A new investigation of the saints' cults which flourished in medieval Scotland, fruitfully combining archaeological, historical, and literary perspectives.

In Kind Neighbours Tom Turpie explores devotion to Scottish saints and their shrines in the later middle ages. He provides fresh insight into the role played by these saints in the legal and historical arguments for Scottish independence, and the process by which first Andrew, and later Ninian, were embraced as patron saints of the Scots. Kind Neighbours also explains the appeal of the most popular Scottish saints of the period and explores the relationship between regional shrines and the Scottish monarchy. Rejecting traditional interpretations based around church-led patriotism or crown patronage, Turpie draws on a wide range of sources to explain how religious, political and environmental changes in the later middle ages shaped devotion to the saints in Scotland.

The twelfth century saw a wide-ranging transformation of the Irish church, a regional manifestation of a wider pan-European reform movement. This book, the first to offer a full account of this change, moves away from the previous concentration on the restructuring of Irish dioceses and episcopal authority, and the introduction of Continental monastic observances, to widen the discussion. It charts changes in the religious culture experienced by the laity as well as the clergy and takes account of the particular Irish experience within the wider European context. The universal ideals that were defined with increasing clarity by Continental advocates of reform generated a series of initiatives from Irish churchmen aimed at disseminating reform ideology within clerical circles and transmitting it also to lay society, even if, as elsewhere, it often proved difficult to implement in practice. Whatever the obstacles faced by reformist clergy, their genuine concern to transform the Irish church and society cannot be doubted, and is attested in a range of hitherto unexploited sources this volume draws upon. Marie Therese Flanagan is Professor of Medieval History at the Queen's University of Belfast.

Edition and translation of this important genre of Old Welsh poetry.The "Stanzas of the Graves" or "Graves of the Warriors of the Island of Britain", attributed to the legendary poet Taliesin, describe ancient heroes' burial places. Like the "Triads of the Island of Britain", they are an indispensable key to the narrative literature of medieval Wales. The heroes come from the whole of Britain, including Mercia and present-day Scotland, as well as many from Wales and a few from Ireland. Many characters known from the Mabinogion appear, often with additional information, as do some from romance and early Welsh saga, such as Arthur, Bedwyr, Gawain, Owain son of Urien, Merlin, and Vortigern. The seventh-century grave of Penda of Mercia, beneath the river Winwæd in Yorkshire, is the latest grave to be included. The poems testify to the interest aroused by megaliths, tumuli, and other apparently man-made monuments, some of which can be identified with known prehistoric remains.This volume offers a full edition and translation of the poems, mapped with reference to all the manuscripts, starting with the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest extant book of Welsh poetry. There is also a detailed commentary on their linguistic, literary, historical, and archaeological aspects. translation of the poems, mapped with reference to all the manuscripts, starting with the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest extant book of Welsh poetry. There is also a detailed commentary on their linguistic, literary, historical, and archaeological aspects. translation of the poems, mapped with reference to all the manuscripts, starting with the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest extant book of Welsh poetry. There is also a detailed commentary on their linguistic, literary, historical, and archaeological aspects. translation of the poems, mapped with reference to all the manuscripts, starting with the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest extant book of Welsh poetry. There is also a detailed commentary on their linguistic, literary, historical, and archaeological aspects.

Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350-1560 examines lay religious culture in Scottish towns between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. It looks at what the living did to influence the dead and how the dead were believed to influence the living in turn; it explores the ways in which townspeople asserted their individual desires in the midst of overlapping communities; and it considers both continuities and changes, highlighting the Catholic Reform movement that reached Scottish towns before the Protestant Reformation took hold. Students and scholars of Scottish history and of medieval and early modern history more broadly will find in this book a new approach to the religious culture of Scottish towns between 1350 and 1560, one that interprets the evidence in the context of a time when Europe experienced first a flourishing of medieval religious devotion and then the sterner discipline of early modern Reform.

Premodern Scotland: Literature and Governance 1420-1587 brings together original essays by a group of international scholars to offer fresh and ground-breaking research into the 'advice to princes' tradition and related themes of good self- and public governance in Older Scots literature, and in Latin literature composed in Scotland in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. The volume brings to the fore texts both from and about the royal court in a variety of genres, including satire, tragedy, complaint, dream vision, chronicle, epic, romance, and devotional and didactic treatise, and considers texts composed for noble readers and for a wider readership able to access printed material. The writers and texts studied include Bower's Scotichronicon, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Gavin Douglas's Eneados. Lesser known authors and texts also receive much-needed critical attention, and include Richard Holland's, The Buke of the Howlat, chronicles by Andrew of Wyntoun, Hector Boece, and John Bellenden, and poetry by sixteenth-century writers such as Robert Sempill, John Rolland of Dalkeith, and William Lauder. Non-literary texts, such as the Parliamentary 'Aberdeen Articles' further deepen the discussion of the volume's theme. Writing from south of the Border, which provoked creative responses in Scots authors, and which were themselves inflected by the idea of Scotland and its literature, are also considered and include the Troy Book by John Lydgate, and Malory's Le Morte Darthur. With a focus on historical and material context, contributors explore the ways in which these texts engage with notions of the self and with advisory subjects both specific to particular Stewart monarchs and of more general political applicability in Scotland in the late medieval and early modern periods.

This study places the Scottish compilation of saints' legends within the hagiographic landscape of medieval Britain.