ABSTRACT
Andrew Melville (1545-1622) has often been likened to a second father of Scottish university education. It was following his return to Scotland in 1574 that the universities collectively gained ‘a new lease of life’ with a programme of studies in keeping with the latest educational provision on the Continent.1 However, the so-called ‘Melvillian’ reform programme faced massive resistance in Scotland, both as it was directly implemented at Glasgow and St Andrews between 1574 and 1580, and indirectly in the influence it had on teaching elsewhere. What were the key tenets of this reform programme, and why did it cause so much controversy? At its core, the ‘Melvillian’ reform programme comprised a humanist refocusing on Aristotle in the original Greek instead of in Latin translation, alongside a raft of new humanist subjects such as history and sacred chronology; a thorough grounding in scriptural study and exegesis, including tuition in the full range of biblical languages; and the use of the works of the French educational reformer Petrus Ramus as a framework to teach these subjects, but particularly to teach the rudimentary elements of logic and philosophy. It is this last component that has been the most discussed, and least understood, part of Melville’s teaching programme, and in what follows we will try to delineate what Ramism actually was and why Melville found it so attractive.
