SELIM 16.indb


Andrew Breeze, Selim 16 (2009): 165–166ISSN: 1132–631X

Scattergood, John 2010: Occasions for Writing: Essays on Medieval and 
Renaissance Literature, Politics and Society. Dublin, Four Courts Press. 272 
pp. ISBN 978-1-84682-179-0. 55€.

John Scattergood, now retired  om teaching English at Trinity College 
Dublin, has since the 1970s published many books. Though one cannot 
claim distinction for them (let alone any startling discovery), they are 
always clearly written, being  ee  om jargon and pretentiousness. This 
volume adheres to the accustomed pattern by off ering twelve papers, three 
of them on ‘movements’ and nine on ‘incidents’, as follows.

We start with ‘Redeeming English’, which takes the fashionable 
subject of English and Englishness in the late middle ages, but diff ers  om 
treatments by Thorlac Turville-Petre and others through consideration of 
the English language in Ireland, where by the fi  eenth century it seemed 
to be in permanent retreat before a linguistic reconquista by Irish. A er 
words and nationalism come words and love, as presented in the twel h 
century by Andreas Capellanus and in the fi  eenth by women’s love letters 
 om the Paston circle. Implications for class and gender are here to the 
fore. ‘Writing the Clock’ turns to medieval people and time. It discusses 
a famous hate-poem by Da dd ap Gwilym, where the Welsh poet abused 
a timepiece that disturbed his slumbers. Professor Scattergood here 
includes the absurd translation of hwyaid as ‘ducks’ (p. 81), even though 
this reviewer pointed out in his Medieval Welsh Literature (Dublin, 1997), 
p. 121, that the correct rendering is ‘foliot’, an oscillating horizontal bar 
which regulated such mechanisms until the Dutch invented the clock 
pendulum in about 1650. Professor Scattergood may think that medieval 
clocks had ducks inside them, but we should be foolish to believe him.

The remainder of the book off ers varied fare on medieval and early 
Tudor matters. Analysis of the Hiberno-English poem Piers of Bermingham 
of 1308 brings out the confusion of critics and Irish historians as to whether 
it is eulogy or satire. The author off ers a persuasive revisionist case for 
the latter (though without mention of an important paper on the poem 
by Professor Yoko Wada of Kansai University). A er that are William 
Langland, Robin Hood, and outlaws; then money, medieval cities, and 
Chaucer’s last poem, a compaint to his empty purse. Chapter seven turns 
to the perilous subjects of Oldcastle’s rebellion and Lollardy, ably setting 



166

Andrew Breeze

Selim 16 (2009)

out the literary and political manipulation of Oldcastle’s memory  om 
his own day until that of Shakespeare. Two more papers on the fi  eenth 
century comment on the new concept of England demonstrated by The 
Libelle of Englysche Polycye, and the absence of contemporary attention 
to a French naval defeat off  Yorkshire in 1451. (An essay on the The 
Libelle of Englysche Polycye might have mentioned that Sir John Paston 
possessed a copy of it, as this reviewer pointed out in 2001, though 
Professor Scattergood seems unaware of this.) We end with three papers 
on the age of Henry VIII. Skelton’s Magnyfycence is mined for comment 
on corruption at the king’s court; Thomas Wyatt provides occasion for 
analysis of satire in Henry’s last years, when political life was as dangerous 
as ever; and English patriotism returns with John Leland’s Itineraries, 
where this antiquary’s notes on ruined monasteries chart the brutal eff ects 
of Henry’s policies for English landscape, religion, and society. 

John Scattergood is not an incompetent researcher, but he is an 
imperfect one, who will irritate scholars more careful and comprehensive 
than himself by the selective nature of his work. Nevertheless, his essays 
have the merit of focussing on actual texts. Though Pieces for Occasion is 
hardly a mainstream book, it has much of interest. It should certainly be 
consulted by specialists working on the texts that it deals with. If there is 
one thing about it that calls for whole-hearted praise, it is not the author’s 
workaday and somewhat self-regarding prose, but the volume’s elegant 
presentation: something we expect  om that admirable embodiment of 
Irish enlightenment and eff ectiveness, Four Courts Press of Dublin.

Andrew Breeze
University of Navarre, Pamplona

•

Received 09 Aug 2010; revision received 23 Aug 2010; accepted 30 Aug 2010