GEORGE BUCHANAN. - Scottish humanist and historian, born at Killearn on 1 February 1506, died at Edinburgh on 28 September 1582. While studying in Paris, where he discovered his vocation for interpreting the classical world to his contemporaries, he composed the poem Quam misera sit conditio docentium literas humaniores Lutetiae, which appears as the first piece in his Book of Elegies and stands as a valuable document of the age.
Returning to Scotland in 1535, he set himself to denounce in biting Latin epigrams the obscurantism of opponents to every innovation or reform, whether in religion or in science. Under the title Somnium he translated into Latin the Scots poet William Dunbar’s pasquinade How Dunbar was desyrd to be ans freir. In the Franciscan Order Buchanan saw the chief enemy of classical studies, and in later satires (Palinodia and Franciscanus et Fratres), carried away by polemical fervour, he attributed to this Order the vices of rapacity and licence, contempt for the rule, and imposture. Accused of heresy, he was imprisoned at St Andrews, from which he escaped in 1539 to England and then took refuge in France, his adopted and hospitable homeland. He taught at Bordeaux, where his pupil was Montaigne, and later moved to the University of Coimbra in Portugal. There he was struck by a charge of heresy from the Inquisition and confined in a monastery, where he began his celebrated poetic paraphrase of the Psalms (1548). Released and back in Scotland, he became a Protestant and took part in public affairs, emerging as one of the most ardent champions of the Reformation and one of the most merciless accusers of Mary Stuart, whom he had earlier served as tutor. In De iure regni apud Scotos (1579) Buchanan weaves an apology for the Scottish Reformation, affirming the principle of popular sovereignty and the right to rebel against monarchical despotism.
A different character marks his other works: patriotic and oratorical is his Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582); academic and humanistic are the tragedies modelled on classical models (Baptistes, Jephthes) or translated from Euripides (Medea, Alcestis); didactic and scholastic are various original Latin compositions, among which the poem De Sphaera deserves special notice for its exposition of Ptolemaic cosmogony in opposition to the system proclaimed by Copernicus and rejected by scholars and laymen alike as impious and irrational.