ABSTRACT
Education was the cornerstone of any Protestant society. This was a fact recognised by Luther in his earliest writings, by Phillip Melanchthon in his wide-ranging work as an educational reformer, and by Calvin in his foundation of the Genevan Academy.1 It was also recognised by the earliest Scottish reformers in their blueprint for the Scottish Kirk, the First Book of Discipline. Noting that there should be a school in every parish and that education would inculcate reformed beliefs in children (and by extension in their families), one of the largest sections in the First Book was an extensive overhaul of the three Scottish Catholic universities – St Andrews, Glasgow, and King’s College Aberdeen – accompanied by an urgent plea that this should be a priority for the Kirk.2 Yet while the ideal of creating a Protestant system of higher education in Scotland, one that would produce ‘godly’ and civic-minded citizens and ministers well versed in reformed doctrine, was inherent from the onset of the reformation in 1559-60, this was not fully realised until the end of the reign of James VI and I. Moreover, while two new and wholly Protestant foundations were established in Edinburgh in 1583 and at Marischal College in New Aberdeen in 1593, the ‘ancient’ universities underwent a rather circuitous process of casting down their medieval and Papally-sanctioned constitutions in favour of radical new Protestant ones, only to have all their original foundations (excluding that at Glasgow) restored by 1621, albeit modified to omit any overtly Catholic teaching. At the heart of this transformational process was Andrew Melville, and although the Protestant universities that emerged in Scotland in the early seventeenth century did owe something to him intellectually, they were in many ways completely different to the institutions he had first envisaged when he began the process of reform at Glasgow in 1574. His role in producing a network of Protestant seminaries from the remains of a very Catholic system of higher education, and the
effect this process had on intellectual life in the Scottish universities, is the subject of what follows.
