Steve Boardman and Susan Foran, editors. Barbour’s Bruce and Its Cultural Context

The Bruce, the long poem completed in 1375 by Archdeacon of Aberdeen John Barbour, is undoubtedly deserving of focused interdisciplinary study, and this symposium volume provides a number of engaging perspectives on this epic Scottish work. As a collection, however, it does read more like a range of current research forwarded by interested contributors than as specific commissions designed to offer a comprehensive overview of its subject from all angles. In Barbour’s Bruce and Its Cultural Context: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland, Steve Boardman and Susan Foran provide a valuable introduction, foregrounding the context of Scottish political society and the increasingly belligerent Anglo-Scottish relations in the 1370s. Thus, they describe the intended courtly audience for this fourteen thousand-line vernacular (Middle Scots/English) “verse romance” or “chivalric biography.” The poem focuses upon the heroic efforts of King Robert the Bruce/I (r. 1306–1329), knight Sir James Douglas, and a number of their contemporaries in their struggle to secure the Scottish kingdom from English conquest ca. 1286–1332. The introduction rightly scrutinizes the evidence for Barbour’s having drawn on earlier verse lives and histories of events in Scotland and Ireland first produced ca. 1314–1329, under Robert I himself, or even in the 1330s and 1340s, as Anglo-Scottish dynastic war resumed. This analysis is sensitive to the possibility of Barbour’s having modified these earlier works to suit his later-fourteenth-century audience and his intended rhetorical purpose, as well as to his having worked in phases, perhaps appending additional material after his coverage of Robert’s achievements up to and including his famous victory in battle over Edward II of England at Bannockburn in 1314. Perhaps the most intriguing point to emerge at the outset of this volume is evidence for connections between Barbour and Archibald Douglas, Lord of Galloway and future 3rd Earl of Douglas, the bastard son of the poem’s celebrated Sir James Douglas (and a man who prospered and remained hugely influential through the bumpy transition between the Bruce and Stewart dynasties in 1371).

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