This chapter reviews scholarship on the Scientific Revolution in Scotland. A long-ignored manuscript of astronomical, mathematical, and natural philosophical verse and prose commentary provides an invaluable opportunity to explore many of the aspects that have drawn the attention of revisionist studies. A preliminary evaluation of the manuscript’s form, content, and production-context provides the opportunity to gain a far more nuanced understanding of the progress of intellectual change during the long Scientific Revolution as literary, philosophical, and scientific dialectic forged new paths. The manuscript highlights that, contrary to the prevailing scholarly view, not only were the new methodological approaches and phenomenological theories of the Scientific Revolution being taught and debated in early modern Scotland; key educationalists within the realm from the time of Copernicus made significant contributions to scientific progress.

Edinburgh lawyer and jurist Thomas Craig was a prominent public figure in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jacobean Edinburgh. Our appreciation of Craig's cultural and intellectual legacy has usually been understood only through the prism of his well-known vocational activities in the law. Craig, however, was much more than a lawyer. He was part of a vibrant humanist culture in Edinburgh that played a significant part in wider European intellectual debates pushing the Scientific Revolution forward. Craig was an engaged and enthusiastic member of a circle of friends and family who were at the forefront of the sixteenth century's radical and transformative astronomical and mathematical debates. Evidence from a cross-section of Latin literary material reveals Craig's part in a remarkable intellectual awakening that took place in Humanist Edinburgh, and whose significance is only now beginning to be understood.

Adam King was born into a respectable family of advocates on the eve of the Scottish Reformation. He was a professor of mathematics and philosophy at the University of Paris for many years, who then returned to Scotland to become an advocate and commissary of Edinburgh. His family's adherence to the Catholic faith in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation was overt and vigorous, and led to significant disruption in their lives. This article charts the life and career of Adam through these turbulent times, from his battles with religious authorities to his emergence as a man with significant influence in post-reformation Scotland. It provides a preliminary map of his friends and acquaintances, and presents evidence that they reflect a strong literary and scientific culture in early modern Scotland, which transcended their religious affiliations and was addressing some of the most pressing questions raised by the Scientific Revolution.

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1 Written in early modern Latin (Neo-Latin), GIC is a hexameter poem of 204 lines, which forms part of a larger poetic cycle on the life of Christ that runs to 869 lines. 2 There is no evidence it was published in King's lifetime, and our earliest surviving copy of the poem is in a manuscript written at some point between 1617 and King's death in 1620. 3 GIC was, however, published in Amsterdam in 1637, fully 17 years after Adam King's death. 4 Since the time of its publication, it has received no scholarly comment, and this article represents the first considered treatment of the poem. 5 It is a devotional poem celebrating the birth of Christ. King wrote it during a time of significant cultural || 1 Durkan (2001) offered the first (albeit short) modern account of King's life. McOmish (2016) provided some additional biographical material. McOmish (2018) is a first detailed evaluation of King's scientific literature. For evidence of his contemporary vocational activities in Paris, cf. Du Boulay's Historia universitatis Parisiensis (1673, pp. 788-90). Poems written by King during his time in Paris survive in manuscript form in the University of Edinburgh library (DK.7.29). 2 The other two poems are entitled: Iesu Christi Passio and Iesu Christi Triumphus, Resurrectionem & Ascensionem complexus. All three poems are contained in the above manuscript at Edinburgh, from which the text of King's poem used in this article is drawn.3 The King MS is composed of two different manuscripts, which have latterly been bound together at some point in the 18th century. The first contains King's commentary and supplements to George Buchanan's De Sphaera (see note 13 below), which was used by Ruddiman (1725) in his edition of Buchanan, Opera Omnia. The text of Buchanan's poem used in this article is taken from this manuscript. The second manuscript contains King's body of occasional poems (Sylvae). GIC and the other Christ cycle poems are contained in the second manuscript at 1 r -10 r . All the Sylvae are in the same hand. The last dateable poem in them is King's Epibaterion ad Regem in Scotiam Redeuntem, which he composed to welcome King James back to Scotland in 1617-see Green (2016, p. 134) for the context. 4 GIC and the other poems on Christ's life were published after King's death in the large anthology of Scottish Latin poetry the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (henceforth DPS): Johnston (1637, vol. 2, pp. 201-23). 5 In 2013, an AHRC project to translate part of the DPS produced a provisional electronic edition of the poem with some critical comment: see http://www.dps.gla.ac.uk/delitiae/display/ ?pid=d2_KinA_001&aid=KinA. A revised edition of GIC and all of King's poetic corpus is in production.

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