George Buchanan

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Buchanan, George (1506-82). The most distinguished Scottish humanist of his era, Buchanan was educated at Paris, where he gained a reputation as a neo-Latin poet and dramatist. Deeply influenced by Erasmus, his anticlerical views led to frequent brushes with authority culminating in imprisonment by the Portuguese Inquisition. On his return to Scotland in 1561 he was associated both with the court of Mary Stuart and with the new protestant kirk. Following the queen's deposition in 1567, he emerged as the most influential of Mary's detractors, justifying resistance to tyranny in his elegant dialogue De jure regni apud Scotos (1579) and his monumental Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582).

Buchanan, George (1506-82), humanist, textual critic, poet, playwright, historian, and political theorist, was a Scotsman who taught for many years in Paris, Bordeaux, and Coimbra. A friend of the Pléiade, especially Du Bellay, he wrote in Latin, not French, yet his poems and plays helped to shape vernacular writing. From the 1530s onwards he wrote witty, elegant satires and erotic and scientific poems, but did not publish them until he was 60. His plays were performed in Bordeaux in the 1540s, with his pupil Montaigne among the actors: translations of Euripides' Medea (1544) and Alcestis (1556), and two original works, Jephthes (1554) and Baptistes (1577). Buchanan was the first to write classical tragedy in France, adapting Euripides and Seneca to biblical subjects, and following Aristotle's principles. After condemnation and imprisonment by the Portuguese Inquisition for his Protestant sympathies, during which time he worked on his metrical paraphrases of the Psalms, he returned to Paris, and then Scotland (1561), where he became tutor to the young James VI (later James I of England). He wrote there De iure regni apud Scotos (1579), discussing royal authority and tyrannicide and attacking Mary Queen of Scots, and his subjective and controversial Rerum scoticarum historia (1582).

— Peter Sharratt

Buchanan, George (1904-1989), novelist and poet. Born in Kilwaughter, Co. Antrim, and educated at Campbell College, Belfast, he became a journalist. In the Second World War he served in the RAF. His first novel, A London Story (1935), compares the careers of two brothers. Rose Forbes (1937) and The Soldier and the Girl (1940) are studies of Irish women seeking fulfilment. The Green Seacoast (1959), an autobiographical work, covers the period of the Easter Rising. In collections such as Conversation with Strangers (1959) and Inside Traffic (1976), his poetry deals with urban experience. The Politics of Culture (1977) is one of several essay collections.