Monuments and the margins: Old age and memories of Scottish Jacobitism in the epitaph of Marjory Scott, 1700-1900

In c. 1728, the Edinburgh poet Alexander Pennecuik (1684-1730) published an epitaph on the centenarian Marjory Scott of Dunkeld. Over the next two centuries, this text was widely circulated in a variety of media. This thesis argues that the Scott epitaph functioned as a textual monument to the anti-Union and Jacobite politics of Pennecuik’s day, over a period when Jacobite memory was delimited and trivialised in the public sphere. Close study of the epitaph’s original context and its transmission reveals such sources of memory to be highly portable and also flexible, suitable to the heterogeneous identities and memories of Scottish people. As a tribute to a centenarian, the epitaph further opens up an exploration of old age as a conduit for diverse memories and as a multivalent symbol of Scottish identity.