Final Report Summary - ELMEMS (The Epic in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland)
The main aim of the project was to complete the first ever study on the epic in Scotland in the late Middle Ages and the renaissance and its reciprocal connections with European literature. Dr Mainer’s analysis examined how socio-political and cultural issues conditioned the creation and transformation of the epic genre and the connectedness between Scottish culture and Europe.
There were four main objectives:
(1) To reassess the importance of the epic as a genre and its survival throughout time owing to interaction with other genres.
(2) To trace the transformation of the epic genre in Scotland.
(3) To examine how the different manifestations of the epic respond to contemporary anxieties about national identity, class identity and gender identity.
(4) To compare the epic in Scotland with English literature written in Ireland: the Irish comparison offers a contrasting point to the Scottish epics, placing the research in a wider European context. This was also complemented by an article (absent from the original proposal), which also included a comparison with Spanish literature.
Results:
The research resulted in five scholarly articles ranging from the early thirteenth-century Chansun de Dermot to the literature of the Scottish reign of James VI before he became King of England (1603). The comparative Hiberno-Irish and Spanish articles together with those dealing with Italian and France translations revealed the intercultural relations between Scotland and other European nations.
Dr Mainer’s interdisciplinary approach showed the interaction between political theory, the social circumstances and the conceptualizations of gender, national and class identity. In the article dealing with the earliest texts, the Chansun de Dermot and Barbour’s Bruce c. 1375), despite the differences in chronology, place of composition and ideology, both texts present thematic convergences in their representation of the Irish invasion that go further than the perfunctory repetition of epic motifs. Instead, those are reworked to accord with the historical circumstances and political principles articulated. The Anglo-Norman and the Scots are envisaged as socially and culturally superior, bringing their social order to the chaos of Ireland. Another traditional element of classical and medieval epics, the tension the hero and the king, is adapted in divergent ways by both narratives manipulating and inventing historical events to comply with the texts’ goals.
Translation also played a central role in the formation of identities in late medieval and early modern Scotland. The translation of the French Cleriadus et Meliadice into Scots as Clariodus and its popularity over the sixteenth century can only be understood if the text is read as a mediator of the Stewart dynastic discourse on foreign policy during the late fifteenth and all through the sixteenth century. However, it is not a simple assimilation of Cleriadus et Meliadice to pre-existing Scottish cultural codes. The epic motifs typical of most Scottish romances characterized the target text along other alterations to the source: a dual discursive strategy of foreignization and domestication allows for the preservation of a myriad of courtly motifs and topoi at the same time as they are stylistically and thematically adapted to Older Scots literary models, deploying Dunbar’s The Thrissill and the Rois as the main artistic and political inspiration. Owing to these narratological devices, the main themes and tropes are temporally and spatially re-categorized, providing the translation with an afterlife in a very precise political Scottish context. Clariodus’s ideological premises enact a discourse about peaceful harmony amongst European nations, whose only enemy is the Ottoman empire. Precisely these same ideas were put forward by James IV and later in the century by James VI. This is similar to James’s epic poem, Lepanto, is which at least in its first publication intended to give an equally harmonious vision of a united Europe fighting against the Ottomans. Thus both texts were re-codified to be relevant to contemporary Scotland and the dynastic discourse even if on the narrative level, there seemed to be little connection with the country.
Although text Fowler’s translation of Machiavelli’s Principe is not an epic but a political treatise, its later inclusion in the project shows the way in which texts were acculturated in the Scottish context. The translation intends to encode the ideology of the Jacobean political discourse by domesticating the main source, selecting different sources and adding new material to the target text. The translator, being familiar with Jacobean policies and attitudes towards the administration of power, domesticated the source text to participate actively in the formation and support of Jacobean ideologies at a time when he had fallen out of favour with James. The translation is a recontextualising process of acceptance and of submission to James. Thus, Fowler’s translative strategies were at the service of justifying and legitimising existing structural power relations and ideologies during James’s reign. In a similar political context, The Historie of Judith operates as an example of early modern Western gender politics and as assertion of control over women as individuals and as a category as applied in the realm of literature and translation. Yet, Judith’s representation is much more problematic than what a superficial reading may denote owing to not just being an exemplary Protestant female, but more interestingly a heroine, who undertakes a role exclusively stipulated for men at the time. Judith’s construction as female leader could not escape the restrictive social rules in which biological difference determined a certain kind of role, performative expectations and acceptability in Western Europe, making the dichotomy woman-power impossible to reconcile.
Potential Impact:
The medieval Scottish texts studied had never been approached from an epic angle. Dr Mainer’s project reinstated the paramount importance of under-researched texts, such as Hudson’s Historie of Judith, Clariodus or Fowler’s Prince, deploying an interdisciplinary methodology and structure. This contributed not only to the better understanding of these particular narratives, but also to the ideologies behind the formation of European nations, which are still relevant nowadays, and the dialogic interaction between literature, politics and society.
The project also took into account one of HERA’s mission statements (HERA deliverable, 6.2.1 2006): “the resurgence of European regional cultures”. From the late Middle Ages, both Scottish and Irish notions of cultural and political identity have been defined against the English centre. Thus peripheral Scottishness and Irishness wanted to recover their centrality against notions of Englishness and Britishness. This study investigated the origins of these cultural and national identity tensions. Similarly, “Appropriations of the past”, which is an area of HERA’s interest, was key to the project. The texts analysed appropriated and distorted the past to make it relevant to their own political agendas and contemporary times.
There were four main objectives:
(1) To reassess the importance of the epic as a genre and its survival throughout time owing to interaction with other genres.
(2) To trace the transformation of the epic genre in Scotland.
(3) To examine how the different manifestations of the epic respond to contemporary anxieties about national identity, class identity and gender identity.
(4) To compare the epic in Scotland with English literature written in Ireland: the Irish comparison offers a contrasting point to the Scottish epics, placing the research in a wider European context. This was also complemented by an article (absent from the original proposal), which also included a comparison with Spanish literature.
Results:
The research resulted in five scholarly articles ranging from the early thirteenth-century Chansun de Dermot to the literature of the Scottish reign of James VI before he became King of England (1603). The comparative Hiberno-Irish and Spanish articles together with those dealing with Italian and France translations revealed the intercultural relations between Scotland and other European nations.
Dr Mainer’s interdisciplinary approach showed the interaction between political theory, the social circumstances and the conceptualizations of gender, national and class identity. In the article dealing with the earliest texts, the Chansun de Dermot and Barbour’s Bruce c. 1375), despite the differences in chronology, place of composition and ideology, both texts present thematic convergences in their representation of the Irish invasion that go further than the perfunctory repetition of epic motifs. Instead, those are reworked to accord with the historical circumstances and political principles articulated. The Anglo-Norman and the Scots are envisaged as socially and culturally superior, bringing their social order to the chaos of Ireland. Another traditional element of classical and medieval epics, the tension the hero and the king, is adapted in divergent ways by both narratives manipulating and inventing historical events to comply with the texts’ goals.
Translation also played a central role in the formation of identities in late medieval and early modern Scotland. The translation of the French Cleriadus et Meliadice into Scots as Clariodus and its popularity over the sixteenth century can only be understood if the text is read as a mediator of the Stewart dynastic discourse on foreign policy during the late fifteenth and all through the sixteenth century. However, it is not a simple assimilation of Cleriadus et Meliadice to pre-existing Scottish cultural codes. The epic motifs typical of most Scottish romances characterized the target text along other alterations to the source: a dual discursive strategy of foreignization and domestication allows for the preservation of a myriad of courtly motifs and topoi at the same time as they are stylistically and thematically adapted to Older Scots literary models, deploying Dunbar’s The Thrissill and the Rois as the main artistic and political inspiration. Owing to these narratological devices, the main themes and tropes are temporally and spatially re-categorized, providing the translation with an afterlife in a very precise political Scottish context. Clariodus’s ideological premises enact a discourse about peaceful harmony amongst European nations, whose only enemy is the Ottoman empire. Precisely these same ideas were put forward by James IV and later in the century by James VI. This is similar to James’s epic poem, Lepanto, is which at least in its first publication intended to give an equally harmonious vision of a united Europe fighting against the Ottomans. Thus both texts were re-codified to be relevant to contemporary Scotland and the dynastic discourse even if on the narrative level, there seemed to be little connection with the country.
Although text Fowler’s translation of Machiavelli’s Principe is not an epic but a political treatise, its later inclusion in the project shows the way in which texts were acculturated in the Scottish context. The translation intends to encode the ideology of the Jacobean political discourse by domesticating the main source, selecting different sources and adding new material to the target text. The translator, being familiar with Jacobean policies and attitudes towards the administration of power, domesticated the source text to participate actively in the formation and support of Jacobean ideologies at a time when he had fallen out of favour with James. The translation is a recontextualising process of acceptance and of submission to James. Thus, Fowler’s translative strategies were at the service of justifying and legitimising existing structural power relations and ideologies during James’s reign. In a similar political context, The Historie of Judith operates as an example of early modern Western gender politics and as assertion of control over women as individuals and as a category as applied in the realm of literature and translation. Yet, Judith’s representation is much more problematic than what a superficial reading may denote owing to not just being an exemplary Protestant female, but more interestingly a heroine, who undertakes a role exclusively stipulated for men at the time. Judith’s construction as female leader could not escape the restrictive social rules in which biological difference determined a certain kind of role, performative expectations and acceptability in Western Europe, making the dichotomy woman-power impossible to reconcile.
Potential Impact:
The medieval Scottish texts studied had never been approached from an epic angle. Dr Mainer’s project reinstated the paramount importance of under-researched texts, such as Hudson’s Historie of Judith, Clariodus or Fowler’s Prince, deploying an interdisciplinary methodology and structure. This contributed not only to the better understanding of these particular narratives, but also to the ideologies behind the formation of European nations, which are still relevant nowadays, and the dialogic interaction between literature, politics and society.
The project also took into account one of HERA’s mission statements (HERA deliverable, 6.2.1 2006): “the resurgence of European regional cultures”. From the late Middle Ages, both Scottish and Irish notions of cultural and political identity have been defined against the English centre. Thus peripheral Scottishness and Irishness wanted to recover their centrality against notions of Englishness and Britishness. This study investigated the origins of these cultural and national identity tensions. Similarly, “Appropriations of the past”, which is an area of HERA’s interest, was key to the project. The texts analysed appropriated and distorted the past to make it relevant to their own political agendas and contemporary times.