Afterword: Eisd O Eisd

Abstract

Ihad the good fortune of reading Dunbar and Henryson at Macalester College with Glending Olson. I liked the Scottish poetry so much that I spent my last undergraduate year at Stirling University, where, because Felicity Riddy was on leave, I spent most of my time reading contemporary poetry, some Scottish, some not, with Norman McCaig. I had the further good fortune of reading Middle Scots poetry with Tony Spearing when I was a graduate student, and I wrote my dissertation on the Scottish reception of Chaucer (especially the Scots’ pronounced attachment to “schort conclusiouns” of a moral nature). I published some of those findings in “The Scottish Chaucer,” which discussed the Seiden Arch B.24 MS and argued for the importance of scribal variation and manuscript structure to the study of cultural transmission.² This call was not much heard at the time. Still, Tony Spearing’s move to the University of Virginia would also set on track R. James Goldstein’s The Matter of Scotland, a significant early reading of Scotland’s historical literature as cultural production.³ I was not destined to too great a loneliness. A number of good formalist/historicist critics were writing about late medieval Scotland: Spearing himself, but also, for example, Lois Ebin, Gretchen Mieszkowski, and Priscilla Bawcutt.

Inferiority, singularity, establish themselves at the crossroads of multiple components, each relatively autonomous in relation to the other, and, if need be, in open conflict.

Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies ¹