Wilderness, Exoticism and the State’s Order: Medieval Views

Summary

Upon entering Edinburgh's Museum of Scotland (built in the 1990s), the visitor passes between two sentences, calligraphed on opposite walls, from the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) asserting Scottish independence and freedom; their heavily symbolic placement clearly lifts these phrases from the field of antiquarian anecdote and turns them into a motto for contemporary culture and politics. On one wall is written: ‘As long as only one hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any condition be brought under English rule’; on the opposite wall: ‘For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life’. The explanatory notice gives the Latin original of the phrases, and emphasizes their modern resonance:

These still resounding words appeal for freedom in the face of conquest by England. The ‘Letter of the Barons of Scotland’ to Pope John XXII, dated at Arbroath on 6 April 1320, was a declaration in the name of the ‘whole community of the Realm’ on their determination to maintain the independence of Scotland and to support King Robert Bruce.

This recent Scottish example of anchoring a late-twentieth century national museum in a medieval bedrock is representative of the tendency of modern national thought to hark back to ancient or medieval roots and continuities. Nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Flemish national thought is full of references to anti-French resistance in the Battle of Courtrai (1302); the Irish and Greek nations invoke the memory of resistance against English and Turkish rule over many centuries. But does a claim to ancestry really prove direct descent? Must we, on the basis of nationalist self-historicizations, accept that nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism is the direct continuation of a persistently asserted, unchanging Scottish, Flemish, Irish or Greek ‘nationality’ across all these centuries? If modern Scots, Flemish or Greek nationalists recognize their ideals in medieval precursors, does that mean that those medieval precursors would have recognized themselves in these self-proclaimed nineteenth- and twentieth- century successors? Would the Scottish Barons who so resoundingly asserted their inalienable liberty in 1320 have cheered the movie Braveheart as modern Scottish audiences did?