Andrew Melville is mainly remembered this day as a defiant chief of radical Protestantism in Scotland, John Knox’s inheritor and successor, the architect of a particular Scottish Presbyterian kirk and a visionary reformer of the Scottish collage procedure. whereas this view of Melville’s contribution to the shaping of Protestant Scotland has been criticised and revised in contemporary scholarship, his broader contribution to the improvement of the neo-Latin tradition of early sleek Britain hasn't ever been given the eye it merits. but, as this assortment exhibits, Melville was once even more than just a spiritual reformer: he used to be an influential member of a pan-European humanist community that valued classical studying up to Calvinist theology.

Neglect of this serious point of Melville’s highbrow outlook stems from the truth that just about all his surviving writings are in Latin - and masses of it in verse. Melville didn't pen any significant prose treatise on theology, ecclesiology or political conception. His poetry, even though, finds his perspectives on some of these themes and gives new insights into his lifestyles and occasions. the most issues of this quantity, for that reason, are to supply the 1st complete directory of the variety of poetry and prose attributed to Melville and to start the method of elucidating those texts and the contexts during which they have been written. whereas the quantity contributes to an on-going procedure that has obvious Melville’s position as an ecclesiastical baby-kisser and academic reformer challenged and reduced, it additionally seeks to redress the stability through establishing up different dimensions of Melville’s profession and highbrow existence and laying off new mild at the broader cultural context of Jacobean Scotland and Britain.