The Pageant Revival: Popularising Renascence
This chapter argues that several Scottish cultural revivalists, including Patrick Geddes, John Duncan and Jessie M. King, enthusiastically embraced Edwardian historical pageantry. What pageantry offered these writers and artists was an opportunity to further disseminate the Celtic myths and ‘lines of descent’ they had built in heir writings and artworks. By focussing on two key pageants: The Scottish National Pageant of Allegory History and Myth (1908) and Patrick Geddes’s The Masque of Learning (1912), I reveal the importance of Celtic mythology to Scottish pageantry, as well as the ways that these pageants interrogated stadialist notions of historical progress. A sub-chapter is dedicated to Arthurianism in Scotland, where I highlight the ways in which the Scottish claim to King Arthur helped advance Scottish cultural revivalism. The chapter also complicates wider critical understandings of Edwardian British pageantry, and reveals a distinct tradition in Scotland.