Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Scoto-British (The Scoto-British Subjects of James I: Literature, Europe and Nation Building in Newly United Great Britain, 1603-1617.)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-01-09 do 2024-01-08
The context for this research is that of early modern Europe, often regarded as the cradle of modern national sentiment.
The negotiation process that resulted from the King's attempts to foster a unified Britain was complicated by the deep cultural and political bond between Scotland and Continental Europe. The project gives particular consideration to gender aspects, given the role of the court of Anna of Denmark in the cultural dynamics of the Jacobean world, and to ephemeral and occasional literature, neglected by literary histories until very recently. This project has a highly multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary focus, involving different fields in philology (codicology, palaeography and book studies) and history (prosopography, political and identity history, literary history).
By focusing on an under investigated sector of early Stuart society, this research will transform our understanding of the Jacobean period. Given the relevance of issues of British identity and European belonging to the current political discourse, this project will deeply impact both the scholarly and the wider world, stimulating scholarly research on a lesser-investigated topic and encouraging an educated debate on national and supranational identities in the UK and in the EU.
This has allowed for the (re)discovery of edited and unedited texts by Scoto-British writers (although less material seems to have survived that was initially expected), which have been the object of study. The results of this study, along with edited textual material, will be published in book form.
Secondary research, mainly focusing on the Union of the Crowns and on related literature by English and Scottish writers in English, Scots and Latin (but also including substantial research into Discourse Analysis and its applications to historical political discourse) has included over 200 works between monographs, chapters, essays and articles.
Preliminary results have been published in articles and essays in journal and miscellanies, and disseminated via conference talks and keynote papers (Symposium for Seventeenth Century Scottish Literature, Associazione Italiana di Anglistica, International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language, Literature, and Culture, International Association of Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies), workshops (in collaboration with the Symposium for Seventeenth Century Scottish Literature) and seminars (University of Sussex, Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies).
Moreover, the researcher has shared their specific expertise with the host institution, in the form of teaching both core modules on Medieval and Renaissance Literature and workshops for graduate students on archival skills, palaeography, and textual editing.
Moreover, vernacular Scoto-British poetry has been connected to its proper context, that of contemporary English and Scottish literature in the vernacular and in the Latin, especially when connected to the issues of the Union, the royal family and the new British state.
Finally, this project has greatly contributed to locate Scoto-British literature in its political context, and to connect Scoto-British literary efforts to the burgeoning discourse on a pan-British identity, which was previously almost exclusively centred on English (vs Scottish, Irish or Welsh) responses to the Union and Britishness.
From a focus on literary studies, the project has revealed the complexities in the negotiation process of British national and cultural identity in a key moment for its development, allowing us to reframe received historical ideas of Britishness.
In so doing, the project has contributed to a new direction in literary studies, focused, as John Pocock had advocated in the 1970, on a genuinely “British” idea of literature and canon.