William Dunbar is one of the most important writers of late-medieval Scotland; compared with his near contemporaries Robert Henryson and Gavin Douglas, he is the most varied and the most enigmatic. The eighty-odd poems that can be confidently attributed to him are for the most part quite short (references here, both titles and numbers, are to The Poems of William Dunbar [1979]; translations are based on the notes and glossary of the editor, James Kinsley). The longest, "The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo" (K14: The Tale of the Two Married Women and the Widow), is only 530 lines; "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie" (K23) is somewhat longer, but half is by Walter Kennedy. Yet they offer an extraordinary range of language, meter, style, tone, and content: aureate allegory and ferocious flyting, begging poems and devout prayers, dream visions and celebrations of court occasions, rhyming couplets...