Bridging the Continental divide: neo-Latin and its cultural role in Jacobean Scotland, as seen in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637)

Alexander Arbuthnot (1538-1583) was a student and then regent at St Andrews between c.1552 and 1558, and was found competent to serve as a protestant minister in St Andrews by the general assembly in December 1560. Between 1561 and 1566 he studied civil law at Bourges, and on his return, after a brief spell as minister of Logie Buchan in Aberdeenshire, was appointed as the first protestant principal of King's College Aberdeen in 1569 (following a purge of the Catholic staff by the regent Moray). Melville and Arbuthnot were ideologically very closely matched - both men opposed episcopal hierarchy, and both were interested in implementing a full-scale protestant reform of the Scottish universities. With that latter aim in mind, the two agreed in 1575 to develop a shared programme of reform, which was implemented at Glasgow with the parliamentary-sanctioned 'Nova Erectio' of 1577. However, an attempt to implement a similar 'Nova Fundatio' at King's College was repeatedly hindered, first by the political upheaval of the Ruthven Raid and James' subsequent blocking of the reform in its immediate aftermath, and then by Arbuthnot's sudden and unexpected death. Calderwood noted (History, vol. 2, p. 319), that Arbuthnot was 'in all sciences expert; a good poet, mathematician, philosopher, theologue, lawyer, and in medicine skilful'. Where he got this latter training is unknown, but Melville makes clear reference to both his medical and his legal skills in this epitaph. See James Kirk, 'Arbuthnot, Alexander (1538-1583)', ODNB; Reid, Humanism and Calvinism, pp. 95-106. Metre: elegiac couplets.