Dame Scotia and the Commonweal: vernacular humanism in The Complaynt of Scotland (1550)

Robert Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland (Paris, 1550) has attracted surprisingly little attention from modern scholars. Although available in an accessible critical edition since 1979, no analysis of its context, sources and polemical purposes has been undertaken in recent scholarship. This article redresses this imbalance, reading the Complaynt as part of the ideological warfare that accompanied the English crown’s ‘Rough Wooing’ of Scotland in the 1540s and examining its author’s remarkable re-working of Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif (1422) in the context of sixteenth-century vernacular humanism. It also highlights the extent to which Ciceronian civic humanism informed Wedderburn’s understanding of the Scottish ‘commonweal’ and explores his detailed argument about the origins of social rank and the nature of ‘true nobility’.