Gavin Douglas, The Palyce of Honour

Composed at the turn of the sixteenth century amid Scotland’s growing sense of its own cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour ingeniously combines such diverse materials as biblical tradition, Ovidian and Chaucerian poetry, and Scottish history and politics to produce a distinctively Scottish rendering of the medieval dream vision genre. Its dreamer, a would-be poet of love who dreams of divine figures from Greek mythology processing on horseback through a wilderness, travels with the Muses to the mountain palace of the god Honour, the judge of traitors and usurpers. Written in a genre associated with divine truth, Douglas’s dream vision champions literature as the best means of instilling in rulers the spiritual lessons, moral edification, and knowledge of the classical past that are essential to kingly power. The present edition furnishes readers with historical context, extensive glosses and notes, and a guide to the Scots language.