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Foreword

Avant-propos
Mélanie Cournil et Jeanne Schaaf

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1This issue of Études écossaises explores the intricate connections between memories and territories in Scotland, focusing on the relationship that binds these two notions, at times mutually interdependent, at others marked by tension and conflict, particularly in their literary, cultural, and historical expressions.

2In the Scottish context, territory, understood in its plurality, may be conceived both as an archival site and as a living space in which the political, linguistic, and cultural tensions that have shaped—and continue to shape—the Scottish nation and its representations are inscribed. In Scotland, memory is territorialised in specific sites such as the National Wallace Monument and the Culloden battlefield, where national narratives are constructed around heroic figures and foundational historical episodes. It is present in place names, ruins, and monuments, as well as in textual, poetic and symbolic spaces.

3In its broadest meaning, territory is defined as a delimited portion of space shaped over time by social practices, systems of representation, and power relations arising from human activity, contributing to its symbolic construction. Lived experiences, whether individual or collective, foster a sense of belonging anchored in space. Because territory is inseparable from human agency and social practices, it becomes a site for the production of narratives and for the articulation of historical and political claims. As a dynamic and evolving concept, territory must therefore be considered in close relation to memory, conceived as the ongoing construction and transmission of the past within and through space.

4Just as territory, even in its material dimension, cannot exist without the mental representations through which individuals apprehend it, memory is therefore rooted in a distinctly human act. It summons a time that has passed without being confined only to commemoration or retrospective interpretation. Whether it serves a reparative function, bears the imprint of trauma, or operates as a force of contestation, memory unfolds as a dynamic process embedded in the present, through which the past is reactivated and the future (re)oriented. When intertwined with territory, memory produces perceptions and modes of appropriation, both material and symbolic. It can transform certain places into sites of remembrance, celebration, or collective identification, while turning others into arenas of dispute where latent tensions resurface. In this way, memory reconfigures relationships among individuals and contributes to the formation of communities anchored in a common space. Whether collective or individual, memory assumes a plurality of forms that intersect, overlap, and sometimes conflict, inscribing new discursive layers upon the land. Rural and urban landscapes, from borders and vast stretches of land to monuments and ruins, function as territorial traces of history, alongside literary and cultural productions. Examining territory in relation to memory reveals that the concept of territory is never neutral but always imbued with meaning; perpetually constructed and redefined through the narratives and discourses that inhabit it.

5For instance, the Highlands of Scotland do not merely designate a region in the north and west of the country; they evoke a space enduringly marked by the Jacobite defeat of 1746 at the Battle of Culloden, the subsequent policies of repression, and the Highland Clearances, whose forced displacements continue to inform contemporary representations of dispossession and exile. The ruins of villages, burial grounds and the deserted shores constitute material traces of these upheavals, now integrated into a collective memory regularly mobilised in public debate and cultural production.

6The contributions gathered in this issue examine these modes of inscription and the processes through which territories both preserve and produce memories. Covering a period from the 17th century to contemporary Scotland, they draw on a wide corpus ranging from Gaelic oral poetry to colonial correspondence.

7It is within this framework that Alice de Nanteuil’s article examines late 17th‑century Gaelic poetry from the Highlands through the works of Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn. In a context of territorial dispossession and the disintegration of the clan system, their poems emerge as acts of poetic reparation. Territory is named and described with precision: landscapes and meaningful sites become the signs of a threatened collective memory. Orality does not merely represent space; it symbolically reconstitutes it, transforming poetic work into a site of memory. This articulation of orality, memory, and territory is further developed in Kristel van Soeren’s study of the Jacobite song collection A Collection of Loyal Songs, Poems, &c. (1750). Situated in the immediate aftermath of Culloden, the corpus is approached both as a material object and as an archive. Long marginalised, Jacobite songs are analysed as essential vehicles of the cultural memory of a politically defeated yet symbolically active group. By addressing both the textual and musical dimensions of the songs, the article demonstrates their capacity to reaffirm a collective identity grounded in loyalty.

8This dynamic conception of memory finds a contemporary echo in Monika Kocot’s study of Surfacing—a collection of nature and travel essays—by Kathleen Jamie. The article explores the interaction between physical landscapes, mental landscapes or mindscapes, and memory in Jamie’s writing, with particular attention to the non-linear temporalities that traverse the essays. Moments of transition or in‑betweenness, when the past intrudes into the present, are interpreted as liminal spaces leading to reflection, mourning, and repair. The article explores how memory emerges as a contested space. It analyses the creation of autobiographical space, the act of rewriting as a decolonial practice that reshapes narrative geographies, and the poetic inscriptions rooted within the landscape.

9Extending this reflection on how landscapes are narratively reshaped, Camille Manfredi turns to contemporary travel writing to explore how spatial representation engages with collective histories, environmental change, and evolving cultural identities. Analysing 21st‑century travel narratives by Scottish and English authors such as Malachy Tallack and Linda Cracknell, her article shows how these texts revisit the Romantic legacy of the Sublime while bearing witness to the political, environmental, and cultural transformations of devolved Scotland. It emphasises the ways in which these narratives reframe landscapes as lived spaces shaped by a new, more “responsible” or ethically conscious form of travel writing that is emerging in Scotland. This approach favours slowness as a form of resistance to contemporary acceleration and privileges embodied and sensory engagement with post-natural landscapesechoing Philippe Bourdeau’s notion of “post-tourism” and Jean Corneloup’s concept of “transmodern wayfaring”.

10Julie Gay’s contribution turns to the islands as privileged sites of preservation, due to their isolated nature. Often perceived as natural and cultural conservatories, islands seem to preserve distinct temporalities, allowing access to layered histories. Drawing on Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays and insular fiction—particularly The Wrecker and The Ebb‑Tide—the article examines how the island functions not as a fixed repository of memory but as a dynamic, heterochronic archive where territory and recollection interact creatively. Drawing on Derridean conceptions of the archive and Foucauldian heterotopia, the article highlights the ways in which spatial exploration becomes both a creative impetus and a mode of reactivating the past within the narrative present. Through this lens, Stevenson’s islands emerge as mutable spaces in which memory is continually reactivated and reshaped.

11Industrial cities such as Glasgow bear witness to another inscription of memory within the territory. From this perspective, Nathalie Duclos analyses the disputes over the two memorials to the Great Famine in Glasgow—one commemorating Irish and Scottish famine victims and the other exclusively Irish—unveiled in 2018 and 2021 respectively. Through the controversies surrounding their installation, the study highlights persistent tensions regarding the place of the Irish diaspora in Scotland, as well as debates on sectarianism and rising anti-Irish racism. The urban territory thus appears as a space in which memories confront one another, as these memorials crystallise competing narratives about the place accorded to Irish descendants in contemporary Glasgow.

12While this article highlights debates about memory within a local context, Scottish territories beyond the cities have also historically been represented by external observers. The perception of the Highlands is central to Sabrina Juillet Garzón’s study of French travellers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These foreign visitors, including Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, Charles Nodier, and Pierre-Étienne Denis Saint-Germain Leduc, acted as indirect witnesses to the Clearances. In their testimonies, the Highlands are described as a space in transition, marked by absences and silences that themselves constitute a form of memory. However, the article underlines the limits of foreign perception while emphasising the role of travel writing in shaping transnational memory.

13The sense of belonging that extends beyond national borders lies at the heart of Thomas Archambaud’s article on the Gaelic correspondence of Sir John Macpherson in 18th‑century India. As an agent of the East India Company, Macpherson made strategic use of Scottish Gaelic in the colonial context, with trusted correspondents, to express personal opinions that could not be formulated in English for fear of being read by prying eyes. The article, therefore, reveals how a language associated with geographical marginality becomes an instrument of trust, patronage, and integration within the Highland diaspora. Gaelic thereby enables the re‑creation of a shared symbolic territory. Taken together, the articles demonstrate that Scottish territories—whether written, traversed, inhabited, or commemorated—are inseparable from the memories that permeate them.

14This issue concludes with short reviews of two noteworthy books, Jean Viviès, George Cheyne, médecin de son siècle. 1672–1743, Presses universitaires de Province, 2023; and M. S. F. Johnston, Cross-border Conflict 1327–1388: England v Scotland and France—Their Histories as Recorded by Sir Jean Froissart, Ceramicon, 2023.

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Mélanie Cournil et Jeanne Schaaf, « Foreword »Études écossaises [En ligne], 25 | 2026, mis en ligne le 09 avril 2026, consulté le 10 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/6786 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/161mi

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Auteurs

Mélanie Cournil

Sorbonne Université
melanie.cournil@sorbonne-universite.fr
 
Mélanie Cournil est maîtresse de conférences en histoire britannique à Sorbonne Université. Spécialiste de l’histoire impériale et de l’histoire écossaise, elle s’intéresse à la question de la circulation et de l’appropriation des savoirs botaniques à travers l’Empire britannique dans la première moitié du xxe siècle, en s’appuyant sur la correspondance scientifique de William Jackson Hooker, directeur des Glasgow Botanic Gardens et titulaire de la Chaire royale de botanique de l’Université de Glasgow (1820‑1841).
 
Mélanie Cournil is Senior Lecturer in British History at Sorbonne Université. A specialist in British imperial history and Scottish history, her research focuses on the circulation and appropriation of botanical knowledge across the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. She bases her work on the study of the scientific correspondence of William Jackson Hooker, Director of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow (1820–1841).

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Jeanne Schaaf

Université Lumière Lyon 2
jeanne.schaaf@univ-lyon2.fr
 
Jeanne Schaaf est maîtresse de conférences en théâtre anglophone à l’Université Lumière Lyon 2. Spécialiste du théâtre écossais contemporain, ses domaines de recherche comprennent le lien entre théâtre et nation, la tension entre scènes locales et globales, ainsi que l’émergence de nouvelles communautés artistiques à l’ère technologique. Elle a co‑traduit les pièces Ciara (2013) de David Harrower et What Shadows (2016) de Chris Hannan.
 
Jeanne Schaaf currently holds a teaching and research position as Senior Lecturer in English at Lyon 2 University. A specialist in contemporary Scottish theatre, her fields of research include the link between theatre and nation, the tension between local and global stages, as well as the emergence of new artistic communities in a technological era. She has co‑translated the plays Ciara (2013) by David Harrower and What Shadows (2016) by Chris Hannan.

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