Place, Poetry, and Politics: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Reception of Alexander Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae

This article explores the reception in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Scottish Jacobean poet Alexander Montgomerie (c. 1550–1598), especially his dream vision The Cherrie and the Slae. Whereas Montgomerie has long been recognised as the pre-eminent voice of Scottish Jacobean poetry based on his style, formal mastery, and generic versatility, from the later seventeenth century onwards, readers, editors, and especially poetic imitators such as G. G. of S, John Wilson, and Alexander Ross, turned to The Cherrie and the Slae because it enabled localisations of its fictional landscapes across a variety of real-world Scottish places. This reception history is underpinned by a turn in what Charles Withers has called ‘geographical thinking’. By way of a case study, this article also serves to draw attention to the importance of place and space studies for premodern Scottish literatures.