borders. This chapter shows how English and Scottish records of the past were ‘interdependent’ (p. 14): Scotland’s chroniclers set about refuting the narratives of their English forebears by also co-opting their rhetorical strategies in an act of ‘writing back’ (p. 4). Terrell also argues for the prominence of the ‘genealogical mode . . . in Scottish historical writing, which, like much medieval history writing is often more concerned with the present-day uses of the past than with establishing an accurate record of past events’ (p. 35), and later in the study she identifies these same genealogical tropes in Older Scots courtly poetry. Chapter Two explores the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s narratives of national origin in his Historia Regum Brittanie on Scottish historians, including Baldred Bisset and John of Fordun. Terrell shows how Fordun, in his Chronica Gentis Scotorum, negotiates the contradictions of his English sources and challenges their authority, much in the way that Robert Henryson, an important link between the scholastic tradition of the chroniclers and Older Scots verse, does in his critical evaluation of Chaucer’s authority in Testament of Cresseid. Chapter Three is an exploration of Walter Bower’s influential Scotichronicon, an expansion of Fordun’s text, which Terrell characterises as ‘a compendium of Scottishness that will facilitate nationalist sentiment’ amongst his readers (p. 80).

After this comprehensive guide to the development of nationalist sentiment in Scottish history writing, Chapter Four turns to Older Scots vernacular literature and the often-paradoxical relationship to English texts it shares with Scotland’s Latin chronicle tradition. She explores the increasingly ‘grandiose’ (p. 94) nationalistic claims made by the authors of vernacular offshoots from Bower’s Scotichronicon, such as the Scottis Originale, and the dynamics created by their co-existence in manuscript anthologies such as the Asloan Manuscript with texts of English origin or those which express enthusiasm for the Chaucerian tradition: ‘the result is a curious dichotomy, in which English culture is both denounced and venerated’ (p. 101). Chapters Five to Seven turn to the most technically brilliant of the Scottish poets, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. Identifying the shared concerns of poets and chroniclers with ‘ancestral’ narratives (p. 128), Terrell offers detailed and perceptive close readings of many of Dunbar’s poems. She suggests convincingly that Dunbar’s poetry mirrors the tensions at the heart of James IV’s reign as the Anglophile impulses of his court were tempered by deteriorating relations with Henry VIII...