BUCHANAN, GEORGE. - Scottish humanist and historian, b. at Killearn on 1 February 1506, d. at Edinburgh on 28 September 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 time.
Having returned to Scotland in 1535, he set about denouncing in caustic Latin epigrams the obscurantism of the opponents of every innovation or reform, whether in the religious or in the scientific field, and he translated into Latin, under the name Somnium, the pasquinade of the Scottish poet William Dunbar: How Dunbar was desyrd to be any freir. In the Franciscan Order the B. saw the greatest enemy of classical studies, and in the subsequent satires (Polinodia and Franciscanus et Fratres), driven by polemical impetuosity, he imputed to that Order the vices of rapacity and license, of contempt for the rule and of imposture. Accused of heresy, he was imprisoned at St. Andrews, whence in 1539 he managed to flee to England and then to take refuge in France, his chosen and hospitable homeland. He taught at Bordeaux, where he had Montaigne as a pupil, subsequently moving to the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Here he was struck by the accusation of heresy on the part of the Inquisition and confined in a monastery, in which he began his celebrated poetic paraphrase of the Psalms (1548). Freed, having returned to Scotland, he became a Protestant, and took part in public affairs, showing himself one of the most fervent champions of the Reformation and one of the most ruthless accusers of Mary Stuart, whose tutor he had at first been. In the De iure regni apud Scotos (1579), the B. weaves the apology of the Scottish Reformation, affirming the principle of popular sovereignty and the right to rebel against monarchical despotism.
The other works of the B. have a different character: his Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) is patriotic-oratorical; the tragedies modelled on the classics (Baptistes, Jephtes) or translated from Euripides (Medea, Alcestis) are academic-humanistic; and various original Latin compositions are didactic-scholastic, among which the poem De Sphaera should be noted, in which the B. expounds the Ptolemaic cosmogony in contrast with the system proclaimed by Copernicus and rejected by learned and unlearned alike as impious and irrational.
Bibliography5 works
Vittorio Gabrieli