George Buchanan

Although his name is now virtually unknown beyond academia, George Buchanan (b. 1506–d. 1582) was one of the foremost humanists and Neo-Latinists of the 16th century. His work as a writer, polemicist, and educator had a Europe-wide impact in his own lifetime, and a cultural afterlife so great that it resulted in a large obelisk being erected in his memory in his hometown of Killearn, Scotland, and year-long public celebrations of the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth at the Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrews in 1906. Buchanan is best known to early modern historians as the polemicist for the revolutionary party that forced Mary Stuart to abdicate from the throne of Scotland in 1567 in favor of her infant son, James. It was in this context that he produced a scurrilous account of her reign (the De Maria Regina Scotorum, published in English as the Detectioun), an explosive treatise on the nature of Scottish kingship and the right to resist and kill tyrants (the De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus), and a history of Scotland (Rerum Scoticarum Historia) that acted as a “proof text” of sorts for his theories on monarchy. Buchanan was also tutor to Mary’s son, who as James VI and I would become arguably the most literary British monarch ever to sit on the throne. To scholars of the French Renaissance, Buchanan is more famous—and has been studied in comparatively much greater depth—as the author of Neo-Latin works across an impressive range of genres, many of which strongly influenced early French vernacular literature. These included religious tragedies and translations of ancient Greek plays (Jephthes, Baptistes, Alcestis, Medea), and secular and anti-clerical poetry (the Franciscanus, written in Scotland for James V around 1537, being the most famous example). His crowning poetic achievement, the Latin versification and paraphrasing of the complete Hebrew Psalter, was begun while he was imprisoned by the Inquisition in Portugal, where he had been one of the first teachers at the newly established University of Coimbra. Once safely back in France and then Scotland, the complete collection was published in stages, and it enjoyed exceptional critical acclaim and international dissemination. The psalm paraphrases would see Buchanan receive the epithet (at least according to his publisher) of “easily the prince of poets of our age” (poetarum nostri saeculi facile princeps). He died in 1582, but his works and ideas circulated among poets, intellectuals, and revolutionary parties alike for centuries after.