James Douglas and Barbour's Ideal of Knighthood

McKim, Anne

doi:10.1093/fmls/xvii.2.167

Cited by 23 publications

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“…2:23-30). 22 This event likewise precipitated the flight of the leader into the wilderness and initiated an uprising. Barbour explicitly compares the Scots to the Maccabees at 1.465-66 and it is reasonable to assume that the book of Maccabees provided a narrative model for this incident.…”

Section: Inaugural Sacrilege and The Murder Of Comynmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sacrilege, Sacrifice and John Barbour’s <i>Bruce</i>

Tolmie¹

2007

IRSS

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Barbour's Bruce 1 is a poem cherished by historians, and one well served by them, not least in its recent edition by A.A.M. Duncan. Yet there are episodes in it -and, I contend, even structures controlling its overall narration -that they cannot explain. Not even with the aid of ideological criticism such as is provided by Foucault or Althusser can much be made of several important incidents in the text, such as the pair of hunting scenes in Books Six and Seven, during which time the protagonist is a fugitive in Galloway, or the spectacular violence of the so-called Douglas Larder in Book Ten. Likewise, while Bruce's murder of his fellow baron John Comyn is a matter of historical record, and its political impetus in establishing the rebellion that led to his kingship is undeniable, Barbour's narrative treatment of it in The Bruce, as a sacrilege, has anthropological facets that extend beyond the comfort zone of historical, or even historicist, criticism. Anthropology was the headline discipline of structuralism in its day, bringing to wide critical attention Lévi-Strauss and other great systematizers; its paramount influence on other genres of scholarship was sharply cut off by the advent of poststructuralism, which dismissed its comparative and universalizing practice as anti-historical. Yet it is to this body of criticism that I return, at least to one renegade continuator of it, in the form of the French critic and rogue theologian René Girard. His work from the 1970s, Violence and the Sacred, provides a means of access to a ritual plane in Barbour's medieval, clerical work, although not one governed by the Christian liturgical and imaginative forms that readers might expect. 2 The narrative accomplished on this plane is critical to the Sarah Tolmie IRSS 32 (2007) 7 * Dr Sarah Tolmie is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She works on Middle English poetics and historiography and is the author of 'Langland, Wittgenstein and the End of Language', Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2006).

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Section: Inaugural Sacrilege and The Murder Of Comynmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sacrilege, Sacrifice and John Barbour’s <i>Bruce</i>

Tolmie¹

2007

IRSS

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Barbour,John (TheBrus)

Wingfield

2017

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain

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The churchman and court servant, John Barbour (c. 1325–95) was author of the Older Scots poem, The Brus (which survives in two fifteenth‐century manuscripts: Cambridge, St. John's College, MS G.23 and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 19.2.2). The c. 8000 line octosyllabic couplet poem, which was written c. 1375–77, has been variously classified as history, biography, epic, romance, and Bildungsroman. It draws on a variety of sources, including French romance, and presents the dual careers of its two main heroes, Robert I and Sir James Douglas, during the Wars of Scottish Independence. Its main themes of freedom and loyalty relate to this period and that in which the poem was composed (the reign of Robert II).

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Barbour, John: The Bruce

Kll¹,

Johnston²

2020

Kindlers Literatur Lexikon (KLL)

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James Douglas and Barbour's Ideal of Knighthood

Cited by 23 publications

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Sacrilege, Sacrifice and John Barbour’s <i>Bruce</i>

Sacrilege, Sacrifice and John Barbour’s <i>Bruce</i>

Barbour,John (TheBrus)

Barbour, John: The Bruce

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