The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland

The early modern literary miscellanies of Scotland explored here offer rich evidence of a vibrant literary culture—at the Scottish court, among its urban and civic elites, most obviously but not exclusively in Edinburgh, and in landed family households all over Scotland. How does one structure these separate manuscript collections (mainly poetry) produced during an eighty-year period into a book, if the significant theme that emerges from them is the importance of manuscript transmission and interconnection? Textual communities, as the author, Sebaastian Verweij, terms them, collected, transcribed, circulated and preserved Scotland’s literary heritage, and increasingly English texts too. Printed material was also on the move: books and pamphlets were bought, lent, devoured, copied and returned. While the manuscripts were written in a certain place, the texts themselves usually originated elsewhere, indicating their movement along transmission routes built on social, familial and literary networks. The manuscripts embodied collaborative practices, with the existence of the same texts in several collections, as well as the poets’ original scripts, reflecting the wider social spaces or literary circles that transcended the physical distances between the people that populated them

Art · Economics · Literature · Production (economics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Medieval Literature and History · Scottish History and National Identity