An online IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Lucy Hinnie (Postdoctoral Fellow 2023-24; British Library)
Making a Monograph: Recontextualising the Bannatyne MS (c. 1568)
This Work in Progress seminar will consider the process of writing, against the backdrop of developing my doctoral research into a monograph. It will serve as a case study, considering the myriad changes that have occurred between the completion of my thesis in 2018 and the start of my fellowship in 2023: political, academic, personal and practical. I offer this recontextualization of my research as a study in how external factors can determine and deepen our understanding of our research, and the ways in which our research moves with us into new and unexpected places.
My research itself focusses on the Bannatyne manuscript, the largest extant miscellany of late-medieval and early modern Scottish literature, commonly dated to 1568. Compiled by a young Edinburgh lawyer, George Bannatyne, during a ‘tyme of pest’, the manuscript contains over 400 disparate pieces of verse, divided into five sections: theology, morality, comedy, love and fables. The manuscript, now housed in the National Library of Scotland (Adv. 1.1.6) contains a wealth of anonymous and obscure verse as well as named Scottish makars such as Douglas, Dunbar and Henryson. It intersects a period of huge change in Scottish culture: the incipient Reformation and the reign of Mary Queen of Scots are the backdrop for its creation.
More recently, my research has considered the way in which the collection has endured over hundreds of years as a paragon of Scottish culture, redeployed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Allan Ramsay and Sir Walter Scott as being a true Scottish canon, before being further utilized as an aspirational mode of Scottishness, feeding into a colonial agenda. Sitting at the intersection of the late-medieval and early modern period, my work argues that Scottish poetry continues and elevates the medieval querelle throughout the sixteenth century and directly impacts the ideas of Scottish identity that fuel the Scottish colonial agenda.
This presentation illustrates the shift of the balance of scholarship from the accepted, and by now dated, canon of Scottish literature and towards the marginalised and highly-charged issues of feminism and colonial history, considering how the recent shifts in the political and academic climates have helped this strain of research come to light in my monograph writing process.
Please note this seminar is online-only. Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83178441780
Passcode: Kj7gnpP4