Friday 29th January, 1pm GR06/7.

Conor Leahy (St. John’s) will give a lecture entitled ‘Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry’; a brief abstract follows. All are welcome.

‘Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry’

‘All the traditions of late medieval poetic landscape flow together and coalesce, miraculously, in Gavin Douglas.’ So wrote Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter in their 1971 study, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World. Along with Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas (c.1476-1522) helped transform the Scots vernacular into a major European literary language. His pioneering translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1513) into ‘the langage of Scottis natioun’ was praised by Ezra Pound as being ‘better than the original’, while his magnificent descriptions of the Scottish landscape make him (according to Alastair Fowler) ‘effectively…the inventor of nature poetry’.

My lecture seeks to place the poetry of Gavin Douglas in the wider contexts of late medieval landscape writing. My discussion will range from well-known works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s dream poems, to some lesser-known but fascinating pieces,such as Mum and the Sothsegger and the Middle English On Husbondrie. I will examine how the qualities of perspective and spatial consistency developed fitfully and unpredictably in fourteenth and fifteenth century writing, but I will also discuss how descriptions of landscape could have a shifting range of associations in the context of any given work.

Douglas himself could draw upon a diverse tradition of Scottish and English landscape poetry, both for specific details and for structural coherence. In his panoramic descriptions of nature (Prologues VII, XII, and XIII of his Eneados) we find the use of materials as varied as Robert Henryson’s Fables and Testament of Cresseid, Virgil’s Georgics, Chaucer’s House of Fame, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and even Douglas’s own dream vision The Palice of Honour (1501). The breadth and sensitivity of his reading allowed Douglas to look searchingly and with fresh insight at the natural world, and to write some of the most vivid and original poetry of the late Middle Ages.

This lecture is of interest to students working on the following papers: Part I, Paper 3 (English Literature 1300-1550) Part II, Paper 5 (Chaucer) Part II, Paper 6 (Medieval Supernatural)