The Kingis Quair

This is a bibliography page, concerning a work to which reference is made elsewhere in this guide.

James Stewart (King James I of Scotland) The Kingis Quair

The Kingis Quair is a poem written in Scotland around 1423. The language is the one of the historic dialects known collectively as Middle Scots. In modern English, the name means 'The King's [Note]Book', Quair being equivalent to 'quire' (a collection of sheets of paper folded like the pages in a book), and the French cahier, an exercise book. The original only survived in one manuscript (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. B.24).

The authorship has occasionally been disputed (principally in Brown, J T T (1896) The authorship of The Kingis Quair: a new criticism, Glasgow, MacLehose), but the consensus now is that King James I (1394-1437) did indeed write it. ("There is no reason whatever to doubt" his authorship - Norton Smith, 1971.) Some modern editions are:

James I, King of Scotland, (1971) The Kingis Quair, edited by J. Norton-Smith, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Stewart, James (1973) The Kingis Quair edited Matthew P. McDiarmid, London, Heinemann,

James I., King of Scotland, (1911) The Kingis Quair: together with a Ballad of Good Counsel, edited Walter W. Skeat. Second and revised edition. Blackwood, for the Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh and London, 1911.

and a facsimile of the manuscript, which also contains other medieval poems:

The works of Geoffrey Chaucer and The kingis quair: a facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. B.24, with an introduction by Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards and an appendix by B.C. Barker-Benfield. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer (1997).