This article takes as its focus a set of Latin verses (copied in a late sixteenth‐ or early seventeenth‐century Scots hand) on fol. 1v of the so‐called Ruthven manuscript (Edinburgh, University Library, MS Dc.1.43) of Gavin Douglas's Eneados. These were not recorded in the seminal Scottish Text Society edition of the poem by Coldwell and have not, to the best of my knowledge, been previously discussed elsewhere. They can, however, now be identified as extracts from Books 3 (‘mane accinge’) and 2 (‘humiles nobilitat virtus’ and ‘te cura nunc’) of Julius Caesar Scaliger's Epidorpides (first published posthumously in 1573 in Geneva as De sapientia et beatitudine libri octo, quos Epidorpides inscripsit and again in 1574 as part of Poemata in duos partes divisa (Heidelberg)). In this article, I transcribe and identify the verses, document those connections between the elder and younger Scaliger and three Scottish writers (Buchanan, Melville and Rollock) that might account for the appearance of the verses in the Ruthven manuscript, and consider what correspondences one might draw between the three extracts from Scaliger's Epidorpides on fol. 1v of the Ruthven manuscript and the subsequent translation of Virgil's Aeneid by Gavin Douglas.

This chapter begins by introducing the most significant features of Scottish literary manuscript miscellanies, such as: their relatively late date, in comparison with surviving miscellanies from elsewhere in the British Isles; their copying by scribes who also functioned as notary publics, writers to the signet, and merchants; their links to some of Scotland’s most prominent book-owning families; and their inclusion of material derived from print and from south of the border. The remainder of the chapter offers a necessarily brief case study of one particular Older Scots literary manuscript miscellany (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.5) in which the Older Scots romance, Lancelot of the Laik, is placed alongside a selection of Scottish courtesy texts and legal material, a series of English and Scottish prophecies, several acts of the Scottish parliament, an English translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie, and the only surviving manuscript copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia.

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The Older Scots romance Clariodus survives uniquely in a manuscript written in the second half of the sixteenth century (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS 19.2.5). The romance itself was composed in the first half of the sixteenth century, most probably during the reign of King James V of Scotland. It is a remarkably close translation into decasyllabic couplets of the French prose romance, Cleriadus et Meliadice, estimated to have been composed between 1440 and 1444. Recent years have seen an increasing scholarly interest in the French Cleriadus, particularly concerning its focus on kingship, moral conduct and the presentation of Clariodus' rise to power. By contrast, the Scottish romance has received regrettably little attention. This essay focuses on the poem's authorship and sources. It interrogates a passage unique to the Scots translation in which Clariodus' unknown author claims to have used two sources-the original French Cleriadus and a previous prose translation, commonly assumed to be in English. The plausibility of this assertion is tested via an examination of the fifteenth-century manuscripts and early reception of the original French romance at the court of Queen Marie d'Anjou. The predominantly female readers of Cleriadus are shown to provide both a 'Scottish link' which anticipates the sixteenth-century Scots translation and an 'English link' which provides a plausible context for an English prose translation.

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