The Maitland Quarto Manuscript: An Edition

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This research project will result in the first critical edition of the Maitland Quarto Manuscript (c.1586), an important collection of Older Scots verse. The poetry of the Maitland Quarto is presently only available in an out-of-print Scottish Text Society volume of 1920 by W.A. Craigie, which is a combination of a diplomatic and facsimile edition with sparse introduction, incomplete textual notes and glossary. The only edition of Maitland's poems is that of Joseph Bain, published in a limited run for the Maitland Club in 1831 (also out of print). Only a small number of the Quarto's texts appear in modern anthologies of Scottish verse. The Quarto contains ninety-five poems. Amongst these it preserves all but one of the poems attributed to Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (c.1496-1586), in contemporary sources, forty-four in total. Maitland was one of the most prolific writers and most distinctive poetic voices of the reigns of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. His poems are of interest because of their topical nature, and because they reflect the literary influences, fashions and concerns of writers of the third quarter of the sixteenth century. They also evidence the circulation of, and interest in, the works of important Scottish poets of the first half of the sixteenth-century, especially William Dunbar and David Lyndsay. A number of Maitland's poems have considerable literary merit and innovativeness and have attracted attention from leading critics (most notably, Professor Alasdair MacDonald), yet remain inaccessible for most students and scholars. A new edition of the Maitland Quarto would provide access to the virtually complete corpus of Maitland's poems. No other source permits this. The Quarto also contains works by John Maitland, Alexander Arbuthnot, Alexander Montgomerie, and Thomas and Robert Hudson (which are found only here or in the Maitland Folio). In addition, the manuscript contains thirty-eight unattributed poems. Most of these anonymous poems are unique, or attested only in a small number of other sources, such as London, Society of Antiquaries MS 87. The Maitland Quarto is therefore highly significant in revealing much about developments in Scottish literary culture in the second half of the sixteenth century, particularly in the neglected period c. 1550-1586, which has been often overlooked in favour of the 'golden age' of Scottish poetry in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the flourishing of literature at James VI's court in the late 1580s and 1590s.The Quarto includes translations from French, and poems with likely, but as yet untraced, continental sources. Its synthesis of elegies, epitaphs, friendship poems, and Sapphic verse, and an early example of 'the country house poem' (perhaps the earliest British example), make it an unusually diverse collection of sixteenth-century verse. This new edition of the Quarto Manuscript will provide access to, and full contextualization of, these texts. The project is conducted according to current principles of textual scholarship. It involves making a full transcription of the manuscript (from microfilm and the original document) and the annotation of all poems through the provision of textual notes (collating readings from other witnesses) and explantory notes, glossary, critical introduction and bibliography. This edition is currently under contract with the Scottish Text Society (to be published for the Society by the major academic publisher, Boydell and Brewer) for publication in 2013.