BARCALAY, ALEXANDER. - Scottish poet, b. in 1475, d. at Croydon (Surrey) in 1552.
It is debated whether he studied at Oxford or Cambridge; probably in both places. He had a profound knowledge of Latin authors (a translation of Sallust’s *Bellum Ingurthinum*). He was first a secular priest, then a Benedictine, then a Franciscan, and finally again a secular priest and parish priest in London.
B. is famous for *The Shy of Folys of the Worlde* (1500), a free version of Sebastian Brant’s *Narrenschiff* (1494), though it was probably derived from the Latin text into which the original had been translated. A typical example of medieval allegorical works, the poem, adapted by B. to English habits of life, written in an easy and flowing language rich in artistic motifs and figures, served to bring this genre to a definitive end and to direct English literary talent toward drama, the novel, and the essay.
Also noteworthy are the five *Eclogues* (1515–21), drawn from Battista Mantovano and from Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), the first example of English pastoral poetry.
A Catholic with rigidly orthodox views and sentiments, B. always had a moral, satirical, or didactic purpose, and in his writings he continually lamented the decline of the Catholic faith, Bohemian heretics, the Turks, and the Jews.