Post by Dr Mike Rodman Jones, School of English

Albrecht Durer’s St Jerome in his Study (1513) is a seminal work in Renaissance art history. It is also one that, in its subject, execution, and reception, divides cultural time in a way that both omits and contains the Middle Ages. St Jerome (d. 420) appears here as an early modern scholar, much in the way that Holbein would represent Erasmus of Rotterdam (1523). The architectural detail and Durer’s interest in rendering the perspective of the domestic interior place this image at a particular moment in cultural history: the epochal moment of the Renaissance, the moment at which the Middle Ages becomes “early Modernity”. Jerome is also ensconced in the process of biblical translation, an activity with sharply politicised and often violent associations in the Sixteenth Century. At the same time, it was Jerome’s translation of the Bible (the ‘Vulgate’) that was one of the central cultural phenomenon of the European Middle Ages, a text cited, discussed, quoted, and debated in everything from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologia to William Langland’s Piers Plowman. More details of the engraving direct us back to medieval clerical and vernacular cultures. The lion in the foreground is amongst the most famous icons of hagiographical narrative associated with works like Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. Jerome’s cardinal’s hat hanging from the wall recalls another essential aspect of Jerome’s legend, his frequently illustrated position in the upper hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Durer’s engraving, then, might be seen to be quintessentially “medieval”, even as it is often viewed and discussed as an important cultural product of the “Renaissance”.

But when, really, did the Middle Ages end?

There is much at stake in the answer to this seemingly innocuous question. It is striking, for example, that my use of the terms “medieval” and “Renaissance” above adheres to the modern typological convention of capitalising the terms “Renaissance” (and indeed often “Modern”) while not doing the same for “medieval”. Such an apparently minute thing is in fact indicative of a broader understanding of cultural history, one that allows even the most culturally-literate to frequently use the term “medieval” as a synonym for ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncultured’ (for an example of this, see the recent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s use of the term in a piece for the TLS):

Traditionally, the answer is a fairly straightforward “somewhere around 1500”. In more detailed ways, we might look to changes in scholarly culture, religious identity, textual production or linguistic standardization to answer this question. In England, we might think of the Reformation, the arrival of print from the continent in the 1470s, the rise of “Renaissance Humanism”, the loss of dialectical difference and most residual inflections in English.

However, we might also look directly at the sixteenth century as one that did not, perhaps, witness the ‘end’ of the Middle Ages so much as the first construction of it, the first wave of selective cultural appropriation and amnesia which rendered the ‘medieval’ as we might (try not to) see it.

The Institute for Medieval Research is hosting an afternoon’s symposium 15 May of particular interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Medieval Studies, early Modern Studies, English, History and History of Art.

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Contrary to popular opinion medieval people did not think that the world was flat. Educated people worked on an Aristotelean idea that the world was round and that it had different zones (including places that were either too hot or too cold to live in).

However, medieval people, just in Antiquity, did not know that the earth revolves around the sun, and thus events such an eclipse, where the sun ‘disappears’ for a while, were clearly noteworthy (just as they are today). Bede tells us about an eclipse in AD 664 which is still remembered at the time when he is writing his Ecclesiastical History of the English People around 735. The eclipse is followed by a devastating pestilence – so severe that some of the newly converted Anglo-Saxons consider going back to their pagan gods. The notion that celestial phenomena could be ‘read’ as portents of disastrous events can be found in various early medieval texts, including Gregory of Tours and Bede. However, these are not always solar eclipses, more likely comets.

It appears that comets functioned as portents of disaster more generally. The association of comets with epidemics and/or battles goes back to the sixth-century author Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, in which he states that comets mark the coming of pestilence and war. This idea was adapted by Bede in his influential On the Nature of Things:

Comets are stars with flames like hair. They are born suddenly, portending a change of royal power or plague or wars or winds and heat.

Still, eclipses and comets are not just ‘supernatural’ events that had to be accepted for medieval writers – they did try to understand why and how they happened. So, Bede in The Nature of Things tells us that eclipses cannot be seen in all parts of the world at the same time because of the earth’s curvature. Solar eclipses, he correctly states, are caused by the intervention of the moon.

With that knowledge, it was possible to predict eclipses, and probably because of that they were not always seen as significant in human events. For instance, Walter Bower records an eclipse in Scotland in 1433 – an event which he experienced – like this:

In this year there was a wonderful eclipse of the sun on 17 June about the third hour in the afternoon. For half an hour it was exceedingly dark like night, so that nothing could be seen by the human eye. Hence it was commonly called the black hour. (Scotichronicon XVI: 23)

In the main witness for this chronicle, produced under Bower’s supervision at Inchcolm Abbey in the Forth, this comment appears in a side note beside a chapter on condemning Lollardy. Although from its position we might wish to infer that Bower sees such unnatural events as reflecting the heterodoxy of the Lollards, there’s no evidence for that. There is no attempt in the phrasing to tie the eclipse to any other event in Scotland, and nothing results from it; Bower’s condemnation of Lollardy lasts for three chapters, and – in chronicle terms – for over a year, since chapter 20 begins in 1432. It is rather that the eclipse occurs before the events of the next chapter, an English embassy in October 1433.

An eclipse, therefore, is an interesting event: comets, on the other hand, were slightly different.

Further Reading:

C. Kendall and F. Wallis (trans): Bede: On the Nature of things and Times. Liverpool 2010.

P. Darby: Bede and the End of Time. Farnham 2012.

D.E.R. Watt et al. (eds) Walter Bower: Scotichronicon 9 vols. Aberdeen and Edinburgh 1989-98, vol. 8 (1989).

Image credit: RawheaD Rex on Flickr

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On a recent episode of GPs: Behind Closed Doors (Channel 5), a reality show that examines doctor-patient relationships, a young mother told her GP that she had been treating her infant’s conjunctivitis with breast milk. The GP was surprised by this treatment and advised against it, stating that it was both ineffective and unpleasant. However, the use of breast milk in medicine is an ancient remedy that is still widely practised in the present day. Even a cursory search of alternative medicine sites reveals a wide range of beliefs about the curative powers of breast milk – everything from curing minor infections to treating cancer. But where in history does this idea appear and is there any evidence-based support for it?

One medieval medical document, The Lylye of Medicyne, uses breast milk as a cure-all for multiple conditions. The Lylye is an important fifteenth-century Middle English translation of a Latin medical text, the Lilium Medicinae, which was completed in 1305 by Bernard of Gordon, a medical doctor and lecturer in Montpellier. The English manuscript (Ashmole 1505) is nearly 500 pages long and contains hundreds of treatments for diseases affecting both the body and mind. Out of nearly 6000 references to botanical and medicinal ingredients, milk, from both humans and animals, is the fourth most mentioned ingredient in the text.

In the Lylye, milk is consumed, applied externally, and used as a base agent for compound medicines. It is said to be curative in everything from fevers and swellings to warts, acne, toothaches, sore throat, epilepsy and wasting conditions. In the chapter dealing with a serious type of fever (Ethica), the text states: ‘þe best mylke þat is for hem is womman milke . . . As myche as it is possible, lete hymtake of a womman brestis’. Furthermore, milk (particularly breast milk) is praised as ‘mete and drinke and medicyne’ and even in the deadly wasting condition Ptysis (most likely pulmonary tuberculosis) breast milk is said to provide ‘grete helpe þeron’.

Although breast milk is used as a cure-all in the Lylye, much as it is in alternative practices today, the references to milk are heavily concentrated in the section dealing with disorders and diseases of the eyes. For instance, in the chapter on conjunctivitis, the text instructs the medieval doctor to ‘droppe ofte womman milke in his yȝen‘. So, returning to the young mother mentioned previously, is there any evidence to suggest that breast milk is effective in dealing with infections of the eyes?

One such study in the Journal of Tropical Pediatrics investigated the effects of human colostrum against conjunctivitis in newborns in developing countries. The study states: ‘our findings suggest that local instillation of human colostrum significantly reduces the incidence of sticky eyes and conjunctivitis’ and, furthermore, ‘the cultural practice of instilling colostrum into the eyes of newborn babies has a sound scientific basis, is desirable and needs to be encouraged’ (Singh, M, Sugathan, P., Bhujwala, R. ‘Human Colostrum for Prophylaxis Against Sticky Eyes and Conjunctivitis in the Newborn’ Journal of Tropical Pediatrics, 28, 1982, pp. 35-37). Another study sixteen years later in the Journal of Reproductive Immunologyalso investigated the antimicrobial effects of human colostrum in neonatal conjunctivitis. They obtained similar results to the first study and stated that all samples of colostrum ‘significantly inhibited chlamydial growth in a dose-response manner’ (Ramsey, K., Poulsen, C., Motiu, P. ‘The in vitro antimicrobial capacity of human colostrum against Chlamydia trachomatis’ Journal of Reproductive Immunology 38 (2), 1998, pp. 155-167).

Of course, these two studies deal specifically with colostrum applied to conjunctivitis of the neonate. However, they also demonstrate that there appears to be an effective antimicrobial agent in breast milk, which lends some explanation to why the practice has persisted for so many centuries.

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Tomorrow (13 June 2014) is the one hundredth birthday of Dr Barbara Reynolds, President of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society and former Reader in Italian at the University Nottingham from 1966 to 1978. She was also Warden of Willoughby Hall between 1963 and 1969, alongside her husband Lewis Thorpe (Professor of French and well-known translator of Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, for the Penguin Classics). An authority on Dante and Petrarch, she published translations of the Divine Comedy (also for Penguin) with her friend Dorothy L. Sayers, the famous author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels. Dr Reynolds was also General Editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary published between 1962 and 1981 still one of the best Italian/English dictionaries. In 1995 Dr Reynolds kindly sent me some of the papers which she had kept concerning the ‘Italian Project’ which she set up at Nottingham in the Autumn of 1968, which continued for several years after that. This group of staff and students hosted lectures open to all (including the wider public) which ranged widely on all subjects Italian, including, as might be expected given Reynolds medieval Italian interests, lectures and meetings on medieval subjects. The papers, which will be deposited with Manuscripts and Special Collections, shed fascinating light on the slower pace of life at Nottingham in the late 1960s. Many distinguished people spoke to the Italian Project, including on 5 March 1969 Sir Ashley Clarke, former British Ambassador to Italy and a leading light in the ‘save Venice’ campaign, who gave a public lecture on the Preservation of Venice. When Dr Reynolds left Nottingham the project seems to have come to an end. Her legacy to Nottingham also includes many early editions of Dante and of Italian dictionaries now kept in the University’s Special Collections. If anyone remembers the Italian project I would be delighted to hear from you (ross.balzaretti@nottingham.ac.uk). In some ways Dr Reynolds interest in all things Italian is continued today by the local branch of the Dante Alighieri Society (chaired by Carolyn Pritchett), which hosts talks and other events on Italian subjects and to which I and others currently at Nottingham have spoken.

It is a pleasure therefore to wish Dr Reynolds a very Happy 100th Birthday!

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A guest post by Maroula Perisanidi, postgraduate student in History

‘Our royalty is an imitation of yours, modelled on your good purpose, a copy of the only empire, in so far as we follow you we excel all other nations’

These are the terms used by Cassiodorus on behalf of King Theoderic (493–526) to express the relationship between the Ostrogothic Kingdom and the Roman Empire at the beginning of the sixth century. Yet, these words, designed as a vehicle for imperial flattery, do not do justice to Theoderic’s rule.

As Professor Herrin’s IMR lecture ‘Rethinking Ravenna: The Ostrogothic Inheritance’ skilfully demonstrated, Theoderic was not a simple imitator. His long 35-year reign continued and extended Roman government in a mixed society. His was a behaviour thoroughly appropriate to a Roman emperor. This is not surprising. Theoderic had ample opportunity to immerse himself in Roman life and politics during his ten-year stay in Constantinople as a child-hostage. Those were indeed his formative years (aged 8-18), which were to teach him what power meant and how it was to be wielded.

Theoderic’s building projects and magnificent mosaics in his capital of Ravenna were another expression of that power. His portrait in San Apollinare Nuovo, his private chapel, was a rare example of the display of secular portraiture in churches. Another famous example, which was to follow Theoderic’s own, was the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora at the church of San Vitale. But there was also an important precedent: San Giovanni Evangelista, the court chapel of Galla Placidia and her son Valentinian III. Although the mosaics of San Giovanni Evangelista no longer survive, we know from a sixteenth-century record that they represented the busts of emperors including Constantine, Valentinian and Gratian. They were a means by which Galla Placidia tried to establish her dynastic geneology and assure the ascension of her young son. They were a rare display of secular power in a religious context.

In fact, apart from these three examples (all in Ravenna), no other images of rulers have survived from fifth- and sixth-century churches. Such displays were particularly unprecedented in the East. The iconographic programme of San Apollinare Nuovo seems to have been firmly rooted within a very local context. This is particularly interesting, as Theoderic is known to have brought craftsmen from the East and to have taken inspiration from Constantinople for some of his building projects. Here again we see the qualities of Theoderic’s rule: it was not a mere imitation of the Eastern Roman Empire, but a fusion and an acceptance of different traditions, found in this case in Ravenna, the capital of Ostrogothic Italy and the land that had until a few decades before been a heartland of the Roman Empire. But Theoderic had also set a precedent himself. When Ravenna had been reconquered by the Eastern Empire, Justinian’s general, Belisarius, was confronted with these local displays of power and was quick to adapt, placing the portraits of the reigning emperor and his wife in the church of San Vitale. In this way, Justinian and Theodora are found flanking the approach to the altar in a city they had never visited.

Although the imperial couple might never have set foot in Ravenna, Professor Herrin’s vivid presentation of the city, the buildings, and the people certainly fuelled the imagination of the audience and made everyone impatient to see its treasures for themselves.

An audio file of the lecture will be available shortly at www.nottingham.ac.uk/medieval

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I opened my Guardian yesterday to read that the famed French historian Jacques Le Goff has died aged 90. Like the late Eric Hobsbawm, Le Goff was one of the great public intellectuals of the last fifty years, a powerful advocate for the societal importance of history. He pioneered new ways of seeing the Middle Ages by linking social and intellectual history. His work, always in French, was translated into many other languages, including English.

When I first arrived at Nottingham in 1990 Le Goff’s La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval had recently been published in English as Medieval Civilization (in a brilliant version by Julia Barrow). Although a work of haute vulgarisation that book, like all of Le Goff’s others, had a radical point to make to a public who regarded (and still do?) ‘medieval’ as synonymous with ‘bad’: the Middle Ages (not Antiquity) was the foundation of European civilisation. His first publication in 1948 (aged only 24) was an article about a Czech student at the University of Paris in the fourteenth century, characteristic of Le Goff’s lifelong interest in education and universities. Thereafter his huge output was continuous, varied and aimed at a wide audience. Having published his first article in Annales in 1960, he was associated with that revolutionary journal for decades, publishing some of his best work in it. An example is a classic article (Annales, vol. 22, 1967) about the interaction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (clerical and folkloric in his terms) in Merovingian cultures. I read this as an undergraduate in the early 1980s at the prompting of Wendy Davies (later my PhD supervisor) who expressed surprise at my lukewarm response. I didn’t like it because of the absence of hard evidence in footnotes but came to realise (as Wendy had suggested) just how important such interventions were in creating wholly new ways of understanding poorly documented periods. Le Goff was, of all the Annaliste historians, the most interested in how anthropological ideas and methods could speak to medievalists, enabling us to read our sources in unaccustomed ways. Where he led others followed, a good example being The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge, 2010). Le Goff moved from interest in cultural understandings of economies (time, rituals, work, trades and universities) to more intellectual themes (purgatory, mentalities and memory). Unexpectedly for an Annales historian he published biographies of St Louis and St Francis of Assisi. These were surely the inevitable outcome of his concern with past patterns of thought, both collective and individual.

His output continued until very recently. Appreciations are appearing around the world as I write. All of them laud his remarkable research. All reiterate his role as a public figure in France. A few have reminded us that he was also a great teacher, an advocate for the importance of teaching and facilitator others’ research, notably through his editorship of the Annales and many volumes of essays. He already seems like someone from another age.

Main image: The Archimedes Palimpsest being disbound. Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights. John Dean Photographer.

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Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte            doolie: doleful; dyte: story

Suld correspond and be equiualent.                  Suld: should.

So begins Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, a story of what happened to Cresseid (or Criseyde or Cressida, depending on your preferred version) after she left Troy. Henryson’s tale is indeed a ‘cairfull dyte’, for Cresseid is rejected by Diomede, and, after being condemned by the gods for alleged blasphemy, she contracts leprosy, thus losing first her beauty and then her life. Dismal as that sounds in summary, however, it is a complex, compelling and potentially redemptive poem: that complexity is embedded from the very beginning, even in the description of the weather.

Seasonal settings in medieval verse are often evocative. Many people – even T.S. Eliot –  are familiar with the spring opening to The Canterbury Tales, and its references to new life and the desire to be out and about. A late spring setting, commonly May, is often found in dream narrative and love poetry. But medieval poets do not just offer conventional images of spring, but use the seasons to create atmosphere, just as much as any other writer. I maintain that my experience of the Old English poem The Wanderer is much enhanced by the experience of waiting at a lonely Scottish bus stop in driving rain in the middle of November: I certainly recognised the writer’s depiction of chilly isolation. Although Chaucer’s London was apparently warmer than Henryson’s Dunfermline, nevertheless, Henryson’s evocation of a Scottish spring is very familiar, and not just to Scots. Over the last few days in Nottingham, we too have seen ‘in the middis of the Lent/ Schouris of haill gart fra the north discend/ That scantlie fra the cauld I micht defend’ (5-7).

 But there is more to Henryson’s description than that. The first hint of something more comes in the identification of the time as Lent. A period of repentance and fasting important in the medieval church, it ends with Good Friday and Easter, a time of acute trial and then a rebirth and a redemption. Like Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, to which it is a response, The Testament is not an overtly Christian poem, and there is no sense whatsoever that Cresseid will be redeemed in an after-life. For that reason, then, the choice of Lent is striking. Its significance seems developed by the third stanza:

 The northin wind had purifyit the air

And sched the mistie cloudis fra the sky;                               sched: cleared

The froist freisit, the blastis bitterly                   froist: frost; freisit: froze

Fra Pole Artick come quhisling loud and schill,       quhisling: whistling;

And causit me remufe aganis my will. (17-21)               remufe: remove

 The key word is ‘purifyit’: like its season, the weather is an agent of change and of self-examination. If the sky is purified by the loss of clouds, then the temperature drops, unpleasantly, but it makes visibility much, much clearer. Although Cresseid dies at the end of the poem, she dies with some understanding of who she is and how she got there, including her own faults and misjudgements. She does not forgive herself, nor does Troilus – or anyone else – forgive her: the Arctic wind is still whistling. However, she reaches the point where ‘[n]ane but my self as now I will accuse’ (574).

 Such a self-understanding (I don’t think it really matters if we as readers don’t agree with her view) puts her in direct contrast with the narrator. The narrator, the one suffering from the cold, is a further layer of complexity. Although he is sometimes identified with Henryson himself, most critics seem him as at the very least a distant projection of the poet. While his propensity to curl up with a book and some wine on a cold night makes him a very attractive figure, his refusal to recognise his old age and unsuitability for love makes him both idle in self-understanding and judgemental in his depiction of Cresseid. I think the poem suggests that it would better for him to endure the cold and recognise himself for what he is. The hail, then, might not simply be important atmospheric effect, but also for interpretative understanding. Leaving the demands of  self-knowledge aside, however, I think I’ll keep the central heating on a little bit longer.

If you would like to know more about Robert Henryson’s poem, you can read in Robert Henryson: The Poems ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: OUP, 1987) or you can read it in Seamus Heaney’s translation, The Testament of Cresseid  & Seven Fables (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

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A guest blog by Dr Ross Balzaretti, History, University of Nottingham

Judith Herrin is one of those (all too rare) historians who asks and answers unexpected questions, and her forthcoming IMR lecture ‘Rethinking Ravenna: The Ostrogothic Inheritance’ (5.30pm, 27 March 2014, A41, Clive Grainger Building, University Park) will no doubt do just that. I am looking forward to it enormously as Professor Herrin is one of the outstanding scholars of Byzantium, the author of many books including The Formation of Christendom (1987), a classic account of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’, two which have explored the histories of Byzantine women (Women in Purple: rulers of Medieval Byzantium, 2001 and Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium, 2013), and much else besides. She has also breeched the apparent divide between academic and popular history with great success, most brilliantly in her fascinating book Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London, 2007). There she tells the story of how as a schoolgirl she first experienced the mosaics in Ravenna on a trip with her mother after the Second World War: ‘Off we went from Milan in a rented Fiat Cinquecento to see the mosaic panels that commemorate Justinian and Theodora. Only later did I wonder why portraits of the rulers of Byzantium who never went to Ravenna flanked the approach to the altar in the church of San Vitale. Why are they there?’ (p. 61). The ability to nuance the obvious historical question (rather than a simple ‘why’ we get ‘why there and why then?’) is typical of Herrin’s approach to this well-worn subject.

My own encounter with Ravenna was more mundane. Returning from a conference in San Marino in September 1994 I spent a day there, wandering from church to church trying to dodge the (other) tourists in time-honoured fashion. The place made a great impression. The vast churches (especially San Vitale and Sant’Apollinare) with their glittering mosaics can hardly fail to stun an early medievalist. No photograph – and this town must be amongst the most photographed anywhere – can prepare you for the scale and splendour of the Late Antique remains. But for me the sense of Ravenna as a quiet backwater impressed more, somewhere of enormous romantic charm, a place which time has somehow left behind just so we can have our own direct experience of a once-great Empire.

This sense of decayed magnificence was probably also apparent to Charlemagne when he famously acquired old columns and marble from Ravenna to help build his own great church at Aachen, modelled on San Vitale (Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, chapter 26), having first asked permission to do so from Pope Hadrian I as good Carolingian rulers were meant to do. Charlemagne’s father Pippin had conquered Ravenna in 756, removed it from Lombard control and refused to return it to Constantine V, then emperor of Byzantium, who had asked him nicely to do so. Pippin gave it to the Pope in Rome instead, just about the most offensive thing you could do to a Greek emperor! By that time Ravenna had long slipped from effective Byzantine control, as had other parts of Italy, including Liguria on the opposite side of the peninsula. Charlemagne himself visited Ravenna more than once, but what he made of his experience is unknown. Charlemagne, like Herrin, like me, and like countless other tourists, must also have gazed on the mausoleum of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, another of the great relics of Ravenna, and one which can be viewed inside and outside in excellent photographs by Genevra Kornbluth, which should whet appetites for what Professor Herrin has in store for us when she visits Nottingham.

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If there are challenges in establishing Older Scots and Middle English as different languages (see previous blog) those are matched equally in attempting to define an Older Scots literary tradition. The Middle English literary tradition is so multifarious that to insist on separateness for Scotland seems doomed to failure. We can see, for instance, that not only the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, read Chaucer (and also Gower and Lydgate) with great care, but so did Hary, writer of the Wallace (the source, at some considerable distance, of Braveheart). We can also trace parallels in alliterative techniques between Scottish writers of the 15th century and English writers of the 14th: indeed, some poems, like the Awntyrs of Arthur, are quite hard to locate on one or other side of the border. So, if there is an identifiable Scottish tradition, it is one that is highly responsive to developments in England.

Like much Middle English literature, literature in Older Scots was also influenced by texts of Continental origin, particularly those in French and Latin. Those engagements were usually direct, and not mediated through English transmission, since many Scots found higher education in Paris and other intellectual centres. That hybridity shows in prose particularly, whether in Gilbert Hay’s translations or in John Ireland’s treatise, The Meroure of Wisdome, but it is also evident in verse redactions of French romances, such as Golagros and Gawane and Lancelot of the Laik. There are some Scots idiosyncrasies here: for instance, French prose romances are translated into verse much later than in England while French and Anglo-Norman seem not to be used as literary languages after the 12th century.

These are all important distinctions, but their influence can only support a Scottish tradition, not define it. There are some features, however, that do seem to be particularly Scottish interests. The most striking of these is probably flyting, a type of apparently ritualised poetic abuse, of whom the master practitioners were William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy. Debate continues as to whether this genre is influenced more by Continental or Gaelic culture; more importantly, it displays a range of insult of which Malcolm Tucker would be proud. At the slightly more respectable end, the Scots also have the Bruce and the Wallace, poems of royal and national identity, that are not quite histories (although they claim truth) and not quite romances; English equivalents are hard to identify.

Both flyting (when done by David Lyndsay) and the Scottish epics (for want of a better term) address another Scottish obsession: telling their rulers what to do and how to behave. The engagement with advice to princes, often quite sharply expressed, can be found in all kinds of texts, from histories, to treatises, to poetry. The messages are often conventional (a king should learn to rule himself before trying to rule others, for instance), but the obsessive concern for good government, right down into the late 16th century is striking. In the end, this characteristic might be the one that is most distinctive.

Whether such distinctions were drawn by earlier audiences, it is hard to tell. The literary traffic between Scotland and England was not all one way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid was appropriated for Chaucer in Thynne’s print of the 1530s; Surrey had clearly read Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid before attempting his own. While Henryson might have been annoyed by Thynne’s print, it probably would not have surprised him that his work had travelled so far: another feature of Older Scots poets is a confidence in their writing, no matter the audience.

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The witticism that Britain and the US are countries divided by a common language might equally apply to Scotland and England. To avoid too much controversy, I am neither going to attribute the thought, nor am I going to discuss contemporary linguistic matters, but instead limit my discussion here to the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when varieties of English were gaining or regaining prestige, and moving towards full elaboration. Elaboration is a key linguistic measures of a language (as opposed to a dialect): this means that the language can be used for all purposes and for all functions and registers, from government and legal documents, through literary usage, all the way down to effective flyting (insults or abuse).

Having established that, there follow other questions. In what ways can we differentiate Older Scots from Middle English? Can we or should we designate both as languages rather than dialects? What wider cultural points derive from our assumptions about the languages? These questions are not limited to what might be deemed linguistic technicalities, but stretch into political and social assumptions about language status, and political borders.

Linguistic Differences between Older Scots and Middle English

We might hope that this question – surely simply a matter of observation – would be easy to answer. The observing part is: there is a reasonably established corpus of Older Scots and Middle English texts, and, moreover, there are dictionaries (Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, available at www.dsl.ac.uk, and Middle English Dictionary, available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/). However, there are some hard decisions to make first, since the number and form of observable differences vary depending on which form of Middle English is selected, and which writing styles are compared. Differences between the language of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  and Troilus and Criseyde, for instance, are perhaps more striking than between Troilus and Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, both as a result of geographical origin and of literary form. Some features of Older Scots which don’t appear in Chaucer’s south-eastern English can be found in Northern Middle English texts, so differences are rarely as absolute as might be most convenient.

Having said all that, there are certain recurrent differences that can help identify a Scottish text. These include: the regular use of <quh-> for <wh->, so quha, quhair, quhen instead of who, where, when; the familiar /e:/ sound, so stane, haill for stone, whole; and an earlier use of Present-day English pronouns, scho, thay, thaim, thair, most probably derived from Norse. Texts with these features are clearly distinguishable from Chaucerian usage  but less so, say, from the York Plays. In enough quantity, however, together with other markers, these features help identify a text as Scots.

Dialect or language?

As a rule of thumb, it can be argued that a language is a dialect with a flag, or perhaps an army for the belligerent. Under that rule, then Older Scots is a language (although of course not the only one used within the realm of Scotland). The same applies to Middle English, notwithstanding the evident linguistic variation between different parts of England. Under the linguistic definition of elaboration, Older Scots qualifies as a language earlier than Middle English, as Older Scots was used more widely and in more consistent forms in documents slightly earlier than any other variety of Middle English.

What does that mean, though? Middle English is clearly still a language, but available in more, and in more diverse, forms than Older Scots. That begins to change in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for a whole number of cultural, technological and political reasons. But that’s a discussion for another place.

For a systematic account of Older Scots, see Jeremy Smith, Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader, (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2012), and for Middle English, see Simon Horobin and Jeremy Smith An Introduction to Middle English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

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