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This chapter details events in the life of George Eglisham from 1585–1620. Eglisham was born some time around 1585, probably in Hamilton about thirty-five miles southwest of Edinburgh. His name appears in the University of Paris' registers for 1610, attached to the ‘German Nation’, but with his exact course of study within the faculty of arts unspecified. He also appears in April 1610 in the registers of the university's Faculty of Medicine as a candidate for the baccalaureate that formed the first stage in the qualification as a physician. In 1612 Eglisham headed north to the Dutch Republic to serve the Scottish king who now sat on the English throne, in the final stages of the campaign James had orchestrated against the controversial German theologian Conrad Vorstius (Vorst). In 1618 he published an eccentric compilation of neo-Latin poetry and literary criticism in which, styling himself as ‘the king's doctor’, he challenged the late George Buchanan, ‘the king's tutor’, to a duellum poeticum, a poetic duel, for the best Latin paraphrase of the 104th Psalm.

Jephtha, Handel's last oratorio, tells the story of an Israelite leader who because of a vow to God finds himself having to sacrifice his own daughter as a burnt offering. Its libretto, by Thomas Morell, draws on the sixteenth‐century Latin play Jephthes sive votum by George Buchanan as well as on the biblical text. All three versions of the story have distinctive presentations of how Jephthah's vow results in the need to sacrifice his daughter, as well as of the outcome of the sacrifice. This chapter compares the three versions particularly in relation to how they portray the daughter's sacrifice, and comments on the theology and gender ideology of each one. Morell's libretto betrays anxieties over the brutal story of Jephthah bringing orthodox Christianity into disrepute, and it strives to transform the biblical narrative's heathenish portrayal of God into one more acceptable to eighteenth‐century Christianity.

The Introduction summarises the origins of Scotland’s patriotic historiography, highlighting the importance of medieval chronicles and the Renaissance histories of Hector Boece and George Buchanan in laying the foundations of early modern Scottish national identity. In particular, it identifies the long-held belief that Scotland was one of the few places to have successfully resisted Roman conquest. As well as looking at the importance of classical literature and authors such as Cicero and Livy in the development of Scottish scholarship, it also outlines eighteenth-century Scottish attitudes towards ancient Rome, its culture and its imperial ambitions, and explores the importance of the Grand Tour in the formation of early modern interpretations of the classical past.

This chapter starts with a very concise discussion of how the different approaches to classical literature debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be traced back to the ancient world and the Middle Ages. The rest of the chapter demonstrates how scholars in the early eighteenth century reflected on the work of their predecessors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based on their own scholarly concerns. The first example is Pieter Burman (1668–1741) and his Sylloge epistolarum (1724–7), the edition of unpublished writings by the French critic Henri Valois (1603–76; edition published in 1740), and the edition of George Buchanan (1506–82), published in 1725. In the Sylloge, for example, Burman focuses on letters that show how eminent scholars thought about the correct reading of classical texts, while a ‘popularizer’ like Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) is criticized. Valois’s work was used as a starting point to reflect on what Burman and his nephew Pieter Burman the Younger (1713–78) saw as the downfall of French textual criticism. Finally, Burman’s own interest in the stylistic and rhetorical aspects of texts also allowed him to avoid involvement in politically sensitive matters, as was the case for Buchanan’s views in contemporary Scotland. The final example discussed in this chapter is the prefatory material written by Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) for the edition of Erasmus’ Opera omnia (1703–6), in which Le Clerc dwells on the relationship between the study of ancient literature and other academic disciplines such as philosophy and theology.

Even after the destruction of the Jewish temple by the Romans in ad 70, the memory survived. The location on the east side of the Old City of Jerusalem was known to the Byzantines, to Islam, to the Crusaders, to Ayyubids, Mamluks, and Ottomans. It was not until the twenty-first century that this apparently solidly established identification was challenged. The initial attack came from Ernest L. Martin in a book provocatively entitled The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot. He argued, first, that the vast esplanade hitherto considered to be the site of the temple, now venerated by Muslims as the Haram esh-Sharif, was in fact the site of the Antonia fortress, and, second, that the temple had been built in the City of David on the Ophel Ridge over the spring of Gihon. These points were taken up and elaborated by George Wesley Buchanan in a series of articles. The two parts of the hypothesis are not of equal weight. No one has ever claimed to find physical evidence of a monumental building over the Gihon Spring. Much remains, however, of the great esplanade built by Herod. In consequence, the basis of the discussion is much broader because it has to incorporate tangible evidence. This chapter begins with the question of the Antonia, which is the main focus of Martin's book, and then deals with the arguments in favour of the Gihon temple put forward by Buchanan.

The constitutional crisis of 1639–41 was caused less by the removal of bishops from the church than by the prohibition on all kirkmen exercising civil powers. The result was acceptance of the extraordinary constitutional fiction that the bishops were a corruption added onto the ancient three Estates. This chapter explores the rival historical interpretations of the Scottish Reformation that emerged in the reign of James VI and I, and investigates why it was the Presbyterian version that won out after 1639. Examining contested histories of the Scottish constitution can also help us better understand the profound ambivalence about popular political engagement exhibited in Covenanter polemic. The conviction that sovereignty resided in ‘the people’, expressed most forcefully in Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex, sat uneasily with the realities of popular involvement in the dismantling of Charles I’s regime.

This chapter takes on the changes in semantics of the word “world.” In the 1550s, Scottish polymath George Buchanan composed the poem “In colonias brasilienes” as a means of attacking the Portuguese colonial enterprise in Brazil. His attacks through poetry often take a semantic and rhetorical approach. In them, he not only questions whether the empire is justified spiritually and politically, but also asks how their conquest affects his and his contemporaries’ understanding of the world. “World” in this sense, may differ from how we understand it today, and from how the ancients understood it during their time. The chapter explores the semantics of the “world”—such as what is the relation of the self to the world, or how the term world itself either suffices or fails to serve the desired meaning or effect.

The key agency of terrorism before the letter, apart from the implements and gestures of violence, is the communicative, symbolic power attributed to it. But the agency is therefore indeterminate. Many accounts of terrorism before the letter assume a closed semiotic circuit—but such a circuit is a fiction. This chapter focuses on the circuits of meaning in the stories of Mahomet and Irene, Amleth and the Danish people, and the murder of David Riccio, as told by George Buchanan. It then discusses the concepts of symbolic exchange, sacrifice, scapegoating, and several kinds of exchanges that can be made when a person is injured, captured, or killed in the interest of a political cause. It then discusses the notion of the ‘public sphere’ in early modernity, the system within which terrorism attempted to communicate, and concludes with an analysis of Book Five of The Fairie Queene.

This chapter provides a sociologist's perspective on the endless dialogue between the past and the present. The central theme is: getting history right or wrong takes second place to the power, the charge, of history. It is of interest that the great sixteenth-century Scottish historian and thinker George Buchanan believed that the purpose of history was ‘to restore us to our own ancestors and our own ancestors to us’, but, though he lived in a post-classical era, he was spared the doubts of his post-modern descendants.

From the 1560s, tensions between Protestant and Catholics escalated and this was accompanied by a wave of writing on political and religious ideas, especially in France and the Netherlands. There was a renewed interest in the nature and origins of authority within the political sphere, particularly the importance of the ‘people’ and the ways in which their will could be both represented and controlled. This chapter considers some of the key texts of resistance theory written in the 1560s and 1570s, including Francogallia and the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos in France, and George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos in Scotland. Discussions of liberty and privileges in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt are also considered; here historically based arguments began to be supplemented by appeals to wider principles of morality and natural law. The election of Henry of Valois to the Polish throne provides one example of elective monarchy in practice. This chapter discusses the role of religion and of legal arguments in the development of resistance theories. It also highlights some of the practical and conceptual difficulties in appealing to popular sovereignty, especially in a period of deep confessional divisions, and shows how the authority of magistrates could be understood in different ways.

Because form and meaning are inseparable in poetry, interpreters of First Isaiah should attend to matters of poetic style in these texts. Commentaries on Isaiah by Robert Lowth (1778) and George Buchanan Gray (1912), who also wrote treatises on Biblical Hebrew poetry, were characterized by careful literary sensitivity, but more recent interpretations have been less consistent in this regard. Despite a growing body of literature discussing particular poetic features or texts in Isaiah—much of which emphasizes the final form of the biblical book—the need remains for a thorough treatment of the poetry of First Isaiah. Because the study of ancient poetry necessarily raises historical questions, this volume will consider the likely historical contexts of poems in Isaiah and their probable reception by their original audience.

This chapter questions why John Dennis, the first literary critic to associate Milton with the poetic sublime, refuses to apply this term to Samson Agonistes or even publicly to discuss the drama. This omission is particularly problematic given that Dennis regards Milton’s sublimity as the product of his religious passion and defends the portrayal of tragic heroes who share much the same flaws as his Samson. The answer to the problem explored here is that while Dennis generally shared Milton’s politics, after the Restoration the political resistance theory implicit in his drama is far more radical than John Locke’s theory in the Second Treatise on Government, which Dennis explicitly approved. The post-Restoration implications of these differences are thoroughly discussed, along with the probable influence of George Buchanan’s Jephtes (1554) on Samson Agonistes.