Scots: Studies in its Literature and Language John M. Kirk and Iseabail Macleod (eds). Rodopi, 2013 ISBN 9789042037397, 65 [euro], 309pp. Scholarly Festschrifts dedicated to a specific scholar usually mark the coronation of the achievements of a lifelong career, and express the esteem and consideration in which the honorand is held by their peers; in the present case, the unquestionable importance and the extremely high quality of J. Derrick McClure's committed involvement in most aspects of Scots research makes it only too appropriate that this collection should gather some of the best names in Scottish Studies to celebrate him with diversified articles focussing on his field of expertise. Jeremy Smith's 'Textual Afterlives: Barbour's Bruce and Hary's Wallace' skilfully presents the application of historical pragmatics to five editions of John Barbour's The Bruce and Blind Hary's The Wallace, namely John Ramsay's manuscript (1489), Robert Leprevik's print (1571), Andro Hart's edition of 1620, Robert Freebaim's of 1758 and John Pinkerton's of 1790 for the first, and John Ramsay's manuscript (1488), Robert Leprevik's edition of 1570, the Glasgow editions of 1685 and 1713, Robert Freebaim's of 1758, and Robert Morison's of 1790 for the second. Details such as layout, punctuation, capitalisation, fonts and the individual treatment of distinctively Scottish lexemes are carefully sifted in order to infer the effect which they presumably exerted on their contemporary Scottish readership; special attention is devoted to the medieval and early modern understanding of a text as a conglomerate of concepts rather than grammatical units, as well as to any indicator of the shift from an oral to a visual approach which the introduction of the printing press is known to have entailed. Variations in editorial choices during the centuries suggest a growing antiquarian interest in correctness, as well as the first signs of a romantic 'mythological historicity' which drew heavily on the epic's purported authenticity inspired by the authority of the manuscript originals; prefaces and textual interpolations, on the other hand, are noted as reflecting the evolution of society's political attitude towards its southern neighbour. It is this constant redefinition of Scottish society's identity which, according to the article's premise, is reflected in the textual minutiae, and which warrants the exploration of each edition as a culturally-embedded product of its period, rather than a mere reproduction of the original. Robert McColl Millar's To bring my language near to the language of men? Dialect and Dialect Use in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: Some Observations' explores how the social, economic and political changes which marked the second half of the eighteenth century influenced the increasingly self-conscious recourse to dialect for literary purposes against the opposing tendency of widespread diffidence towards anything diverging from the accepted norm. The case study concentrates on two emigrants' letters to their families, one from a Scottish indentured servant in Maryland in the early eighteenth century, the second from an English political prisoner in New South Wales in the early 1800s: the relevant dates are posited as the two approximate temporal extremes between which the standard language is presumed to have imposed itself. The theoretical premise is then tested against the entries found in the early nineteenth-century Original Statistical Account of Scotland, which are subdivided into the two categories of overt attitudes towards language as opposed to covered ones. Both concepts have been previously developed by McColl Millar, and in this article identify the self-conscious, often ambivalent comments passed by the informants on the linguistic landscape of their district on the one hand, and the incursions of Scots lexical items, idioms and proverbs into an otherwise wholly English text on the other. …