Place and Poetry in premodern Scotland

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2024-05-10 17:00:06

This website is dedicated to how places were presented, imagined, and described, in the poetry of premodern Scotland (medieval and early modern periods, c. 1400-1700). It is a collaboration between the National Library of Scotland and the University of Bristol, and the result of a British Academy Midcareer Fellowship on 'Place and Poetry in Premodern Scotland' held by Sebastiaan Verweij in 2023/24.

For the purpose of this website, a place can be many things: a town, burgh, building, or built object; a natural landmark, landscape feature, mountain, or river; and yet more diffuse places such as a country, a coast line, or a body of water. Scottish premodern poems are of course full of many more different types of places, not least imagined places, mythical places, disappeared places, and more. This website concentrates on places that can be located on a map of Scotland. The poems here featured illustrate how Scottish poets (and some visitors) viewed and experienced such Scottish places. The aim of this website is also to draw attention to a way of writing Scottish place that predates the Romantic representations which have so powerfully shaped modern cultural stereotypes of Scotland. Rather, from the earliest days of Scottish poetry, poets engaged profoundly with their geography, landscape, and environment, in ways that can tell us much about the lived experience of place. During the premodern period, Scots sought to represent their places in a variety of media. The sixteenth century saw the advent of mapping, and of chorography (description of regions, typically in words rather than in maps). Historians increasingly described the land as well as its people and their deeds. The earliest formal landscape paintings of Scotland were produced in the 1630s by a visitor, Alexander Keirincx, and a first wide-ranging set of engravings of towns, castles, and religious buildings, was produced by another visitor, John Slezer, in 1693. Such visual records form the backdrop to this website -- but it is the poetry that tells another more varied story about premodern Scottish places.

The poems featured on this website are selected because of their density of interesting places, to provide some coverage of different genres, and to illustrate the many ways in which poets imagined a place. The featured poems are (to date) in two of the three major literary languages of Scotland: Scots (and English), and Latin (with translations). We hope at a later date to extend this website with poetry in Scottish Gaelic, to more fully represent Scotland's multilingual literary history of this period; and to represent some of the distinct kinds of place writing found in the Gaelic tradition. We welcome future collaborations and would like to hear from you about interesting poems that might feature on this website. Please contact Sebastiaan Verweij at s.verweij@bristol.ac.uk.