It is a commonplace that religious and devotional literature makes up the bulk of medieval vernacular literature. This is true for Middle English and even though the body of extant literature of medieval Scotland is less extensive in quantity and scope than that of England and thus may give one a somewhat distorted view of the historical reality, it is nevertheless substantial enough to warrant special study. The present volume focuses on religious and devotional life and literature in Scotland from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth.The predominantly literary topics range from the wider implications of the use of secular material in the Prologue to the Scottish Legends of the Saints at the Catholic end of the period to James Anderson’s poem The Winter Night which, despite its limited literary qualities, remained popular in Scotland because its anti-prelatical stance could be made to suit militant presbyterianism all the way up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. In between there are discussions of the battle between the body and the soul in Henryson’s fable ‘The Preaching of the Swallow’; the manuscript of Adam Abell’s chronicle, the ‘Roit’ or ‘Quheill of Tyme’; religious elements in the poetic works of Gavin Douglas; pastoral encyclopaedism and its moral-didactic roots in shepherds’ calendars in the ‘Monologue Recreative’ part of the Complaynt of Scotland; James VI’s translations of some of the Psalms, and the religious roots of some early Scottish charms. The volume concludes with a philosophical paper on John Mair’s perspective on the question of the relation between God’s creation of the world and his conservation of it, followed by a historical article on the (medieval) background, execution and consequences of the ‘revolutionary’ coronation of the thirteen-month old Prince James, Scotland’s first protestant coronation.
