England's Insular Imagining : The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland

How have the English conceived of Scotland? Lorna Hutson's book is an essential intervention in the contested narrative of British nationhood.It argues that England deployed a mythical 'British History' in pursuing dominion over its northern neighbour: initially through waging war, and then striving to make the very idea of Scotland vanish in new figurations of sea-sovereignty.The author explores English attempts at conquest in the 1540s, revealing how justifications of overlordship mutated into literary, legal and cartographic ploys to erase Scotland-as-kingdom.Maps, treatises and military propaganda are no less imaginative in their eradicative strategies than river poetry, chorography, allegory, epic, tragedies, history plays and masques.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 sovereign nation.