ABSTRACT
No two individuals more fu11y defined the values ofthe Scottish Renaissance than did George Buchanan (1506-1582) and Andrew Melville (1545-1622) . Both elaborated humanist traditions that had been prominent in Scottish inte11ectuallife since the 1520s. But both also inhabited (and worked to create) the revolutionary world ofthe British and French Reformations after 1560. In that highly volatile environment, where government authority was twice successfu11y overthrown, as in Scotland, or was radica11y contested, as in France, or was drastica11y de-stabilized, as in England, direct action became a11 but inescapable, and legitimacy needed to be imagined anew, indeed selfgenerated. In such a context, classical political thought, whetller articulated through the literature of antiquity or of the quattrocento, assumed an immediacy unimaginable earlier in the century. The ideal of the Aristotelian citizen, who at once mIed and was mIed by the res publica and who created himself as he created his political society, now acquired compelling cogency. Public life, as visualized by Niccolo Machiavelli no less than by Marcus Tullius Cicero and Titus Livy, penetrated the tissues of Scottish, French, and English political cultures as never before. What for many had previously been no more than abstracted ideals, moral exemplars, and even rhetorical postures, now became practical imperatives of the uhnost urgency.
