ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I characterized our current academic orthodoxy as an extreme version of nominalism, a doctrine expounded in the later Middle Ages. To late medieval nominalism I now turn at length, and in so doing I look to John Mair (also known by his Latinized surname Major) and the chronicle he published in 1521. Although he wrote early in the century and in scholastic Latin, Mair is still a unifying figure among the sixteenth-century Scottish chroniclers, a colleague of Hector Boece at Paris, a teacher of George Buchanan and (probably but not surely) John Knox as well. Mair has been duly praised by modern scholars for his bold skepticism of the foundation legends promoted as fact by English and Scottish chroniclers, a quality egregiously lacking in the chronicles of Boece and Buchanan, whose humanism did not, in this matter, cure their credulity.1 Though himself no humanist debunker of texts, Mair was armed with a different skepticism, that of the scholastic logician. There never was, of course, one “last of the schoolmen,” but Mair, as an eminent exponent of scholastic learning at the University of Paris during the rise of humanism and reformed theology, fits the type as well as anyone else.2 Born in the hamlet of Gleghornie in 1467, Mair had
1 In his “Life of the Author,” prefixed as pages xxix-cxv to the Scottish History Society translation of Mair’s chronicle, Aeneas J. G. Mackay says that Mair “shows a wonderfully sound historical instinct, distinguishing truth from the fable with which the Scottish annals were then encrusted,” and that “in this respect he is far superior to his contemporary Boece, and even to Buchanan, who copied Boece in the earlier part of Scottish history” (lxxxiv), judgments echoed by nearly all who have written about Mair since. Hereafter I cite this biographical essay by the name Mackay; it appears in John Mair (Major), A History of Greater Britain as Well England as Scotland, ed. and trans. Archibald Constable (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1892). For the political uses of English and Scottish foundation myths, as reflected in the works of Mair, Boece, and Buchanan, see Roger A. Mason, “Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in SixteenthCentury Britain,” in Scotland and England, 1286-1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 60-84, and the same author’s Kingship and the Commonweal (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998), 42-6, 95, 183, 193.
