Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland.

Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan, eds. Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland.

East Lothian: Tuckwell Press Ltd., 2002. Pbk. xxx + 158 pp. index. $32.95. ISBN: 1-86232-270-8.

This collection of essays, based on the ninth triennial International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature held at St. Andrews in 1999, offers an excellent primer into developments and critical voices associated with the field. For a number of reasons, including the not-so-trivial ones involving the forces that have centered early modern studies in American scholarship associated with the New Historicism and its predilection for "hot" topics and the English national forces that have relegated early modern Scottish studies to relative academic marginality, the excitement, rigor, and imaginative critical breadth of developments in early modern Scottish scholarship have all but gone unnoticed. The volume, which represents a cross-section of the astonishing range of papers presented at St. Andrews, illustrates "the ways in which many Scottish texts from the early modern period, taking their cue from late medieval literature, display an open-ended porous practice of culture, across genres, languages, classes, localities, and eras. Instead of voicing a series of one-dimensional or somehow isolated cultures, these texts manifest an openness to contiguous cultural discourses such as 'folk' and 'art' poetry, or Scots and Gaelic writing, be they those of their own or a previous era, or of their own or another culture" (x). Notable in van Heijnsbergen's and Royan's language is one of the virtues of the volume itself, that is, a recognition that early modern Scottish literary culture had complex, "porous" practices and affiliations that resonate in relation to reading practices associated with developments in critical theory over the last twenty years.

The interdisciplinary and intercultural "contiguities" marked by van Heijnsbergen and Royan in their introduction and explored in detail by the essayists hint at the remarkable confluence of archival methodologies, historical scholarship, and theoretical acumen that distinguish the essays in this volume. Moreover, van Heijnsbergen and Royan display a salutary self-awareness in locating the work of the volume in relation to extant scholarship: "rather than trying to prove any 'centrality' or 'stability' of Scottish literature and thus running the risk of replacing one fallacy by another, it is better to argue that 'central stability' is an imaginary construction in the first place, and to emphasize that the conceptual mileage of early modern Scottish literature in fact lies in exactly such an awareness of itself as off-centre, of its texts as local inflections of international, almost 'virtual' cultural narratives" (xi). Similar passages from the introduction make a strong case for the kinds of virtual narratives at stake in both the literature and the criticism associated with early modern Scottish literary studies.

Essayists examine a range of topics--from William Stewart's flyting practices through to the poems written upon James VI's accession to the English throne in 1603 through to the influence of older Scots poetry on modern Scots aesthetics. Particularly noteworthy are essays by C. Marie Harker on John Knox's notoriously misogynist 1588 text, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and David Parkinson's eloquently written exploration of metanarratives of reception. The latter begins with the provocative notion that "From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, it might be argued, Scottish literature predicts, enacts and then mourns its loss of autonomy" (138). Harker's essay ends with the compelling argument that "Knox draws upon the topos of the man feminized by his very heterosexuality, the uxorious male, in order to invert and thus contain the pressing fears of foreign regnal consorts who would in fact fail to be ruled by their royal wives and thus threaten the future of English and Scottish national autonomy and Protestant reform" (47). Both Parkinson and Harker invoke autonomy as a nexus around which various cultural and literary practices in early modern Scottish literature come together.

By contrast, Jamie Reid-Baxter's persuasive essay on Philotus, "'Scotland's only Renaissance comedy,'" (52) does a notable job of reconfiguring the traditional intertextual derivation of the play from the Elizabethan prose of Barnaby Riche. Reid-Baxter's learned essay resets the play in a much broader intercultural context that requires "no reference to the world of Elizabethan prose fiction" (52). Thus argued, the play's Roman, Italian, and French sources are highly suggestive of the extent to which the early modern Scottish canon functioned in relation to a much broader frame of reference than has normally been argued, a topic that remains ripe for further development, as is implicit in Reid-Baxter's analysis. The great strength of the volume lies in how its essayists stage issues of autonomy and intercultural affiliations via a range of effective close reading methodologies. The book points to significant changes in the already formidable scholarship associated with early modern Scottish studies, changes that augur well for early modern Scottish studies' future contributions to early modern studies writ large. Tuckwell Press is to be commended for its ongoing support of early modern Scottish literary studies. As a small independent press whose catalogue continues to grow in this direction, it is playing a crucial role in the dissemination of critical scholarship in the field.

DANIEL FISCHLIN

University of Guelph