The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland <i>The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland</i> . By W <scp>illiam</scp> C <scp>alin</scp> . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. x + 415 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is generally accepted that France impacted less on early Scottish literature than on its English equivalent: if nobles and clergy brought French loan words into the Scots lexicon, there was nothing comparable to the flourishing of ‘Anglo-Norman’ writing. However, William Calin endeavours to show how, in the medieval and Renaissance literature of Scotland, the French tradition offered a wide range of genres and styles, which Scots authors made their own. Breaking with the age-old focus on Anglo-Scottish exchanges, he situates Scottish books in a larger intertextual context, international and European. Beginning with The Kingis Quair, attributed to James I, Calin then shows various French influences on the Makars Douglas, Dunbar, and Henryson. A new approach is offered on intertextual relations between Pierre Gringore's Le Prince des Sotz and David Lyndsay's classic Thrie Estaitis. Some of the most interesting pages are devoted to Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI/I. Mary was, ‘if not a great poet, a very good one’ (p. 234): her amatory and devotional verse — whose authenticity Calin vigorously defends — bears the influence of Ronsard and other Renaissance giants. James VI inherited her Francophilia but certainly not her Catholicism: his own verse is shown to be strongly coloured by that of the Huguenot Du Bartas, whom he translated. Calin ends by continuing the recent ‘rehabilitation’ of William Drummond of Hawthornden. A hopelessly out of date Petrarchan who wrote exclusively in English, Drummond had no place in the ‘Scots Renaissance’ Pleiade created by Hugh MacDiarmid and other nationalist intellectuals. Yet Calin argues that the baroque mentality of Drummond's longer texts shows an unmistakeable French imprint. The question of what remains uniquely ‘Scottish’ in this intertextual web persists. If Calin thankfully rejects the Romantic idea that Scottish literature is ‘close to the Volk’ (p. 299), he does find something specifically Scottish in the flyting and the eldritch: a taste for scatology, verbal abuse, and brawling seems to mark the Scots out from their Sassenach and continental cousins. Calin also claims — this time without any proof — that Scots, compared with the French or the English, discuss the situation of culture in greater depth and with greater passion. Scottish literature, he concludes, is ‘multilingual and multicultural, expansive and ever expanding’ (p. 301). But could this description not be applied to all literatures? And why should literature be approached exclusively through the prism of nationality? After all, as this punchy and well-researched book shows, ‘Scottish’ authors of the period had very much as their references Antiquity and the fierce loves and hatreds of religious warfare.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".