Lyndsay’s Meldrum , Hary’s Wallace , and the Craft of History
2020; Brepols; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1484/j.tmj.5.127689
ISSN2033-5393
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Women Writers
ResumoThis article explores the unexpected use that Sir David Lyndsay makes of Hary’s Wallace (c. 1476-1478) in composing his mid-sixteenth-century chivalric biography The Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum. Lyndsay’s exploitation of the Wallace, including Wallace’s encounter with the Red Reiver, has hitherto gone almost unremarked thanks to a near-universal assumption that the Historie is entirely based on the true events of Meldrum’s life. This article argues that Lyndsay intended the original coterie audience for the Historie to spot these borrowings and digest the implications, not only for Meldrum’s own character and life-story, but more broadly for the nature of ‘historical’ writing and the powerful warping pressures of readers’ expectations and patrons’ desires.
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