The Renaissance in Scotland was a cultural, intellectual and artistic movement in Scotland, from the late fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late fourteenth century and reaching northern Europe as a Northern Renaissance in the fifteenth century. It involved an attempt to revive the principles of the classical era, including humanism, a spirit of scholarly enquiry, scepticism, and concepts of balance and proportion. Since the twentieth century, the uniqueness and unity of the Renaissance has been challenged by historians, but significant changes in Scotland can be seen to have taken place in education, intellectual life, literature, art, architecture, music, science and politics.

The court was central to the patronage and dissemination of Renaissance works and ideas. It was also central to the staging of lavish display that portrayed the political and religious role of the monarchy. The Renaissance led to the adoption of ideas of imperial monarchy, encouraging the Scottish crown to join the new monarchies by asserting imperial jurisdiction and distinction. The growing emphasis on education in the Middle Ages became part of a humanist and then Protestant programme to extend and reform learning. It resulted in the expansion of the school system and the foundation of six university colleges by the end of the sixteenth century. Relatively large numbers of Scottish scholars studied on the continent or in England and some, such as Hector Boece, John Mair, Andrew Melville and George Buchanan, returned to Scotland to play a major part in developing Scottish intellectual life. Vernacular works in Scots began to emerge in the fifteenth century, while Latin remained a major literary language. With the patronage of James V and James VI, writers included William Stewart, John Bellenden, David Lyndsay, William Fowler and Alexander Montgomerie.

In the sixteenth century, Scottish kings – particularly James V – built palaces in Renaissance style, beginning at Linlithgow. The trend soon spread to members of the aristocracy. Painting was strongly influenced by Flemish painting, with works commissioned from the continent and Flemings serving as court artists. While church art suffered iconoclasm and a loss of patronage as a result of the Reformation, house decoration and portraiture became significant for the wealthy, with George Jamesone emerging as the first major named artist in the early seventeenth century. Music also incorporated wider European influences although the Reformation caused a move from complex polyphonic church music to the simpler singing of metrical psalms. Combined with the Union of Crowns in 1603, the Reformation also removed the church and the court as sources of patronage, changing the direction of artistic creation and limiting its scope. In the early seventeenth century the major elements of the Renaissance began to give way to Mannerism and the Baroque.

Definitions and debates

Renaissance is a concept formulated by cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt in the mid-nineteenth century to describe the intellectual and artistic movement that began in Italy in the fourteenth century and saw an attempt to revive the principles of the Greek and Roman classical worlds. It encompassed a rational and sceptical attitude, a return to ideas of original sources and proportion and balance in art. The major ideas of the Renaissance are generally considered to have reached Northern Europe much later, in the late fifteenth century. Scotland has been seen as part of a wider Northern Renaissance that is generally considered to have stretched into the early seventeenth century, when it was replaced by the grander styles of the Baroque. However, the association of Baroque styles with Catholicism in predominantly Protestant Scotland tended to result in this trend being overlooked and the period from about 1620 to the end of the seventeenth century is sometimes characterised as a late Renaissance.A. Thomas, "The Renaissance", in T. M. Devine and J. Wormald, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), , pp. 185–7.

In the twentieth century, historians disputed the validity of the concept of a Renaissance as unique, as a reaction against the "dark age" of the Medieval, as a clear break with the past and as a unified movement.J. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), , p. 56. Instead, they emphasised the many intellectual trends and movements that went before it, such as the twelfth-century Renaissance on which it built. It was also once common for historians to suggest that Scotland had little or no participation in the Renaissance. More recently, the significant changes in intellectual and cultural life in the period have been seen as forming a watershed in Scottish cultural history. This has been perceived as opening the path for the Reformation, and later for the modernisation of thought and social life in the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, to which Scotland would make a significant contribution.

Court and kingship

The court was central to the patronage and dissemination of Renaissance works and ideas. It was also central to the staging of lavish display that portrayed the political and religious role of the monarchy. This display was often tied up with ideas of chivalry, which was evolving in this period from a practical military ethos into a more ornamental and honorific cult. It saw its origins in the classical era, with Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar often depicted as proto-knights. Tournaments provided one focus of display, the most famous being those of the Wild Knight in 1507 and the Black Lady in 1508 under James IV. They were also pursued enthusiastically by James V who, proud of his membership of international orders of knighthood, displayed their insignia on the Gateway at Linlithgow Palace.

During her brief personal rule, Mary, Queen of Scots brought with her many of the elaborate court activities that she had grown up with at the French court. She introduced balls, masques and celebrations designed to illustrate the resurgence of the monarchy and to facilitate national unity. The most elaborate event was the baptism of the future James VI at Stirling Castle in 1566, organised by her French servant Bastian Pagez. This combined complex imagery, incorporating classical themes of the goddess Astraea and the revival of the classical golden age, with the chivalry of the Round Table. The ceremony was followed by a banquet, hunts, feasting, poetry, dance and theatre, cumulating in a staged siege and fireworks.A. Thomas, "The Renaissance", in T. M. Devine and J. Wormald, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), , pp. 192–3. The court returned to being a centre of culture and learning under James VI. He cultivated the image of a philosopher king, evoking the models of David, Solomon and Constantine that were seen in his "joyous entry" into Edinburgh in 1579. The grandest event of his reign was the baptism of his son and heir Prince Henry in 1595. For this, the Chapel Royal at Stirling Castle was rebuilt to mirror the proportions of the Temple of Solomon. There were three days of feasting, a staged tournament and a masque featuring a ship of state crewed by classical deities and muses. Masterminded by William Fowler, it was pointedly designed to build the image of the king and support his claim to the English and Irish thrones.A. Thomas, "The Renaissance", in T. M. Devine and J. Wormald, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), , p. 200.

New ideas also affected views of government, described as new or Renaissance monarchy, which emphasised the status and significance of the monarch. The Roman Law principle that "a king is emperor in his own kingdom", can be seen in Scotland from the mid-fifteenth century. In 1469, Parliament passed an act declaring that James III possessed "full jurisdiction and empire within his realm". From the 1480s, the king's image on his silver groats showed him wearing a closed, arched, imperial crown, in place of the open circlet of medieval kings, probably the first coin image of its kind outside Italy. It soon began to appear in heraldry, on royal seals, manuscripts, sculptures and as crown steeples on churches with royal connections, as at St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh. The first Scottish monarch to wear such a crown was James V, whose diadem was reworked to include arches in 1532. They were included when it was reconstructed in 1540, subsisting in the Crown of Scotland. The idea of imperial monarchy emphasised the dignity of the crown and included its role as a unifying national force, defending national borders and interests, royal supremacy over the law and a distinctive national church within the Catholic communion.A. Thomas, "The Renaissance", in T. M. Devine and J. Wormald, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), , p. 188. New Monarchy can also be seen in the reliance of the crown on "new men" rather than the great magnates, the use of the clergy as a form of civil service, the development of standing armed forces and a navy.J. D. Mackie, B. Lenman and G. Parker, A History of Scotland (London: Penguin, 1991), . The aggrandisement of the monarchy reached its apogee in James VI's development of the concept of imperial rule into a divine right. However, the royal image of James in Scotland may have competed with that of his wife Anna of Denmark who maintained a separate parallel court with a distinct identity, and in the first years of the 1590s she and her courtiers wore Danish fashions.Field, J., 'Dressing a Queen: The Wardrobe of Anna of Denmark at the Scottish Court of King James VI, 1590–1603', The Court Historian, 24:2 (2019), pp. 152-167, at pp. 155-7.

Education

Schools

In the early Middle Ages, formal education was limited to monastic life, but from the twelfth century new sources of education had begun to develop, with song and grammar schools. These were usually attached to cathedrals or a collegiate church and were most common in the developing burghs. By the end of the Middle Ages grammar schools could be found in all the main burghs and some small towns. There were also petty schools, more common in rural areas and providing an elementary education.M. Lynch, Scotland: A New History (New York, NY: Random House, 2011), , pp. 104–7. They were almost exclusively aimed at boys, but by the end of the fifteenth century, Edinburgh also had schools for girls. These were sometimes described as "sewing schools", and probably taught by laywomen or nuns. There was also the development of private tuition in the families of lords and wealthy burghers. The growing emphasis on education in the late Middle Ages, cumulated with the passing of the Education Act 1496, which decreed that all sons of barons and freeholders of substance should attend grammar schools and which endorsed the humanist concern to learn "perfyct Latyne". All this resulted in an increase in literacy, although it was largely concentrated among a male and wealthy elite,P. J. Bawcutt and J. H. Williams, A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2006), , pp. 29–30. with perhaps 60 per cent of the nobility being literate by the end of the fifteenth century.J. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), , pp. 68–72.