The Free Thinking Festival Essay: The Medieval Scottish Dream State

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2015

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and this year's general election led to a passionate debate about nationhood and nationalism. But not for the first time. Kylie Murray of the University of Oxford discusses the ways in which feelings surrounding Anglo-Scottish relations and visions of Scottish national identity reached a peak of imaginative, sometimes intemperate expression in 15th-century Scottish literature. Among the jewels - Abbot Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, the most re-published text in Scotland for the next two hundred years – and the inspiration behind one of Scotland’s greatest epic poems, Blind Harry’s The Wallace, where two hundred years after the Wars of Independence, the old hero is virtually re-invented as a second messiah.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Kylie Murray discussing her research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's
0:27.5	out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:45.3	I'm a Scot and I want to take you to a small, rocky island in the Firth of Fourth called Inchcom.
0:49.7	You get a great bird's eye view of it when you cross the fourth bridge by train.
0:53.7	It's almost completely covered by the ruins of a monastery.
0:58.7	In that monastery's heyday, there lived and worked a remarkable man.
1:06.6	Abbott Walter Bauer was one of 15th century Scotland's most conspicuous politicians and churchmen,
1:10.8	passionately engaged in one of the hottest issues of the day,
1:16.2	the extremely vexatious relationship between Scotland and England.
1:23.3	Bauer was absolutely adamant about Scotland's royal and ancient identity and vocal to the point of intemperance on her equally ancient right to independence.
1:29.8	He was so ardent that reading his words today can feel like we're connecting with some kind
1:35.0	of medieval Scottish Alph Garnet. His abiding passion for Scotland led him to create what
1:41.7	survives as medieval Scotland's largest work of literature, the Scoticronicon.
1:47.9	The Scottish Chronicon takes us on a journey to the most distant and remote past that Bauer could imagine,
1:54.9	a past which had become massively politicised during the wars of independence between England and Scotland.
2:01.7	Mythical stories of beginnings and origins were known and deployed across Europe in the
2:07.1	Middle Ages, but in Britain they were hotly contested. England's origin myth had been
2:13.6	communicated, slightly confusingly by the Welsh cleric Geoff Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the 1100s.
2:20.5	Geoffrey's Latin work, the history of the kings of Britain, recounted the Brute myth.
2:25.8	Brut, being an abbreviation for Brutus, grandson of the Trojan Prince Aeneas.
	...

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