ABSTRACT
A concerned with quantifying that influence than with assessing its quality. We are more and more hearing statements that run something like this: “The Scottish poets of the fifteenth century found in Chaucer an important model, but they used that model to serve their own purposes.” Certainly the more we understand about the workings of literary tradition in the Middle Ages, the less will Middle Scots poetics seem exceptionally, perhaps embarrassingly, derivative. We can usefully declare the Middle Scots poets to be as independent-minded as one could wish, and the scholarly renascence in this field has gone a long way in helping us to recognize the nature of that independence by pointing out the ability of Middle Scots poets to read critically and to depart from Chaucerian models.
