Early writing by Scottish women has been insufficiently explored. R. J. Lyall claims that the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are seldom examined in Scottish literary studies. Recognition of the achievement of women's writing from a ‘Scottish Renaissance’ earlier than MacDiarmid's occurs within an already neglected period. This chapter adopts a chronological approach and asks certain questions. Why does the ‘early Scottish women writer’ emerge, seemingly ex nihilo, in the mid-sixteenth century? No counterpart of the French female trobairitz, for example, seems to exist in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Scotland. The orality of much medieval culture and the probable loss of fragile manuscript material may explain this curious silence. How does the seventy years gulf between Mary Stuart and Anna Hume affect their responses to the inheritance of ‘male-authored’ secular love poetics? Is the sensual, baroque aesthetic of Mary's Catholic penitent an absolute counterpart to the Protestant dreamer of Elizabeth Melville's allegory? The interest of these works, even in this brief evocation, should demonstrate that women of the Scottish Renaissance attained the ‘authoritie’ which Knox sought to deny them, at least in intellect and imagination.

Christian Lindsay (fl. 1580s)

Christian Lindsay may be considered doubly unique: she alone of the writers considered in this chapter seems to have engaged in writing as a communal rather than solitary practice, and to have received some critical acknowledgement. Helena Shire first commented on the existence of a ‘lady poetaster’ in the literary and intellectual courtly elite of James Vi's self-proclaimed Castalian band. (Even if we consider the possibility that her name may have been playfully invented for the poetic role-play practised by this coterie, it still importantly signifies the incursion of a female voice.) Her identity is revealed in James's wry piece of poetic advice to Alexander Montgomerie. Lindsay's alleged words sanction the king's criticism of his ‘maister’ poet's hubris:

Montgomerie's sonnet, ‘My best belovit brother of the band’, bestows on her a different kind of honour, desiring that Lindsay's art will enshrine the memory of the literary quartet composed of Robert Hudson, Montgomerie, ‘old Scot and Robert Semple’.