Prepared to honour the work of R. J. Lyall, this collection of essays offers new perspectives on the literature and culture of the reign of James VI, from his accession as an infant to the throne of Scotland, through the Union of the Crowns, to his final years as king of Great Britain. Its emphasis is on James's reign as a whole, stressing the continuities in literary culture throughout the time of his rule, rather than the more familiar narrative of disjunction caused by his accession to the English throne in the 1603 Union of Crowns. In addition, the collection extends its focus beyond a concentration on the environment of James's court to situate the literature of his reign in terms of both regional and international contexts. The essays range widely in their approaches and cover topics as diverse as book history and printing; textual scholarship and editing; language, rhetoric, and prosody; gender attitudes in James's reign; travel writing and colonial contexts; Latin literary culture; and courtly culture and the politics of literary representation. Such variety is also evident in the languages discussed, which include Scots, English, Latin and French, in the generic range of the subject texts, from epic poetry to travel writing, and in the writers discussed, from the very familiar, such as John Knox and Robert Aytoun, to the currently less well-known, such as William Lithgow and Thomas Hudson. All the contributors are respected scholars in the discipline, including some of the most senior figures in the field. Taken as a whole, this collection is the most extensive and varied treatment of Scottish literary culture of this period to date, and will be a key collection for all students and specialists in the field.
About the Author: Kevin J. McGinley lectures in Scottish Cultural Studies at Orkney College. His publications on early Scottish literature and eighteenth-century Scottish drama include essays on Robert Henryson, David Lyndsay, and John Home, and he is co-editor (with R.D.S. Jack) of Of Lion and of Unicorn: Essays on Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations in Honour of Professor John MacQueen. Nicola Royan is lecturer in medieval and early Renaissance literature in the School of English Studies, University of Nottingham. She has published widely on various aspects of Scottish literature from 1375 to 1600, including studies of Richard Holland and Hector Boece, and she is editor of Langage Clere Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond. She is also Editorial Secretary of the Scottish Text Society.