Reading Pitscottie's Cronicles: a case study on the history of literacy in Scotland, 1575-1814

This thesis addresses a range of research questions regarding literacy in early modern Scotland. Using the early modern manuscripts and printed editions of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s late sixteenth-century 'Cronicles of Scotland' as a case study on literacy history, this thesis poses the complementary questions of how and why early modern Scottish reading communities were encountering Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', and how features of the material page can be interpreted as indicators of contemporary literacy practices. The answers to these questions then provide the basis for the thesis to ask broader socio-cultural and theoretical questions regarding the overall literacy environment in Scotland between 1575 and 1814, and how theorists conceptualise the history of literacy. Positioned within the theoretical groundings of historical pragmatics and ‘new philology’ – and the related approach of pragmaphilology – this thesis returns to the earlier philological practice of close textual analysis, and engages with the theoretical concept of mouvance, in order to analyse how the changing ‘form’ of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', as it was reproduced in manuscript and print throughout the early modern period, indicates its changing ‘function’. More specifically, it suggests that the punctuation practices and paratextual features of individual witnesses of the text function to aid the highly-nuanced reading practices and purposes of the discrete reading communities for which they were produced. This thesis includes extensive descriptive material which presents previously unrecorded data regarding twenty manuscripts and printed witnesses of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', contributing to a gap in Scotland’s literary/historiographical canon. It then analyses this material using a transferable methodological framework which combines the quantitative analysis of micro-data with qualitative analysis of this data within its socio-cultural context, in order to conduct diachronic comparative analysis of copy-specific information. The principal findings of this thesis suggest that Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles' were being read for a combination of devotional and didactic purposes, and that multiple reading communities, employing highly nuanced reading practices, were encountering the text near-contemporaneously. This thesis further suggests that early modern literacy practices, and the specific reading communities which employ them, should be described as existing within a spectrum of available practices (i.e. more or less oral/aural or silent, and intensive or extensive in practice) rather than as dichotomous entities. As such, this thesis argues for the rejection of evolutionary theories of the history of literacy, suggesting that rather than being described antithetically, historical reading practices and purposes must be recognised as complex, coexisting socio-cultural practices, and the multiplicity of reading communities within a single society must be acknowledged and analysed as such, as opposed to being interpreted as universal entities.

Towards a Bourdieusian analysis of the disabled body and practice: embodying negative symbolic capitals and the uneasy experience of hysteresis

Within the last few years, disabled people have become the target of government austerity measures through drastic cuts to welfare justified through the portrayal of benefit claimants as inactive, problem citizens who are wilfully unemployed. For all that is wrong with these cuts, they are one of many aspects of exclusion that disabled people face. Attitudes towards disability are deteriorating (Scope, 2011) and disabled people are devalued and negatively positioned in a myriad of ways, meaning that an understanding of the perceptions and positioning of disability and the power of disabling practices is critical. This thesis will examine how Bourdieu’s theoretical repertoire may be applied to the area of Disability Studies in order to discern how society produces oppressive and exclusionary systems of classification which structures the social position and perceptions of disability. The composite nature of disability and multiple forms of exclusion and inequality associated with it benefits from a multipronged approach which acknowledges personal, embodied and psychological aspects of disability alongside socio-political and cultural conceptualisations. Bourdieu’s approach is one in which the micro and macro aspects of social life are brought together through their meso interplay and provides a thorough analysis of the many aspects of disability.

Handle with care: historical geographies and difficult cultural legacies of egg-collecting

This thesis offers an examination of egg-collecting, which was a very popular pastime in Britain from the Victorian era well into the twentieth century. Collectors, both young and old, would often spend whole days and sometimes longer trips in a wide variety of different habitats, from sea shores to moorlands, wetlands to craggy mountainsides, searching for birds’ nests and the bounty to be found within them. Once collectors had found and taken eggs, they emptied out the contents; hence, they were really eggshell collectors. Some egg collectors claimed that egg-collecting was not just a hobby but a science, going by the name of oology, and seeking to establish oology as a recognised sub-discipline of ornithology, these collectors or oologists established formal institutions such as associations and societies, attended meetings where they exhibited unusual finds, and also contributed to specialist publications dedicated to oology. Egg-collecting was therefore many things at once: a culture of the British countryside, from where many eggs were taken; a culture of natural history, taking on the trappings of a science; and a culture of enthusiasm, providing a consuming passion for many collectors. By the early twentieth century, however, opposing voices were increasingly being raised, by conservation groups and other observers, about the impact that egg-collecting was having on bird populations and on the welfare of individual birds. By mid-century the tide had turned against the collectors, and egg-collecting in Britain was largely outlawed in 1954, with further restrictions imposed in 1981. While many egg collections have been lost or destroyed, some have been donated to museums, including Glasgow Museums (GM), which holds in its collections over 30,000 eggs. As a Collaborative Doctoral Award involving the University of Glasgow and GM, the project outlined in this thesis aims to bring to light and to life these egg collections, the activities of the collectors who originally built them, and the wider world of British egg-collecting. By researching archival material held by Glasgow Museums, published specialist egg-collecting journals and other published sources, as well as the eggs as a material archive, this thesis seeks to recover some of the practices and preoccupations of egg collectors. It also recounts the practical activities carried out during the course of the project at GM, particularly those involving a collection of eggs newly donated to the museum during the course of this project, culminating in a new temporary display of birds’ eggs at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre.