Classical Gains: How world languages enriched the Scottish cultural landscape

Alan Riach: Alexander, we were talking last week about Scotland’s Latin writers but behind or alongside them there’s the Greek influence too, isn’t there?

Alexander Broadie: Around about 1510, Jerome Aleandro came to Paris offering to teach Greek. At first the authorities were reluctant because they understood that if the students studied Greek they might be able to study the New Testament in the original, and then wonder about the accuracy of the Latin version in daily use. Anyhow, Aleandro did teach Greek there and among his students were the Scots John Mair and David Cranston, priest of the Glasgow diocese.

Alan: So the authorities wanted to limit access to knowledge, and the Scots were right there at the start, wanting to learn as much as they could.

Alexander: Indeed. Hand-in-hand with the rise of the movement that would lead to the Reformation was the learning not only of Latin but also of Greek, and, it should be added, of Hebrew.

Alan: Different languages interpret the world in different ways. And approaching meanings and values through these different languages exposes doctrines to different interpretations, different ways of interrogating logic. It’s a risky business.

Alexander: This is in keeping with the Humanist revolution beginning to take place more widely, alongside the rise of a middle class, and parents wanting their children educated in law, medicine and theology.

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Alan: You’re coming into a world characterised not only by demonstrative logic but by an inductive logic. It’s not just “a given reality” but an enquiry into “reality” and a discovery, finding out that maybe it isn’t what we had been told, it isn’t what we thought it was.

And then you might see that instead of believing that “the way things are is the way things have to be” suddenly it becomes possible to imagine – and actually to make – a change for the better. Dangerous insights.

Alexander: Galileo, for example, was using logic, scientific investigation, and logarithms. Logarithms were invented by John Napier of Merchiston, who published his findings in a book he wrote in Latin – surely a major contribution to the Scottish cultural canon! And these are as deeply embedded and vital a part of our literature and culture as are the contributions made in Gaelic, Scots and English.

Alan: What followed?

Alexander: In the 1550s and 1560s there was a new generation coming through. The Scots made a major contribution to the Humanist revolution. Around this time, John Rutherford, who signs himself Rethor Fortis (Strong Speaker), made commentaries on Aristotle whose language is very different from John Mair’s because the models that he – Rethor Fortis, or Rutherford – was using were from the golden age of Roman writing. Cicero was the major figure. In the 1560s there was a plague in Bordeaux, where the family of Pierre Montaigne was based. Montaigne had to escape, and he and his children went to their house on the banks of the Dordogne. He brought in a Scottish tutor, Rutherford himself. Montaigne chose this man above Florentius Volusenus because the Scots were respected above all for their intellectual probity.

Another one was Florene Wilson. He was an important contributor to the Humanist revolution; he studied classical Greek in Lyon, with a group of Humanists living more or less as a commune. It was their rule that the only language they’d speak at mealtimes, when they were all together, was Greek.

Alan: I guess they must have believed you couldn’t understand the thinking of the Greek authors unless you could get inside the language itself, and the only way to do that was to get the language into yourself, literally, bring it into your body, and enunciate it in conversation with others.

Alexander: Wilson’s great book was On Tranquillity of Mind, the exposition of a Christian stoicism. By contrast, at the start of the 13th century, the Scottish polymath Michael Scott had a reputation as a wizard. Well, he was a linguistic wizard, at least.

He certainly had a curious career. In his last years, he was the official astrologer at the court of Frederick the Second of Sicily. Previously he had been a translator, one whose work would be influential for centuries. The central figure for him was Aristotle.

Alan: So how did Aristotle, this pagan Greek, become central to Latin Christianity?

Alexander: The Arabs translated him first, into Arabic. And the great contribution Michael Scott made was to translate the Arabic texts of Aristotle into Latin. He brought Aristotle’s ideas into the Christian world in a major way. The great Arabian commentators wrote on these texts. Imagine a square text in the middle of the page with commentary all around it on all sides.

Along comes Averroes who writes the commentary not just on Aristotle but also on the Arabic commentaries, and then along comes Michael Scott, who translates the Arabic version of Aristotle, the commentaries, and the commentaries on the commentaries.

Alan: Michael Scott is one of those shadowy figures in Scottish cultural history and literature whose significance is often obscured. He figures in James Hogg’s astonishing compendium of weird delights, the novel The Three Perils of Man: War, Women and Witchcraft (1822).

He’s the wizard who magically splits the Eildon Hills from one into three. And in the 14th century, Dante meets him in Hell, in the Inferno. His tomb is in Melrose Abbey. But if we go through Michael Scott to Latin and Greek via Arabic, are you suggesting that it’s impossible to really understand Aristotle without seeing him through Muslim eyes?

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Alexander: Now, I don’t want to appropriate Aristotle into the Scottish literary canon but I do want to emphasise that we should be sensitive to the multiple layers of perspective and interpretation that are involved here, and the vital role of the Scots in this process.

Alan: It comes forward from there, doesn’t it?

Alexander: Yes. There was a wonderful flourishing of poetry in Jacobean Scotland, in the latter part of 16th century, and the first part of the 17th. Two people collaborated on collecting it all. John Scot of Scotstarvit and Arthur Johnstone published in Amsterdam in 1637 the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum, a huge book of more than 1200 pages, with at least 37 poets and hundreds of poems. Every word is in Latin.

Probably the world authorities on this poetry are Steven Reid and his colleague David McOmish. They’ve been working on a new edition for publication. This is for the here and now and it is as much a part of the Scottish canon as the work of Robert Burns.

Alan: And the result of their research is now published, available online: Bridging the Continental Divide: Neo-Latin and its cultural role in Jacobean Scotland, as seen in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637), available at www.dps.gla.ac.uk. What a breakthrough! The story is rich, complex, wonderful and very deep. If you were a lawyer, Alexander, at this point I think you could say, “I rest my case.”

Thank you.