IN ONE OF THE most important artistic survivals from sixteenth-century Scotland, David Lyndsay's drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, there is a protracted seduction scene in which a young man is tempted by a female protagonist who is sensuality incarnate. This occurs within the allegorical template of the play's first part: it portrays a monarch's fall within a larger drama about rightful sovereignty, and the nature of social and political justice. In staging the king's undoing through desire, this scene exemplifies one of the most pervasive ways in which masculinity is imagined in early modern Scottish literature. Yet specifically as a portrayal of vulnerable masculinity, it has been overlooked, perhaps because it depicts a highly conventional late medieval moral and gendered conflict between reason and sensuality. It may also reflect the broader lack of critical attention given to masculine bodies, selves, and identities in early modern Scottish writing compared to recent scholarship in English and French Renaissance cultures. While work on women writers and representations of femininity has begun to reveal some interrelationships between gender and cultural agency, the subject of masculinity, either ‘as an analytical category’ or as a sphere of literary representation, is relatively unexplored. Literature, however, can interestingly refract and reflect sociocultural norms and ideals. As a beginning step in exploring the relationship between masculinity and the early modern literary imagination, this chapter discusses lyric poetry drawn from two important poetic miscellanies: the Bannatyne and Maitland manuscripts. In the present context this chapter cannot comprehensively survey their diverse material, or provide a detailed account of provenance and context (further sources are suggested in endnotes). Its focus is on selected poems that are thematically preoccupied with questions of sexual desire and social conduct. This subject matter most vividly illuminates the fault lines and fragilities of the masculine identities that are projected as both normative and ideal – men in the roles of lovers, fathers and sons.

In his obituary of J. M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw called his plays ‘ terrifying’. Although Peter Pan (first performed in 1904) had long become a cherished children's fantasy and a staple of Christmas theatricals, Shaw seemed more perturbed than enchanted by it (1993: 151). Barrie is seldom described as a Gothic writer, although his own well-known and often reductively understood biography has been ‘Gothicised’ into a dark psycho-narrative. Rather than use the latter to suggest Barrie's election to the Scottish Gothic canon, this chapter takes its cue from recent work by R. D. S. Jack (2010), Valentina Bold and Andrew Nash (2014) and others, who demonstrate how Barrie is a writer of complexity and contradiction. The generic and thematic range of Barrie's writing means that he is not a consistent or fully fledged Gothic writer but nevertheless Gothicism still inks a recurrent pattern of motifs and ideas in his work. This chapter singles out three texts in particular from the first three decades of the twentieth century: the novella, Farewell Miss Julie Logan (1931); the play, Mary Rose (1920), which Alfred Hitchcock had a long, unrealised dream of filming (McBride 2001: 24); and Peter Pan, here discussed in its incarnations as both drama and prose text (1902; 1904; 1906). It suggests that Barrie's Gothicism most arrestingly coheres in the mode of the ghost story, retrospectively echoing the conventions of the classic late Victorian ghost story whilst mirroring the psychological complexities of contemporary Modernist supernatural fictions (see Briggs 1997; Riquelme 2008; Smith 2010; Thurston 2012). In its delicate yet complex obsession with themes of death and loss, memory and the past, his spectral writing provides evidence of an engagement with Scottish national Gothic, specifically in the persistent portrayal of historical and psychological ‘pasts’ which cannot be exorcised, and in the use of thematic and aesthetic motifs from traditional folkloric belief. This chapter suggests, however, that this engagement is subtly manifest as an ambivalence towards a past that is simultaneously feared and desired. In its imaginative obsession with loss – with the consequences of ‘calling back’ the missing or the vanished – and ultimately with the figure of the child beyond reach, Barrie's writing is an intensely ‘affective’ form of Gothic.

The manuscript miscellanies associated with Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496–1586) are well known as a precious resource for an understanding of the circulation, transmission, and creation of late medieval and Renaissance Scottish poetry. The two collections (Folio and Quarto) belong to what Alasdair A. MacDonald has termed ‘the great century for Scottish literary manuscripts’, raising questions about literary preservation, survival and popularity in early modern Scotland. Both volumes hold a mirror to the aesthetic, moral and political interests of a specific gentry household in an estate in East Lothian. Together they encompass a diverse and eclectic range of subjects that historically span several Stewart monarchies, and reflect religious and political sympathies allied to reformed thought. Social, political and spiritual identities and affiliations under-pin both collections, often with immediate and topical urgency, but the notion of identity also has particular roots, for these are manuscripts intimately bound up with one particular family. In terms of provenance, associations and thematic interests, familial identity, as Joanna Martin has recently demonstrated, is vital. The wealth of poems ascribed to Sir Richard Maitland himself – described as a ‘valyeant warrior wicht [strong brave warrior] / … With the pen the Poetis pairt weill playit’ – means that Folio and Quarto are a composite celebratory testament to his creative and moral vision. Poetic inscription ensures the perpetuity of the Maitland ‘lyne and linage’ (MQ, I, line 6), described in a commendatory poem by Robert Hudson as an ‘ancient raice’ (MF, CLXXXII, line 1). In the case of the Quarto, this notion of literary legacy or poetic survival becomes more poignant, given that its apparent date of compilation is the year of Maitland's death. In a very literal way, then, the manuscript is a memorial witness to Maitland and his family – ‘[h]is childaris childring’ – for in its concluding section are funerary and elegiac poems.

But the idea of family lies at the heart of these collections in other ways. This essay explores how a small but significant vein of poems imaginatively embody the relationships between parents and ‘children’. It also looks at concomitant ideas of ‘young’ feminine and masculine conduct.

In a curious twist of cultural history, Scotland enjoys a ‘Renaissance’ that began in the twentieth century rather than at some point between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Denis Saurat’s term for the cultural energies of the movement associated with Hugh MacDiarmid renders the fate of earlier Scottish literature ‘curiouser’ still: an anomaly in both Scottish and European literary history. Even in the wake of a new ‘British history’ which recognises the separate and interlinked cultures of the four nations, and of renewed sympathy towards the idea of a ‘northern’ Renaissance, the depths of the literature associated, for example, with Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87), and her son, James (1566–1625) – poets themselves – remain uncharted beyond specialist critical studies. Instead, a story about an impossible, or improbable, first Scottish Renaissance is told, woven out of two historical events, often perceived as culturally calamitous: the mid-sixteenth-century Reformation, and the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Yet Edwin Muir’s powerfully emotive visions of the hollowed-out culture resulting from Scotland’s violent Reformation, for example, should not prevent us from seeing interesting redirections and reconceptualisations of artistic expression rather than its complete extinction.

The very term ‘Renaissance’ is perhaps a distorted looking-glass through which to view artistic and intellectual changes which assume different forms in different cultures. Coined by the French writer Jules Michelet in 1855, then famously used by Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization [or Culture] of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), it embodied the monumental processes of intellectual, artistic and cultural renewal or rebirth which could collectively be judged a self-conscious or purposeful negation of an earlier medium aevum or ‘middle age’. This idea of Renaissance spawns its own myth (an illuminatory Renaissance versus the medieval ‘dark ages’) but might be preferable to the alternative periodisation of ‘early modern’, which unhelpfully foregrounds the notion of a prescient, welcome ‘modernity’.