Gavin Douglas (d. 1522), a prominent Scottish churchman who eventually rose to become Bishop of Dunkeld, is most widely admired as a writer for the Eneados, his brilliant Middle Scots translation of the Aeneid, completed in 1513 shortly before the battle of Flodden (where the Scotsmen were defeated by the English). Three shorter poems attributed to him also survive: “The Palice of Honour,” “Conscience,” and “King Hart.” The last two survive only in the Maitland Folio; of the three works, it is the authorship of the third that remains most in doubt. In the nearly thirty years since Bawcutt's critical edition of The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas was first published, great strides have been made in the field of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-c. Scottish letters, including the long-awaited completion of A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue in 2002 (readers of the present review will be glad to know that this monumental work is available for free as part of the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, accessible at http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl). In the intervening decades, no scholar in the field of early Scottish literature has made a greater contribution than Bawcutt herself, whose major scholarly work includes her authoritative monograph on Douglas (Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study [Edinburgh: University Press, 1976]), her superb book on Dunbar (Dunbar The Makar [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992]), and her two-volume edition of The Poems of William Dunbar (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998), which superseded the widely used edition by James Kinsley.

The Scottish Text Society must therefore be praised for allowing Bawcutt the opportunity to bring her edition of Douglas up to date. This new rendering silently corrects typographical errors in the previous one and adds a significant amount of new material, conveniently located in the supplement printed at the back of the volume. A ten-page review essay surveys scholarship undertaken on Douglas's shorter works since 1967 and on relevant historical studies that have shed light on the culture of early modern Scotland. This review is followed by thirty-three pages of notes (new, i.e., different from the first edition), bibliography, where the editor provides a great deal of information about textual cruces, the poet's lexicon, and his relation to other literary works, including his use of sources.