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The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland. Edited by Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood. Phantassie, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press. 1998. xii + 201 pp. Illus. Index. L20.00. ISBN 1 89841057 7
Seven of the essays in the volume under review are based on lectures first given in a series on aspects of national identity in Renaissance Scotland held in the Oxford English Faculty in 1992 (and 1993); the eighth, Nicola Royan's, was originally delivered at the seventh international conference on medieval and Renaissance Scottish language and literature at the University of Strathclyde in 1993. Brought together in this volume, they form a strikingly well-focused corpus of writings which will appeal particularly to those who did not have the good fortune to hear the oral presentations.
Mapstone's scene-setting introductory comments succinctly summarise the contents and main arguments of the various contributions. This review will therefore try to avoid duplication by offering, instead, a commentary from a folklorist's point of view.
Though the chief approaches adopted in the essays are politico-historical and literary, it is Juliette Wood's essay on "Folkloric Patterns in Scottish Chronicles" (pp.116-35) that might well attract the special attention of readers of this journal. Using as her illustrations legends, personal-experience narratives, and accounts of portents, Wood brings her expertise in the storying aspects and belief systems of the folk-cultural register to bear on an analysis of the structure and function of such traditional phenomena in the chronicling process, and therefore also on their presence in the resulting chronicles. Instead of simply identifying and isolating relevant features in these narratives, as is...