Not just a lawyer: Thomas Craig and humanist Edinburgh

Abstract

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.