BARCLAY, ALEXANDER. - Scottish poet, b. in 1475, d. at Croydon (Surrey) in 1552.
It is debated whether he did his studies at Oxford or at Cambridge; probably in both places. He had a profound knowledge of the Latin authors (trans.
of Sallust's Bellum Iugurthinum). He was first a secular priest, then a Benedictine, then a Franciscan and finally once again a secular priest and parish priest in London.
B. is famous for The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde (1509), a free version of the Narrenschiff (1494) of the Alsatian Sebastian Brant, but derived, in all likelihood, from the Latin text into which the original had been translated. A typical example of medieval allegorical works, the poem, adapted by B. to the habits of English life, written in an easy and flowing language and rich in satirical touches and figures, served to exhaust that genre forever, and to direct the English literary genius toward drama, the novel and the essay.
Also to be remembered are the five Eclogues (1515-21), derived from Battista Mantovano and from Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pius II, and the first example of English pastoral poetry.
A Catholic of rigidly orthodox views and sentiments, B. always had a moral, satirical or didactic purpose, and always lamented, in his writings, the decadence of the Catholic faith, the Bohemian heretics, the Turks and the Jews.