On the Margins: Early Modern Scottish Writing

Abstract: Sixteenth-century Scottish literature suffers from the superimposition of a European periodisation that sorts ill with its historical circumstances, and from the centripetal force of Tudor culture. Thus, in the perception of literary historians, it is often reduced to a marginal phenomenon, drawing its force solely from receptivity and imitation. Yet its ‘Auld Alliance’ with France, its trading routes with Scandinavia, and its significant importation of printed books from the Low Countries, meant that continental ideas and influences reached Scotland directly rather than via its southern neighbour. The often-lamented marginal position of Scottish early modern literature was also the key to its insatiable exploration of continental models and its development of forms, such as the sonnet, once they had long exhausted their vitality in Italy or France. By speaking from the margins, within, as it were, its own cultural time-zone, through its exploration of continental models and its development of forms that had long exhausted their vitality elsewhere, Scotland transformed this marginal space into a locus of discussion, and proposed an alternative model of literary development, based on a network of translation, coterie literature, cooperation and exchange.