Reclaiming our cultural identity

Details are here: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DJGHD4F3

We are informed: “This sequence of 50 short poems, Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World, is now known only from three tiny illuminated manuscript books. The books, presenting a verse-translation from the French of Antoine de la Roche Chandieu (1534-1591), were written and illustrated by the Scottish poet and calligrapher Esther Inglis (c1570-1624).

“Jamie Reid Baxter discusses Inglis’s formative Scottish background, the life of her family in Edinburgh as well-integrated Huguenot bourgeois immigrants, her spiritual reading matter, the commendatory sonnets that preface several of her manuscripts, her work as author, and the Octonaries themselves. The essay is followed by the first-ever printed text of Inglis’s Octonaries, co-edited with Georgianna Ziegler, textual notes with variants among the three manuscripts, and three appendices.

“Dr Reid Baxter’s essay was awarded the RDS Jack Medal, given annually by the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures, for the best essay related to Scottish literary reception or diaspora.”

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Now, I take it The National’s readership is generally committed or at least well-disposed to Scotland’s independence, or else keeping an eye on what the opposition is up to. My position with all the contributions I’ve made to the paper since 2016 has been and remains that, if we’re to bring an independent Scotland into being, the cultural life of our country has to be fully understood as central and essential to our wellbeing. That’s the manifesto. And this is part of the reclamation.

Here’s an artist and poet significant in so many ways, whose work, when known at all, has usually been claimed as belonging to the Tudor English ascendancy. That’s an example of cultural appropriation of a kind we should never allow, let alone become used to. Anyone who might try to dismiss Inglis’s work as of only esoteric or elitist interest needs to keep in mind not only its intrinsic quality but also that political context.

Cultural genocide goes hand in hand with other, more obvious, forms of atrocity but both are militarised practices of power, and even as seemingly slight a thing as an essay like this, here in The National, is written to oppose them.

I’ll quote from the introduction and give you a sampling of the poems but just to introduce the editors first. They are Jamie Reid Baxter, honorary research associate, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, who has published extensively on 16th and early 17th century Scottish history, music, literature and religious thought and practice, including books on the poet Elizabeth Melville (2010) and the composer Jhone Angus (2011). His work on Inglis has included both scholarly publications and public engagement.

Georgianna Ziegler, the Louis B Thalheimer Associate Librarian and Head of Reference Emerita, Folger Shakespeare Library, has published on Inglis in The Library, The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women and elsewhere. She created and maintains the website Esther Inglis (1570?-1624): Calligrapher, Artist, Embroiderer, Writer and is completing a book-length biography of Inglis, which Edinburgh University Press will publish next year.

The book we’re encountering today comes from South Carolina Poetry Reprints, a series originated by one of the great men behind the efflorescence and renaissance, indeed, of Scottish literary scholarship in the 20th century, Professor G Ross Roy, in 1970. The series makes available newly-edited texts of significant shorter Scottish works and is now edited by Patrick Scott and published in association with Studies in Scottish Literature at the University of South Carolina.

Illustrations were selected from Folger MS V.a.91 and from Folger MS V.a.92. Researchers will find links to them and other Inglis manuscripts at estheringlis.com/ms-locations/

If we had more news about these great works and the endeavours of such heroes as the men and women who have toiled hard and long to make them available to us, we could de-escalate the overflow of images and bad words from the overinflated politicos in what passes for “mainstream media”.

That, too, is a credit to The National: here we have a platform for information that really matters. Not the pathetic pontifications of the fools, cowards and monsters in high office but the enduring work of the artists and scholars whose only job is to help people to live.

And ultimately, that’s what Inglis is about. Jamie Reid Baxter’s essay introduces her: Esther Inglis, Franco-Scottish Jacobean Poet, and her Octonaries, and then gives us the context, “Jacobean Scotland 1567-1625, Jacobean Britain 1603-25”. This establishes beyond any question that Inglis should never have been considered a “Tudor” calligrapher and poet, claimed by the “Tudor Industry” as such. This is bad scholarship, bad history and colonialism of a familiar kind.

Inglis was the first female self-portraitist in these islands, a superlative limner and calligrapher and a poet of real distinction. She was a Huguenot refugee, as the next section of the book details, but from childhood to adulthood she lived in Edinburgh, then moved to London and Essex, near Chelmsford, before returning to Edinburgh.

Reid Baxter’s study goes into marvellous detail about her “spiritual reading matter” and then gives an account of the “context and content” of her Liminary Sonnets, discussing her as “a bilingual literary writer” before closing in on Chandieu’s Octonaires and Inglis’s Octonaries. There then follows the full text of Inglis’s “Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World”. For me, reading these poems with a critical eye, as a literary scholar and historian of Scottish literature, and also indeed as a poet, I am wonder struck. They are a new discovery, a wonderful new-found land of brilliant intensities.

The book ends with Textual Notes and Glosses, reproducing in colour the illustrated pages from the original, and is edited closely throughout by Reid Baxter and Ziegler. In other words, the editorial apparatus could not be better. It is illuminating in the best sense, unobtrusive but revelatory of both the historical contexts of the poet and the internal poetic and linguistic dynamics of the poetry.

So, what exactly are we looking at here? The book begins: “This essay seeks to present Esther Inglis (c1570-1624) as a Jacobean Franco-Scot and an author in the conventional, traditional sense. It is followed by the first-ever printed text of the Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World.”

There’s also a mystery: “That Inglis was remarkable was acknowledged in her lifetime: the title of a prefatory sonnet by a mysterious GD, which adorns the Octonaries manuscripts of 1607 and 1609, addresses her as “The only Paragon and matcheles Mistresse of the golden Pen”. That sonnet ends by acclaiming Inglis as no less than “Glore of thy sex and miracle to men” for the sheer quality of the work produced by the “draughts inimitable” of her “unmatched pen”.

(Image: NQ)

The sonnet by GD in the 1607 Octonaries manuscript is “in praise of religious faith, based on the name ESTHER INGLIS, anagrammatised as RESISTING HEL”. Reid Baxter conducts an assiduous investigation in one of the appendices into just who “GD” might have been, but this poem in praise of Esther shines on beyond the mystery itself:

SONNET / VPON ESTHER

INGLIS / ANAGRAMME /

RESISTING HEL

RESISTING HEL, thou shalt the heau’ns obtaine

Deuils are afray’d of such as them resist

Draw neere to God, he will draw neere againe

And compass thee about with armyes blist

Be always strong, and constantly persist

The sharp assaults of Satan to sustaine

First arme thy selfe, then enter to the list

Thyn ayrie foes in hyer parts remaine:

Gird therefore vp thy [loynes] with Veritie

Haue Gods owne word a sharp Swor[de by thy s]yde;

Let Righteousnesse thy Breastplate [euer be;]

Thyn heade as Helmett lett Saluation hyde;

But aboue all mak stedfast Fayth thy Sheeld:

So shalt thou be assurd to win the feeld. GD

The commentary on this is acute: “Despite the heavily anglicised orthography, it is clear that the mysterious GD’s native tongue is Scots, thanks to the scansion-dictated, standard Scottish elision of the intervocalic v of ‘devils’ (ie ‘de’ils’, pronounced ‘deels’) and the rhyming of blist with resist, persist and list.”

The distinction is essential. GD’s second sonnet, “To the onely Paragon”, is a quite different affair:

SONNET, / TO THE ONLY

PARAGON, AND / matcheles

Mistresse of the golden Pen.

ESTHER INGLIS

Some when with conqring arme and vaillant interpryse

They daunted haue the pryd of high and gallant harts

With mightie Monuments rays’d vp in many parts

The all consuming force; of wasting Tyme defyse

Some other men againe, a surer manner try’se

To free their dieing fame, from Tymes most deadlie darts:

These do by diuin writts, by Sciences, and Arts

Giue wings vnto their names, to flie aboue the sky’se.

And many men of olde, by charitable works

Did climbe the Temple of Fame, among the greatest Clarks

Desyring nothing but to eternize their name

But thou (glore of thy sexe, and mirakill to men)

Dost purches to thy self immortell prayse and fame

By draughts inimitable, of thy vnmatched Pen. GD

After an account of her Huguenot background, we come to the body of her own writing and a discussion of its prevailing tone. Reid Baxter comments: “Laura Lunger Knoppers asked: ‘Is Inglis’s apparent denial of her art in elaborately illuminated artistic manuscripts a simple contradiction? A sign of an oppressed woman gaining agency only through negating the self?’.”

Apparently not: “Inglis was drawing upon the fervent Protestant view that the value of all human endeavour (including writing) comes not from the self but in relation to God.”

Ziegler wrote of Inglis’s self-portraits: “As an artist […] Inglis is a lesser god, a handmaid of the Lord, as she styles herself, creating hand-made books that contain the mark of her own identity as well as the word of God through her.”

(Image: NQ)

This humility is so unfashionable in 21st-century Scotland, or shall we say the western world more broadly, that a strong draught of Inglis’s poems might be a corrective to an awful lot of hubris and folies de grandeur. Try OCTO. VII:

When the black face of the skyes

Doth robbe the day-light from our eyes,

My mynde presents vnto my sight

An other farre more darker night:

It’s, wordling, when thou dost refuse

Instructions good to heare and vse;

And, blinded with a doubill night,

Thou dost putt out thyn inward light.

How many, many people do we see extinguishing their own “inward light” and being rewarded for it by the priorities of the prevailing current attitude towards lived experience?

Here’s a poetic encouragement to take a step back, to distance yourself from such appalling behaviour, not to be complacent or smug in our judgement but clearly to identify the folly of vanity for precisely what it is in our overwhelmed world. Or pitch the poem as a question itself, as in OCTO. IX:

When Sommer hott inflames the ayre,

The ioyfull Cloune shakes off all caire;

The yellow treasure of the playnes

At large requyting all his paynes.

But yee that with discourses vaine

And found desyres, we euer find

Nothing to sowe, but onely wind;

What can yee reape but wind againe?

Or try these in sequence:

OCTO. XVIII.

As the swift hawty wing of th’Agle in the aire,

As the ship on the sea, by winds blowne here and there

So worldly wealth takes wings, and flies as fast awaye,

So pleasures quickly passe, and makes no longer staye.

And as no eye can marke nor in the aire nor floods

The winged vessels path, nor the swift Agles race;

So are thy pleasures gone, so wastes away thy goods,

And thou stryues but in vain to hunt them by the trace.

OCTO. XIX.

Ambition, Voluptye, Auarice

Thrie Ladyes are that all the seruice haue

Of wordlings, that vncessantly do craue

Honnours from them, with wealth, and pleasures nyce

They all are payde: for the ambitious vaine

Gets noght but wind. The man that burns in lust

Repentance gets. The other, earth and dust;

Who stil the more he grips, the les he doth retaine.

Or take this as a vision of disillusionment and reaffirmation, OCTO. XLVI. Savour the liveliness of the language, the use of colour and chiaroscuro, the shifting tones of open-eyed enquiry, curious investigation proceeding as it unpacks the imagery, the delivery of judgment, the sense of resolution:

What monstre haue we heere? That hath of heads such store,

So many eares, and eyes, of diuers sortes and kynde;

Whose vesture poudred is, with plaisant green before

And hath nothing except a darknes black behinde.

Whose restles feete, vpon a rouling bowle doth slyde,

Borne on by winged tyme, that swiftly flies awaye:

And death runs after still, still schooting at his syde?

I sawe it well. What wast? It was the world I saye.

And to conclude, the last poem, OCTO. L. This book should be in the office of every elected politician and every media employee in Scotland, and each one of those persons should be tested regularly on their knowledge and experience of the wisdom the poems deliver.

When we feel and sometimes say that Scotland deserves so much better than has been given her, or done to her, these poems are part of the great gift which we, without fear or vanity, might justly award to ourselves.

Now doth not perfytely appeare

Their vanitie, that founds them heere?

Sith this lyues joyes and pleasures be

No thing but paine and fascherie.

O God, all- good, and onely wyse

In whome my staye and wisdome lyes,

With bounteous blissings so preuent

My wants, that I may liue content.

FINIS.