Tricia A. McElroy and David Parkinson
[1] The three essays featured in this special issue of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance originate from the sixteenth International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature and Language, held virtually at the University of Alabama in July 2021. At first glance, they might appear to address divergent literary and historical matters: Megan Bushnell’s innovative reassessment of Gavin Douglas’s nationalism through the lens of corpus linguistics; Alessandra Petrina’s sweeping theoretical reflection on the Scots approach to invention and translation; and, at the centre, Roger Mason’s magisterial study of the contexts and nuances of the term common weal, a foundational political concept that had, as he argues, its ‘moment of maximum impact’ in the sixteenth century.
[2] With admiration for each paper, we brought them together with some initial uncertainty about how they would speak to one another and what they might reveal as a group. We appreciated the disciplinary roots of each essay – linguistic, historical, literary – even though all three scholars display the marvelous interdisciplinarity and methodological flexibility that typifies so much work in early Scottish studies. We noted immediately how all three are essaies in the truest sense: posing questions, following threads, testing approaches, pursuing connections … in a word, questing. As the essays were revised and sharpened, we realised that they had coalesced into a remarkably insightful exploration of Scottish literary and political consciousness across the sixteenth century. Beginning at the moment of Flodden, moving through the political and religious turbulence of the century, these papers claim our attention for their bold inquiry into the elaboration of a proto-national identity constructed through language and poetry.
[3] Megan Bushnell’s essay, ‘What’s in a name? Douglas’s depiction of nationhood in the Eneados’, launches the conversation. She sets out to revisit and reorientate the scholarly debate about Douglas’s political sympathies. Acknowledging that nascent nationalisms often emerge in the creation of vernacular literatures, she investigates specifically how Douglas approaches language and nationality in his translation of Virgil. Bushnell concludes that Douglas’s nationalism is not straightforward, that his Eneados is not bald allegory, nor is his vernacular version of Virgil’s poem an artless vehicle to weigh in on ‘local’ historiographical quarrels deriving from the foundational myths of Scotland and England. Rather, Douglas’s explicit commitment to accuracy in translation and his emphasis on the nobility of his patron (and relative) Henry, Lord Sinclair, result in a text that boldly asserts the cultural ascendancy of Scotland. Douglas’s poem imagines and enacts the passing of the baton from Latin to Scots, and his faithful rendering of Virgil’s poetry embraces a humanist vision that translates the pietas of the Aeneid into cognate Scottish notions of moral duty to kin, community, and virtue.
[4] In his essay ‘The idea of the common weal in sixteenth-century Scotland’, Roger Mason excavates the antecedents, meanings, and, importantly, strategic rhetorical uses of a term that will undoubtedly be familiar to scholars of the period. Ubiquitous but heretofore mostly unexamined, common weal emerges in this literary and historical tour as the marker of a distinctively complex Scottish understanding of the confrontation between ‘singular profit’ and common good, as well as the cultural values that contribute to the welfare and security of the realm. Surveying the emergence of common weal in Scottish political vocabulary, from its debut in the 1520s, across poetry, kingship literature, chronicle history, and propaganda, Mason identifies two significant ‘semantic fields’ activated by the term, These are particularly prominent in Bellenden’s translation of Boece’s Scotorum Historia (1527): a chivalric and martial code aimed at securing the continued independence of Scotland, balanced against a civic and humanist commitment to the classical idea of the bonum commune and a powerful impulse towards social and religious reform, both Catholic and Protestant. The rhetorical strength of common weal as a term emerges most notably during the period of the Rough Wooing in the 1540s, when it is deployed to shore up the historical independence and integrity of Scotland against English aggression. With Sir David Lindsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, the concept becomes immortalized in the figure of John the Commonweal, particularly at the moment when he takes his proper place in parliament and presides over legislation to reform the common weal. This ideal, however, would find its harshest challenge as the century wore on, in the practical problem of what to do in the face of a tyrannical monarch. As religious and political forces began to shift sovereignty from the crown to the people, the idea of common weal gets drained of its nuanced yet potent and productive sense of the relationship between king and commonwealth, and, in its place, a Tacitean, anti-monarchical resonance emerges. Its ‘moment of maximum impact’ had passed.
[5] In her essay ‘Translation and invention in sixteenth-century Scotland’, Alessandra Petrina considers the Renaissance relationship between the concept of invention and the practice of translation, particularly with regard to the ability of translation to range from conservation to transformation. Scotland provides a special case, given its unique situation politically and geographically, not to mention its complicated multilingual terrain. Key to understanding translation in Scotland, Petrina posits, are Gavin Douglas’s Eneados and James VI’s ‘Reulis and Cautelis’, the little handbook of poetics in his Essayes of a Prentise, as explicit responses to the impact of imitation and invention on the development of vernacular language. For his part, Douglas acknowledges the difficulty and costs of following a ‘fixt’ style rather than writing ‘all ways at liberte’ but emphatically prioritises the translator’s obligation to remain faithful to his source. Yet given the experimental nature of his project – particularly his interpolation of commentary – what results is translation as an act of mediation that both models engagement with the original text and contributes to the advancement of Scottish literature. In the lacuna of Scottish theorising on translation between Douglas and James, Petrina turns to the French authority Joachim du Bellay and his metaphor of translation as a cultivating, nourishing activity. By imitating prestigious authors – devouring, digesting, transforming them – the translator enriches the target language and gives it greater historical autonomy. Indeed, Scots translations of the later sixteenth century often move towards this kind of ‘creative mimesis’. Situated thus, James’s ‘Reulis and Cautelis’ renders poetic composition as strikingly artisanal, rather than a radical act of unaided originality, making imitation intrinsic to the concept of invention. As Petrina concludes, ‘Individual wit and noble literary works cooperate as the necessary ground of invention’.
[6] Together, these essays evoke a sense of Scottish grappling with self-understanding and self-definition, particularly through the use and transformation of the Scots vernacular. What materialises is a ‘common weal’ of shared concerns that are at once recognisable, yet subtle and profound. These concerns are best expressed in terms of the tension and negotiation between individual and community; between liberty and subjection; and between imitation and, in our modern conception of it, originality. The confrontation between individual and community plays a tangible and central role in Mason’s analysis of common weal and its evolving nuances across the century. In early parliamentary records, interestingly, common weal is not explicitly set against individual self-interest, whereas poetry and chronicles highlight the clash between ‘singular profit’ – of merchants, for example, or more commonly of the monarch – and the good of the realm. For mid-century writers like Sir David Lindsay, the term takes on a reforming angle concerned with the need to reinvigorate the Scottish common weal, and eventually becomes imbued with connotations of liberty versus subjection – the latter, particularly to England.
[7] Liberty and subjection – or in a Scottish formulation, freedom and ‘thirldom’ – find metaphorical expression in the essays of Bushnell and Petrina. Douglas famously describes his obligation to translate Virgil’s text accurately as being ‘attachit ontill a staik’, unable to ‘go na ferthir bot wreil about that tree’.[i] Perhaps in an echo of this, James VI characterises an act of translation as binding one ‘to a staik, to follow that buikis phrasis quhilk ze translate’.[ii] As Bushnell and Petrina demonstrate, a pronounced concern for poets of the Renaissance – arguably felt more acutely by Scottish writers of the Northern Renaissance – was how to negotiate their relationships with the past and with past writers. How does one render a Virgilian epic in Scots, remain faithful to the original, and ‘translate’ (if at all) its interests in nation-building to a local context? And how can we imagine Scots vernacular as the true successor to Latin? Having digested these three essays, we might ask, can a sense of political and cultural identity be unencumbered by debts to the past? Can a shared identity ever emerge in a radical act of unaided originality, or is it always artisanal, crafted out of fragments of language and history?
[8] In her final thought, Petrina remarks that invention and translation ‘work together in proposing intertextuality as a fertile site of literary production’, and we might pause to consider this key point. It is only in the clash between individual self-interest and the good of the whole, or between banal imitation and singular originality, that transformation is likely to occur – a transformation construed as the shared pursuit of maintaining Scottish integrity or as the creation of a poem that cultivates the vernacular. Interestingly – though perhaps not surprisingly in a Scottish context – the negotiation of such tensions is highly charged with moral imperative, with a pietas redolent of the Aeneid. Just as Christian humanists believed that achieving the bonum commune depended upon individual commitment to civic responsibility, Douglas’s role as fidus interpres involved a sense of deep privilege and, even more importantly, of multiple moral obligations. His approach to translation, as an act of fidelity, requires him to be a guardian of his source text, and, because he translates at the request of his patron, he is also responsible for ensuring that his work is appropriately emblematic of Sinclair’s nobility and character. But, of course, Douglas’s project is not just about preservation or imitation. Bringing Bushnell and Petrina into conversation with one another suggests the transformative possibilities of the Eneados, of creating a textual palimpsest that prompts further work, generates a ‘readership of Scottish Aeneases’, and imagines a distinctive Scottish literary tradition.
[9] What these three essays share, above all, is a carefully executed attention to the relationship between an act of translation and its sources of literary and political authority. Douglas, James, and the poets of the sixteenth century both observed and contributed to the development of the principles of translation as a practice: What could an act of translation do for Scottish literary culture and for the language of Scots? What methods and actions were appropriate to venerate past authors, to make meaning in the present, and to build a new tradition? And where, among those various nodes, did the authority of a text reside? Analogously, in the idea of common weal – particularly as it functions across a century of social and religious reform – we see the adoption of a political concept with resonances in the classical past, translated into present circumstances and applied as a key marker of Scottish political aspiration: What words and meanings can, at any given moment, effectively communicate the balance of power necessary to ensure the integrity of the realm and the good of its various constituents? In addressing such questions, these essays thus deepen our perception of the processes shaping Scottish literary and national identity, especially as those processes are propelled by individual and collective attention to the uses of language.
[i] Gavin Douglas, Eneados, ed. P. Bawcutt and I.C. Cunningham, STS 5th ser. 17–19, I.prol.297–8.
[ii] Ibid.