The Impact Of Latin Culture On Medieval And Early Modern Scottish Writing

In the late medieval and early modern periods, Scottish latinity had its distinctive stamp, most intriguingly so in its effects upon the literary vernacular and on themes of national identity. This volume shows how, when viewed through the prism of latinity, Scottish textuality was distinctive and fecund. The flowering of Scottish writing owed itself to a subtle combination of literary praxis, the ideal of eloquentia, and ideological deftness, which enabled writers to service a burgeoning national literary tradition.

The first detailed examination of the vibrant culture of literature produced by Scots in Latin in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Essays exploring the great religious and devotional works of the Middle Ages in their manuscript and other contexts.

An investigation into the various ways in which Renaissance writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Dutch Republic.

From early medieval times to the present, this diverse collection of thirty-one essays sets literary texts in their historical contexts.

England's Insular Imagining is vital reading for anyone interested in British nationhood. It shows how the English used Geoffrey of Monmouth's mythical 'British History' (1137) first to justify an attempted Scottish conquest, then to make Scotland's nationhood vanish in new literary, legal and cartographic figurations of English sea-sovereignty.

The first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales. Places have the power to suspend disbelief, even concerning unbelievable subjects. The many locations associated with King Arthur show this to be true, from Tintagel in Cornwall to Caerleon in Wales. But how and why did Arthurian sites come to proliferate across the English and Welsh landscape? What role did the medieval custodians of Arthurian abbeys, churches, cathedrals, and castles play in "placing" Arthur? How did visitors experience Arthur in situ, and how did their experiences permeate into wider Arthurian tradition? And why, in history and even today, have particular places proven so powerful in defending the impression of Arthur's reality? This book, the first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales, provides an answer to these questions. Beginning with an examination of on-site experiences of Arthur, at locations including Glastonbury, York, Dover, and Cirencester, it traces the impact that they had on visitors, among them John Hardyng, John Leland, William Camden, who subsequently used them as justification for the existence of Arthur in their writings. It shows how the local Arthur was manifested through textual and material culture: in chronicles, notebooks, and antiquarian works; in stained glass windows, earthworks, and display tablets. Via a careful piecing together of the evidence, the volume argues that a new history of Arthur begins to emerge: a local history.

Compiled by a team of experts in the field, this volume brings to view an array of Latin texts produced in British universities from c.1500 to 1700. It includes a comprehensive introduction to the production of Neo-Latin and Neo-Greek in the early modern university, the precise circumstances and broader environments that gave rise to it, plus an associated bibliography. 12 high-quality sections, each prefaced by its own short introduction, set forth the Latin (and occasionally Greek) texts and accompanying English translations and notes. Each section provides focused orientation and is arranged in such a way as to ensure the volume's accessibility to scholars and students at all levels of familiarity with Neo-Latin. Passages are taken from documents that were composed in seats of learning across the British Isles, in Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh and St Andrews, and adduce a wide range of material from orations and disputational theses to collections of occasional verse, correspondence, notebooks and university drama. This anthology as a whole conveys a sense of the extent of Latin's role in the academy and the span of remits in which it was deployed. Far from simply offering a snapshot of discrete projects, the contributions collectively offer insights into the broader culture of the early modern university over an extended period. They engage with the administrative operations of institutions, pedagogical processes and academic approaches, but also high-level disputes and the universities' relationship with the worlds of politics, new science and intellectual developments elsewhere in Europe.