BUCHANAN, GEORGE. – Scottish humanist and historian, b. at Killearn on 1 Feb. 1506, d. at Edinburgh on 28 Sept. 1582. In Paris, where he completed his studies, he discovered his vocation as an interpreter of the classical world for his contemporaries and composed the poem, the first in the Book of Elegies, Quam misera sit conditio docentium literas humaniores Lutetiae, which constitutes a valuable document of the period.
Returning to Scotland in 1535, he devoted himself to denouncing in caustic Latin epigrams the obscurantism of the opponents of every innovation or reform, both in the religious and in the scientific sphere, and translated into Latin, under the title Somnium, the pasquinade by the Scottish poet William Dunbar: How Dunbar was desyrd to be any freir. In the Franciscan Order B. saw the greatest enemy of classical studies and, in his subsequent satires (Polinodia and Franciscanus et Fratres), driven by polemical fervour, he charged that Order with the vices of rapacity and licence, contempt for the rule, and imposture. Accused of heresy, he was imprisoned at St. Andrews, from where he succeeded in escaping in 1539 to England and then taking refuge in France, his elective and hospitable homeland. He taught at Bordeaux, where Montaigne was among his pupils, and subsequently moved to the University of Coimbra in Portugal. There he was accused of heresy by the Inquisition and confined in a monastery, where he began his celebrated poetic paraphrase of the Psalms (1548). Released and returned to Scotland, he became a Protestant and took part in public affairs, proving himself one of the most fervent champions of the Reformation and one of the most ruthless accusers of Mary Stuart, of whom he had initially been tutor. In De iure regni apud Scotos (1579), B. weaves an apologia for the Scottish Reformation, asserting the principle of popular sovereignty and the right to rebel against monarchical despotism.
The other works of B. have a different character: patriotic and oratorical is his Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582); academic-humanistic are the tragedies modelled on the classics (Baptistes, Jephtes) or translated from Euripides (Medea, Alcestis); and didactic-scholastic are various original Latin compositions, among which the poem De Sphaera deserves mention, in which B. expounds the Ptolemaic cosmology in opposition to the system proclaimed by Copernicus and rejected by learned and unlearned alike as impious and irrational.