The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland

The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland. Edited by Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood. Phantassie, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press. 1998. xii + 201 pp. Illus. Index. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1 89841057 7

Seven of the essays in the volume under review are based on lectures first given in a series on aspects of national identity in Renaissance Scotland held in the Oxford English Faculty in 1992 (and 1993); the eighth, Nicola Royan's, was originally delivered at the seventh international conference on medieval and Renaissance Scottish language and literature at the University of Strathclyde in 1993. Brought together in this volume, they form a strikingly well-focused corpus of writings which will appeal particularly to those who did not have the good fortune to hear the oral presentations.

Mapstone's scene-setting introductory comments succinctly summarise the contents and main arguments of the various contributions. This review will therefore try to avoid duplication by offering, instead, a commentary from a folklorist's point of view.

Though the chief approaches adopted in the essays are politico-historical and literary, it is Juliette Wood's essay on "Folkloric Patterns in Scottish Chronicles" (pp. 116-35) that might well attract the special attention of readers of this journal. Using as her illustrations legends, personal-experience narratives, and accounts of portents, Wood brings her expertise in the storying aspects and belief systems of the folk-cultural register to bear on an analysis of the structure and function of such traditional phenomena in the chronicling process, and therefore also on their presence in the resulting chronicles. Instead of simply identifying and isolating relevant features in these narratives, as is often the tendency in the descriptive scholarship of discovery, she seeks discernible patterns. In her discussion of reported portents and prophecies, she persuasively argues that "what emerges is not so much a picture of clear lines of influence as a mixture of folk, popular and elite culture in which all these registers have access to a traditional grammar of image and to the belief structure which supports them" (p. 130), an argument which could equally apply to traditional components in the narration of a purportedly historical past which is, after all, a chronicler's business. From her perspective as a folklorist, "folklore patterns are part of the chronicle form and not merely extraneous material" (pp. 130-31); it would therefore be futile to divide the chronicler's accounts sharply into what "really" happened and what is undocumented and therefore unreliable folklore. Nor is it useful to posit two separate lines of transmission, one recorded in writing and another embedded in oral tradition, with the two of them only occasionally intersecting each other. Of course, it is appropriate to interrogate chronicles as to their historicity and what might be hastily called veracity, but it is equally valid to search in them for the presence of traditional elements and to seek to understand their narrative function. Perhaps not surprisingly to the folklorist, Wood thus offers a different perspective on Scottish chronicles and on the Renaissance culture in which they flourished, enlarging as well as diversifying the scholarly vision in the course of this investigation.

Most closely connected with Wood's study is Nicola Royan's essay on "The Relationship between the Scotorum Historia of Hector Boece with John Bellenden's Chronicles of Scotland" (pp. 136-57). This is a comparison of the Latin original of Boece's work with Bellenden's translation into Scots, based on a close reading of the relevant texts. Royan concludes that "Bellenden's variations from his original are diverse" (p. 153), largely as the result of the translator's conscious reworking of the text, including shortenings, additions and insertions, in order to satisfy his own perspective and that of his intended audience, i.e. people who could not read Latin (probably including King James V, who commissioned the translation).

Related to Wood's essay in a different fashion is Sally Mapstone's study of "Shakespeare and Scottish Kingship: A Case History" (pp. 158-89), which is concerned with the Scottish pre-history of Act 4 scene 2 in Macbeth, specifically with the dialogue on kingship between Macduff and Malcolm. Mapstone traces this episode from its first appearance in John Fordun's Latin Chronica Gentis Scotorum (c. 1360-85) to Shakespeare's play, performed in 1606 only three years after the assumption of the English throne by James VI. Her story of its transformation involves a number of Scottish chronicles, Wyntoun, Bower, Boece, Bellenden and of course Holinshed. This is a model piece of literary detective work. Like Wood's paper and Royan's essay, Mapstone's study provides valuable additional insights at a time when the published completion of that daunting project of a new nine-volume edition of Walter Bower's Scotichronicon has given new impetus to a scholarly interest in chronicle writing in Scotland.