The Functionality of Lyric in Sixteenth-Century Scotland

A remarkable fact in the literary history of early modern Scotland is the sudden efflorescence of the lyric.¹ Whereas in England numerous vernacular lyrics survive from the three centuries between 1200 and 1500 (to say nothing of compositions in Anglo-Saxon which might be claimed as belonging to the genre), from Scotland there is almost nothing equivalent,² save for sporadic and brief quotations from poems encountered in historical works,³ or else whole stanzas which, though part of longer poems, have, or can be alleged to have, a certain detachability from their narrative or descriptive environments.⁴ It is, of course, always dangerous