The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Gavin Douglas’s Eneados was concluded in 1513; in the same year James IV’s reign reached its apogee only to conclude disastrously with his attempted invasion of England and the defeat at Flodden. The Battle of Flodden Fields marks the end of a period of great hopes of social and intellectual renewal for Scotland – a few years earlier, in 1507, the King had supported Chepman and Myllar’s project to set up a printing press in Edinburgh: the culture of early modern Scotland found its starting point here, only to suffer a sudden check. In this section we shall examine the “re-birth” of Scottish poetry in English and Gaelic, focussing in particular on the reign of James VI/I and on his fostering of a new poetic mode at the Scottish Court. Beside the poetic production of the King himself, the poets discussed here will be Alexander Montgomerie, John Stewart of Baldynneis, William Fowler, Alexander Hume and the Hudson brothers. As we move towards the Union of the Crowns, new poets appear on the scene: William Alexander, Robert Ayton, and especially William Drummond of Hawthornden.