England's Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland

Lorna Hutson's book challenges the dominant narrative of British nationhood by arguing that England deployed a mythical British History to pursue dominion over Scotland. She explores English attempts at conquest in the 1540s, revealing how justifications of overlordship mutated into literary, legal, and cartographic ploys to erase Scotland as a kingdom. Hutson shows how Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Henry V and King Lear, Plowden's theory of the King's Two Bodies, Camden's Britannia, and the race-making in Jonson's Masque of Blackness are all implicated in England's jurisdictional claim and refusal to acknowledge Scotland as a sovereign nation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 09 November 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Lorna Hutson's book is a crucial contribution to the ongoing debate surrounding British nationhood. She argues that England employed a mythical concept of British History to exert dominance over its northern neighbor, initially through warfare and subsequently by attempting to erase the idea of Scotland altogether. Through her exploration of English attempts at conquest in the 1540s, Hutson reveals how justifications of overlordship evolved into literary, legal, and cartographic strategies aimed at erasing Scotland as a kingdom. Maps, treatises, military propaganda, as well as artistic forms such as river poetry, chorography, allegory, epic, tragedies, history plays, and masques, all played imaginative roles in this eradicative endeavor. Hutson demonstrates how works such as Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Henry V and King Lear, Plowden's theory of the King's Two Bodies, Camden's Britannia, and the race-making in Jonson's Masque of Blackness are all implicated in England's jurisdictional claim and refusal to recognize Scotland as a sovereign nation.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the complex and often contentious relationship between England and Scotland, challenging traditional narratives and shedding light on the creative ways in which both nations have attempted to define and control their shared history.

Weight: 666g
Dimension: 161 x 237 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781009253574