Rhetoric Royalty, and Reality

This volume contains twelve studies, all dealing with aspects of the literature and culture of Scotland during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Most of these contributions began life as papers delivered at an international conference on that subject, held at Rolduc Abbey, The Netherlands, in 2002. Much new light is shed on canonical Middle Scots writers: Alastair Fowler and David Parkinson, both on Gavin Douglas; David Moses on Robert Henryson; Ruben Valdes Miyares on William Dunbar. The essay by Rod Lyall, on the anonymous Three Prestis of Peblis, and that of Eleanor Commander, on the Originale Chronicle by Andrew Wyntoun, both illuminate unperceived aspects of well-known fifteenth-century texts. Both Janet Hadley Williams and Alan Swanson significantly advance our knowledge of the poet, Sir David Lyndsay. Women's contribution to culture is the subject of the essays by Marguerite Corporaal (on poetry by Queen Mary Stewart and by Mary Beaton) and of Marie-Claude Tucker (on the calligrapher Esther Inglis). In the area of Scottish Gaelic literature and culture, William Gillies explores the connections between a prose tale and poem on the topic of the land of the Little People. In the final study, Jamie Reid-Baxter contextualises and expounds a hitherto unknown Renaissance sonnet sequence, The Nyne Muses, by John Dykes. In each of the contributions in this volume rhetoric and reality loom large; royalty, the third term of the title, is the ever-present final parameter of culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.