Rewriting the Past in Scottish Literature, 1350-1550

Considers how Anglo-Scottish conflict was memorialised, reimagined and embedded by later writers.

The Anglo-Scottish Wars of Independence are often treated in historical and poetical works produced in Scotland between the fourteenth and sixteenth century, from chronicles and hagiographical romances to advisory and commemorative poems. Through an examination of such texts, this book explores how late-medieval writers drew on the memory of the wars to articulate a collective identity; and how literary and historical frameworks were deeply influenced by shifting Anglo-Scottish relations. It covers a range of topics: how borders - textual, geographic, and cultural - became a focus for articulations of national memory; the utilisation of origin myths and royal genealogy; anxieties around failures of memory or deliberate acts of forgetting; and the impact of the Battle of Flodden (1513) on writing about Scottish nationhood. Dealing in particular with Bower’s Scotichronicon, Hary’s Wallace, The Complaynt of Scotland and Lyndsay’s Dreme, this study argues that these writers drew on understandings of the arts of memory to shape selective, and collective, recollections of the past as a response to contemporary concerns, providing an emotive memorialisation of Scotland’s history.