The quality of the roster of contributors assembled for this Festschrift in honour of Roger Mason speaks immediately to the profound impact of his insights on the intellectual and cultural lives of the Scots from the fifteenth until (roughly) the seventeenth century, as well as the gratitude felt by numerous colleagues, former students and scholars with no such formal connection to the volume’s recipient. Given the debates surrounding Mason’s embrace of the term ‘renaissance’ – which are nodded to in the warm personal and intellectual appreciations by the editor, Mason’s former student Steven Reid, in the introduction, as well as by his erstwhile boss, Sally Mapstone, in the ‘Afterword’ – it is, however, appropriate that this is the chronological descriptor employed by the volume’s title.
Mason’s own scholarship was interdisciplinary before this became fashionable, and this is duly reflected in the division into three parts, respectively concerning historiography, kingship and sovereignty (broadly focused on the ‘late medieval’ or ‘early renaissance’), and the intersection between literature, politics and religion (more firmly focused on post-Reformation Scotland). Part i, ‘Mason and the historians’, is the shortest of the three, comprising the introduction and Catriona MacDonald’s innovative deployment of Mason’s concept that the Reformation itself was in some senses an antiquarian battle to explore the ways in which confessional identity continued to forge the scholarship of two giants of nineteenth-century historiography – Lang and Hay Fleming. Whilst the themes of this essay do not interlock with the others in the volume as neatly as those in the subsequent sections do amongst themselves, it nevertheless speaks to the broader significance of the ‘renaissance’ period for Scottish history more broadly.
The contributors to part ii share not only a concern for the topics of Scottish sovereignty and national identity, but a close and scrupulous attention to textual detail. This is especially evident in Dauvit Broun’s painstaking reconstruction of a ‘new’ manuscript of the foundational Scottish historical text by John of Fordoun, and Nicola Royan’s lively unpicking of the rhetorical strategies deployed by two Scottish ambassadors to England as artefacts of humanist bargaining. The remaining chapters in this section focus more tightly on monarchs and, broadly speaking, the challenges they encountered in managing their kingdom. Michael H. Brown’s argument that the treason law under Robert Bruce developed in response to specific challenges but that, after the wars of Independence had ended, ‘reticence’ (p. 79) developed towards new applications of the treason laws is a compelling contribution to an area where further study is required. Alison Cathcart, meanwhile, explores Scottish sovereignty from a different perspective in unpacking the international context which surrounded James v’s voyage to the Isles in 1540, demonstrating it to have been ‘imperial’ in both the early modern and modern senses of that word (p. 120). Nestled between these two chapters lies Steve Boardman’s contribution, demonstrating that royal investment in the cult of John the Baptist during the reign of James i suggests continuities across reigns traditionally branded as ‘late medieval’ and their ‘renaissance’ successors. This case is strong, and the repassing of parliamentary acts of James i by his successors (which is quite reasonably not directly discussed in a chapter focused on a particular aspect of a particular reign) strengthens it: we can only hope these three studies in particular spark the future research they deserve.
Moving on to part iii the essays take a broader range of approaches, but the thematic continuities of a concern for national identity, as well as the close reading methodology, serve to bridge the two parts. Perhaps these continuities undermine the case for any clear dividing lines in this period – whether 1460, as Boardman argues in his chapter, or 1560, the year of the Scottish Reformation Parliament, which appears to have broadly informed the division of the volume.
Esther Mijers’s chapter tackles the question of sovereignty from the perspective of visitors to Scotland, showing how the invitation extended by James vi to the Dutch ambassadors to attend his son’s baptism helped to shore up not only Scoto-Dutch relations as a new state emerged, but the very existence of this new state. For this reviewer, this chapter would have been even stronger had these activities been contextualised amongst the practices of successive Scottish governments who shored up legitimacy at home by seeking recognition from abroad earlier in the century. The close-reading approach, meanwhile, is evident in the editor’s own contribution, which comprises the first scholarly discussion of a text on James vi’s coronation by Thomas Maitland, a significant, although second-level, player in the events surrounding this coronation and the immediately preceding deposition of Mary, queen of Scots. The poem emerged in an especially febrile context, and, as the author notes, whilst the vernacular responses to this have been well studied the Latin literature it provoked awaits full exploration. Moving to Mary’s defenders – whose works have likewise been relatively neglected – Tricia McElroy’s chapter takes a similar approach in unpicking a relatively neglected text, the Defence of the honour of Marie queene of Scotland, the authorship of which, she shows, although attributed to John Leslie was in fact shared by several participants. The notion of Leslie as a ‘project manager’ (p. 226) for this book is especially interesting – and potentially a useful springboard for further exploration of the Marian defence project. This historiographical imbalance is illustrated further by the presence of two further essays on the subject of those who ‘won’ following 1567, whilst McElroy stands alone for the Marians. The first of these, by Bess Rhodes, evokes the historiographical concerns of the opening chapters in examining how over two generations commentators on the Scottish Reformation moved from delighted to disillusioned. The wide range of sources here as well as a clear sighted awareness of the importance of legal boundaries in defining when reform happened, since this determined ownership and the viability of action at law, build a case that over time the definition of ‘reformed’ changed, becoming more demanding, and this accounts for reformers’ growing dissatisfaction with their progress. Two of these early reformers, John Knox and James Stewart, earl of Moray, are the subject of Jane Dawson’s chapter, which explores their relationship as one founded on differences, rather than the prevalent tendency deriving from nineteenth-century understandings to group them firmly together.
Kate McClune’s case surrounding the tradition of new year’s gift poetry to the monarch and the special didactic potential of this genre, and Joanna Martin’s unpacking of a neglected text by Alexander Hume to show how poetry could construct a reformed identity, round out this section, and illustrate the breadth of connections across the volume, speaking to the themes of text as gift and the importance of faith to self-fashioning raised by Royan and Boardman respectively in part i. These connections – and those noted elsewhere in this review – are a far from comprehensive overview, but are a fitting note to end on since the number of these which emerge across the volume speak to the cohesion of the collection as a whole, as well as the influence of the scholar in whose honour it was compiled. That many of these contributions open up further avenues for exploration – and several are causing this reviewer to redraft parts of her own ongoing work – is especially fitting as a tribute to a scholar of Mason’s standing.
