Introduction

Steven J. Reid

The corpus of Latin literature produced by Scots in the early modern period is, to paraphrase Homer, its own “wine-dark sea;” and until very recently, the unwary traveller who attempted their own “voyage of exploration”1 upon it was liable to drown. The earliest attempt to provide a survey of Scottish Latinists was Thomas Dempster’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Scotorum,2 a work well- known for mixing fact with error, and in many instances with plain fiction, in its biographical and literary accounts. In the three centuries after Dempster’s pioneering work, only a handful of scholars—including the Danish polymath Ole Borch, the literary scholar and librarian David Irving, the Latinist and printer , and the classical scholar William Duguid Geddes, to name the most prominent—engaged with this large corpus of literature in any meaningful way, chiefly through critical assessments and editions of key poets such as and Arthur Johnston.3 Modern study of Scottish Latin literature arguably began with the publication of Leicester Bradner’s Musae Anglicanae in 1940, which included two chapters surveying Scottish poets active in the decades on either side of the Union of Crowns (1603). Since then, there have been a series of high-level surveys of the themes and trends prevalent in the literature, usually providing little more than the

1 Another paraphrase, this time of J. MacQueen’s well-known metaphor of what it is like to open the DPS; J. MacQueen, “Scottish Latin poetry”, in R.D.S. Jack (ed.), The History of , volume 1: Origins to 1660 (Mediaeval and Renaissance) (Aberdeen, 1988), 213–226, at p. 225. 2 Bologna, 1627; the standard edition used by modern scholars is that published by the Bannantyne Club, ed. D. Irving (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1827–9), which has no critical apparatus. 3 For discussion of Borch and the comments on Scottish poets in his Dissertationes academi- cae de poetis (Frankfurt, 1683), see the chapter by W. Poole below; D. Irving, The History of Scottish Poetry, ed. J.A. Carlyle (1861), has a range of insights on Scottish Latinists still of much value today; Ruddiman is most famous for his edition of Buchanan’s works (Georgii Buchanani . . . Opera Omnia (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1715, 1725)), but also produced editions of Sir Robert Sibbald’s Introductio ad historiam rerum a Romanis gestarum (Edinburgh, 1706), Florens Wilson’s De animi tranquillitate dialogus (Edinburgh, 1707), and Arthur Johnston’s Cantici Solomonis paraphrasis poetica (Edinburgh, 1709). In addition, he wrote his own works on Latin grammar, most famously the Grammaticae Latinae institutiones (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1725, 1731). Geddes was the lead editor of MLA, though the third volume of poetae minores, conceived by him, was executed after his death by W.K. Leask (MLA, iii, prefatory note).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004330733_002 2 Reid names and dates of texts and a summary line or two regarding their contents.4 Until very recently, any individual scholar trying to get below this birds-eye view and make meaningful or detailed sense of this vast corpus was still con- fronted with a mass of texts and manuscripts, whose authors and contents remained largely unresearched and untranslated.5 The state of Scottish Neo-Latin studies has been significantly advanced in the past three decades, and especially in the past ten years, by individual schol- ars producing critical editions and analyses of a range of works,6 collaborative

4 D. F.S. Thomson, “The Latin epigram in : the sixteenth century”, Phoenix, 11 (1957), 63–78; J.W.L. Adams, “Scottish Neo-Latin poetry”, in P. Tuynman, G.C. Kuiper, and E. Keßler (eds), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis. Proceedings of the Second Interna­ tional Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Amsterdam 19–24 August 1973 (München, 1979), 1–9; J.W.L. Adams, “The Renaissance poets (2) Latin”, in J. Kinsley (ed.), Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey (, 1955), 68–98; J. MacQueen, “Scottish Latin poetry”, and J. and W. MacQueen, “Scottish Latin prose”, in Jack (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, 213–226, 227–241; R. Crawford, Scotland’s Books: the Penguin History of Scottish Literature (London, 2007), 100– 137; D. Allan, “ ‘The divine fury of the Muses’: Neo-Latin poetry in early modern Scotland”, in C. Gribben and D.G. Mullan (eds), Literature and the Scottish Reformation (Farnham/ Burlington, 2009), 63–78. 5 As Christopher Upton noted in his PhD thesis (“Studies in Scottish Latin”, 6) the state of knowledge of Scottish Latin in the 1980s made it impossible to write even a holistic survey of the DPS, let alone of a broader range of texts, prompting him to write a series of discrete but interconnected studies. 6 In terms of online resources, the “Bridging the Continental Divide” project provides a critical edition and translation of just under a third of the DPS at http://www.dps.gla.ac.uk/delitiae; D. Sutton’s website, “The Philological Museum” (hosted by the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham: http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/) provides access to edi- tions by Sutton, J. Reid-Baxter and others of a wide range of British Neo-Latin texts, includ- ing a full translation of the 1575 edition of Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia. For printed editions, see: J.R. Naiden, The Sphera of George Buchanan (1506–1582): A Literary Opponent of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe (self-published, 1952); J. Ijsewijn and D.F.S. Thomson, “The Latin poems of Jacobus Follisius or James Foullis of Edinburgh”, Humanisitica Lovaniensia, 24 (1975), 102–152; J. Durkan and W.S. Watt, “Adam Mure’s Laudes Gulielmi Elphinstoni”, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 28 (1979), 199–231; W.T. Johnston, The Best of Our Owne: Letters of Archibald Pitcairne, 1652–1713 (Edinburgh, 1979); W. Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. and trans. D.E.R. Watt, J. MacQueen, W. MacQueen, and S. Taylor (9 vols, Aberdeen, 1987); McGinnis and Williamson, George Buchanan; P.J. McGinnis and A.H. Williamson, The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of ’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot/Burlington, VT, 2002); J. Barclay, Argenis, ed. and trans. M.T. Riley and D.P. Huber (Assen, 2004); R.A. Mason and M.S. Smith (eds), A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: a Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni Apud Scotos Dialogus (Aldershot/Burlington, VT, 2004); J. and W. MacQueen (eds), Archibald Pitcairne: The Latin Poems (Assen/Tempe, AZ, 2009); I.C. Cunningham, “’s Scotiae