History, Literature, and Music in Scotland, 700-1560 (review)

Reviews 215 Parergon 21.2 (2004) although such ‘new technology’ did offer new possibilities, plays continued to be performed in other venues as well, and, as she contends, what mattered most, in this aspect of Marlowe’s art, was his grouping of the actors on stage. She is unusually aware of the impact of such a matter on the audience. Towards the end of Faustus the nature of the space between the figures changes, and the audience expectations built up by earlier spaces are overturned. When Faustus breaches the ‘magic’ space to embrace Helen, his action signals the loss of the play’s connecting spaces, the loss of all bonds, all relationships (in effect) except the bond with hell (p. 180). Personally I believe that Faustus can still be saved even after this transgression, but it certainly is a major one, and the stage action provides striking evidence of that fact. I unhesitatingly recommend this book to anyone interested in Renaissance drama generally; it will come to be seen as a truly outstanding and seminal work in the field. Joost Daalder Department of English Flinders University McDonald, R. Andrew, ed., History, Literature, and Music in Scotland, 7001560 , Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002; cloth; pp. xx, 234; RRP C$45, £28; ISBN 0802036015. The eight essays gathered for this volume are prefaced by a ninth. In this editor R. Andrew McDonald first charts the growth in interest in medieval Scotland, giving some plausible reasons for it besides Braveheart, including recent Scottish political changes. He next looks chronologically at the burgeoning scholarship on medieval Scotland (interpreting that term rather loosely), considering in some detail its changing character. McDonald then refers to the multi-disciplinary symposium on medieval Scotland held at the University of Toronto, 1998, that was the origin of the present volume. From it came two of the book’s articles, with the remaining six specially commissioned. It is important to note this; in keeping, McDonald offers the book as ‘a multi-disciplinary contribution to the study of medieval Scottish civilization’ (p. 11) and not as an attempt to redress a scholarly imbalance or lacuna identified in the earlier part of the essay. The essays are indeed varied in time, theme and approach, but there are links. Several have in common a highly dexterous use of source material. For instance 216 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) Elizabeth Ewan’s prizewinning essay, ‘“Many Injurious Words”: Defamation and Gender in Late Medieval Scotland’, is notable for its intelligent and entertaining consultation of a huge range of burgh records, statutes, charters, case, court, protocol and guildry books to examine the nature of the late-medieval tradition of insult. Similarly, Benjamin Hudson’s simply-titled essay, ‘The Scottish Gaze’, shows an admirably thorough knowledge of his chosen works, the ‘Scottish Chronicle’, the ‘Versified Psalter’, and the Prophecy of Berchan, all dating from or written about the ninth and tenth centuries, which he uses to show how these writings can qualify or add to the early historical and literary knowledge about neighbouring countries as well as of Scotland itself. Several essays, moreover, although diverse in topic or period, share a desire to re-examine issues that have already received some attention. Thus Mary Robbins in her ‘Carnival at Court and Dunbar in the Underworld’ looks again at the two sections frequently considered to be disparate in the poet’s ‘Off Februar the fyiftene nycht’, in doing so making some worthwhile comments on medieval attitudes to hell. Likewise, in ‘Tudor Family Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Margaret McIntyre looks again, but not dismissively as often has been the case, at Margaret Tudor, drawing fruitful attention to the political tensions always present for a woman who was simultaneously Scottish queen dowager, sister of the English king, and female regent to and mother of the Scottish king. Re-examination of the evidence is also at the core of R.Andrew McDonald’s well constructed ‘“Soldiers Most Unfortunate”: Gaelic and Scoto-Norse Opponents of the Canmore Dynasty, c. 1100-c. 1230’, the result a much subtler picture of the disaffected elements at the realm’s peripheries bedevilling a period hitherto considered relatively peaceful. Other essays have...