The Buke of the Howlat was composed in the late 1440s for Elizabeth Douglas, wife of Archibald Douglas, earl of Moray. It is one of the great monuments of fifteenth-century Scots verse, perhaps the finest example of Older Scots alliterative poetry, telling a comic fable of an owl's borrowed feathers, his pride and ultimate fall, and a bird parliament which decides his fate. At its centre is a heraldic excurses which leads to a celebration of the virtues of the Douglas family and their service to Robert Bruce in the Scottish Wars of Independence. Its themes therefore focus on Scottish freedom,...

The Maitland Quarto Manuscript was compiled in c.1586 in the circle of the Maitland Family of Lethington, East Lothian. It is a highly significant and rich collection of Older Scots poetry. It contains the most complete collection of the poems of Sir Richard Maitland, judge, privy counsellor, and Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland under Mary Queen of Scots, together with poems attributed to Maitland's heir, John Maitland of Thirlestane, Chancellor to James VI, and to leading writers and intellectuals, including the king himself, Alexander Montgomerie, and Alexander Arbuthnot. It attests to...

This volume contains eleven Scottish examples of particular kinds of humorous writing - comic, parodic, and satiric - of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Previously unavailable in modern scholarly editions, these works are freshly established from diverse sources, including the manuscript that is the earliest extant of John Knox's -Historie of the Reformatioun of Religioun-. A manuscript owned by the Campbell of Glenorchy family is the source of the volume's most substantial work, Duncane Laideus Testament; the poem's bicultural outlook provides an important reference point for...