Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland

Scripting the Nation is the first book to set the poets of Scottish King James IV's court-William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy, and Gavin Douglas-in an extended dialogue with Latin and vernacular traditions of historiography. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Latin chroniclers such as John of Fordun and Walter Bower argued for their nation's status, using genealogically based myths of origin that linked Scotland to ancient centers of power. As vernacular histories grew more Anglophobic a...