David Hume of Godscroft’s The History of the House of Angus, ed. D. Reid, 2 vols  

David Hume of Godscroft’s informed, racey, and opinionated History of the House of Angus is the second part of his history of the house of Douglas. Written during the reign of James VI and I, it was first published in 1646; this is the first modern edition. This work deals with the Red Douglases, but for Hume family history is a regular trajectory into a historiographical narrative engaging with the major political dramas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in particular the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots. David Reid’s excellent introduction and notes reveal Hume’s work as a politicised piece of Presbyterian historiography that achieves striking variations on materials inherited from Buchanan, Calderwood, and others.

The Prose Works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan A. Glenn, 3 vols

In 1456, at Roslin Castle, Sir Gilbert Hay translated three European best-sellers for the then Chancellor of Scotland, William Sinclair, earl of Orkney and Caithness. Hay’s excellent prose style and his recastings of his originals make these translations intriguing works in their own right. The Scottish Text Society presents them here in a new three-volume edition.

 Volume III: The Buke of Knychthede and The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (1993), contains newly edited versions of two of these bestsellers. The Buke of Knychthede is a translation from French of a chivalric manual originally written in Catalan by the celebrated author Ramon Lull, while The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, is a translation of a version of the Secreta Secretorum, one of the key works in the “advice to princes” tradition. 

Volume II: The Buke of the Law of Armys (2005) is a treatise on the principles of warfare, renowned throughout Europe. It provided a conspectus of instruction and lore that any self-respecting nobleman would have wished to have in his library.

Volume I, which will complete the set, will provide the commentary (on author, manuscript, sources, language), glossary and index.

The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, revised edition, ed. P. Bawcutt 

First published in 1967, this edition has been revised and updated by its editor, and includes substantial additional notes and bibliography. It contains Douglas’s Palice of Honour, the major dream-vision poem he composed a decade before his Eneados translation. The Palice is a spritely and learned poem, responsive both to Chaucerian and to Ovidian influences, but also inventively independent of them. Its yoking of poetics and the pursuit of virtue shows Douglas to be a significant early Renaissance writer.

 The volume also contains revised editions of two poems associated with Douglas, though unlikely to be his, the short poem Conscience and the lengthier and still neglected allegory of desire and self-government King Hart.

The Older Scots Vowels: A History of the Stressed Vowels of Older Scots from the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century, by A.J. Aitken, ed. C. Macafee

In this definitive treatment of the vowel phonology of Older Scots, the late A.J. Aitken adds considerable refinements to his existing authoritative works on the subject. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of orthography and rhyme, as senior editor of A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), he also adds the evidence of recent textual studies and of modern dialectal variation. This work will be an essential tool for scholars and students of Older Scots, a valuable adjunct to DOST, and the indispensable starting point for all future investigations in this area.

Prof. Aitken was working on this monograph at the time of his death in 1998. It has been edited and provided with notes, an introduction and indices by his former student, Dr. Caroline Macafee.

The Song Repertoire of Amelia and Jane Harris ed. Emily Lyle, Kaye McAlpine, Anne Dhu McLucas

The Harris sisters’ ballad collection is an important source for the Scottish song tradition. This is the first published edition of the full collection. It will provide academics, singers and lovers of ballads with a valuable body of songs and ballads from Perthshire and Angus, collected by two women who were aware not only of the cultural value of the ballad legacy they had inherited, but of that of other singers in the area. The collection was compiled in the nineteenth century, but the ballad versions frequently look back to much earlier material. Their sources can be traced to locations including Fearn, Tibbermore, Blairgowrie, Dron and Brechin, and the collection features fascinating versions of ballads such as “Johnnie Armonstrong” and “Tod Lowrie”. The original music is reproduced, along with modern notation, and the volume supplies much commentary material.

Alexander Montgomerie, Poems, ed. David J. Parkinson, 2 vols

A new edition of a major Renaissance poet. Alexander Montgomerie (c. 1543-98) was the most talented and original of the poets writing during the reign of James VI, and the variety and the quality of his verse, from the sonnet to the flyting, marks him out as a key figure in both the history of Scottish literature and sixteenth-century poetry in Britain. David Parkinson’s edition, the first for nearly a century, reassesses both the canon and the textual history of Montgomerie’s writing and offers new texts of many of his works, along with extensive notes and the musical settings of some of the poems.

The Buke of the Chess, ed. Catherine van Buuren

A verse translation made c. 1500 from Latin of a work very popular across Europe in the Middle Ages. The Buke of the Chess offers counsel to all members of society through the analogy of the pieces involved in a game of chess. Inset into the instruction are anecdotes and miniature narratives, often very pithily rendered in this Scots translation. The work survives in one of the most important anthologies of Scots verse and prose, the Asloan manuscript. It is edited here for the first time with glossary and notes.

David Hume of Godscroft’s The History of the House of Douglas, ed. D. Reid, 2 vols 

The Douglas family were important sponsors and subjects of literature throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Hume’s History was commissioned by the tenth earl of Angus in the late sixteenth century. In addition to its colourful cameos of a succession of noted or notorious Douglases, it also engages in dialogue with previous historiographers, notably George Buchanan. Anxious about the potential in monarchy for tyranny, but equally concerned about the dangers of self-seeking (and non-Douglas) noble subjects, Hume’s History is a telling ideological document. 

David Reid’s introduction also unravels the poem’s textual history over the near half-century up to its first printing in 1633 and its subsequent revision in 1644.

Alexander Crawford’s Collection of Ballads and Songs, ed. E.B. Lyle, 2 vols

This edition makes available the collection of one of the most active and interesting of Scotland’s ballad collectors. Alexander Crawford acquired and assembled his ballads and songs principally in the 1820s. Over two hundred of them are printed here, with accompanying tunes, when known. The first volume concentrates on the repertoires of four singers, of whom Mary Macqueen is the most extensively represented. The second volume presents the rest of Crawford’s collection, a substantial part of which was collected in Ayrshire by Thomas Macqueen, Mary’s brother. Crawford sought out those texts that were preserved through oral rather than written tradition and this imparts a particular distinction to his corpus. Versions of famous ballads featured in these volumes include “The Cruel Mother”, “The Three Ravens”, and “The Wee Wee Man”.

The Deidis of Armorie, ed. LA.J.R. Houwen, 2 vols

The Deidis of Armorie is a late fifteenth-century heraldic manual and bestiary translated from French into Scots by Kintyre Pursuivant Adam Loutfut at the behest of Marchmont Herald Sir William Cumming of Inverallochy. This work offers a fascinating example of the working materials of heralds in the Middle Ages; it sets out modes of address, explains heraldic colours and charges, and then delivers a detailed heraldic version of that popular staple of medieval didactic literature, the animal and avian bestiary. The Deidis is edited here for the first time from its four surviving manuscripts, and the notes contain a wealth of information on medieval heraldic and animal lore.

James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, ed. Harriet Harvey Wood, 2 vols

James Watson’s Choice Collection is the first known printed collection of Older Scots verse. Watson, a significant figure in the history of Scottish printing, began to put these works into print in 1706, shortly before the Union of the Parliaments that saw the official loss of Scottish independence and to which Watson was opposed. This eclectic mixture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pieces along with some earlier works, has examples from many key genres in Scottish literary history, such as the beast poem, the mock testament, the elegy, the “peasant brawl” poem, and the drinking song. Harriet Harvey Wood’s commentary provides considered textual analysis of all the pieces in a fascinating collection which suggests links both back to Dunbar and Lyndsay, and forward to Burns and Garioch.

John Ireland, The Meroure of Wyssdome, vol. II, ed. F. Quinn, vol. III, ed. Craig McDonald

Books III – VII of the prose treatise originally written for James III but rededicated to his son, James IV, after his father “happinit to be slane” in 1489 during a magnate rebellion against him. John Ireland was a cleric, theologian, and occasional diplomat. His prose works indicate the expanding role of the Scots vernacular as a vehicle for theological argument for a literate lay audience. Books III-VII contain material dealing with the very topical debate on free will and predestination added by Ireland to his original conception of the Meroure. The final book, VII, moves away from the primarily spiritual focus of the earlier books to offer James IV political advice on good government and the limitations of princely power. Ireland’s Meroure is a major early text in the Scottish “advice to princes” tradition.

The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, vols II and III, ed. John Cartwright (vol. I not yet published)

The full text of a major Older Scots romance work. The Buik of King Alexander is a pacey and elaborate narrative of the career and exploits of one of the celebrated rulers of antiquity. Alexander narratives were extremely popular across Europe in the Middle Ages. This Scots version is one of the last to be produced and draws on an eclectic range of sources to produce a romance that situates Alexander in a Christian context while foregoing none of his story’s traditional bellicosity and drama. The poem is printed from a version copied in 1499 and based on a work originally composed by Sir Gilbert Hay, c. 1460.

Selected Sermons of Zachary Boyd, ed. David Atkinson

A selection from both the published and the unpublished sermons of this seventeenth-century divine. Boyd’s writings afford valuable insights into both Protestant spirituality and Protestant politics in the wake of the National Covenant of 1638. They also provide splendid illustration of the development in Scots of the Protestant plain style: “The most part of gods children are like the psalmists mariners. They reele to and fro and stagger like drunken men. But when all their cunning is gone, then they crye unto the Lord in their trouble [Ps 107; 28]”. In Boyd’s sermons we hear a tone of voice that continues memorably in Scots literary tradition in the writings of James Hogg and Sir Walter Scott.

The Complaynt of Scotland, ed. A.M. Stewart

Composed c. 1550, possibly by Robert Wedderburn of Dundee, the Complaynt is a notable work in the history of Scottish prose and patriotic writing. Though based on a French original, Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif, the Complaynt is an often original and highly topical composition. Dedicated to the queen regent, Mary of Guise, its political targets are the English nation, and the failings of the three estates of Scotland. But the work has much in it besides this, including a splendid pastoral interlude. Written in what its author terms “domestic scottis langage” the Complaynt is a lively and learned piece of polemic, as well as a valuable compendium of aspects of Scottish lore and literary culture.

The Works of Allan Ramsay, vols IV, V, and VI, ed. Alexander M. Kinghorn and Alexander Law

These three final volumes in the Society’s edition of Ramsay’s works collect his previously unpublished poems, along with early drafts of the Gentle Shepherd, and prose works, including the prefaces to the Ever Green (1726) and the Tea Table Miscellany (1734). Also included are Ramsay’s letters, the journal of the Easy Club, Ramsay’s collection of Scots proverbs, and poems about him. These are accompanied by substantial biographical, critical, and bibliographical studies, and by a glossary of the Scots words used in Ramsay’s poems in volumes III and IV.

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