Astonishingly, Ernest Holloway has written the first full biography of Andrew Melville in nearly two centuries. That is, the first since Thomas McCrie's two-volume Life of Andrew Melville published in 1819. Drawing on the recent work of Steven Reid, James Doelman, Roger Mason, Paul McGinnis and others, Holloway seeks to anchor Melville within the rich humanist culture of later sixteenth-century France and Francophone Switzerland. In so doing he intends to modify and widen the received image of Melville as a narrowly clerical individual of mainly Scottish significance. Holloway's Melville emerges initially and perhaps centrally as a scholarly and literary figure, immersed in linguistics, textual analysis, neo-Latin poetry, and studia humanitatis generally. Given these intellectual commitments, Melville found himself most comfortable within a university environment and became notable as an educational reformer. Only through these contexts, Holloway argues, can we appreciate Melville, ‘the ecclesiastical statesman’.

In broad terms Holloway's claims are unassailable. Yet the book remains seriously flawed and quite unsatisfactory nevertheless. Holloway barely goes beyond the primary sources available to McCrie. No mention is made at all of Melville's longest surviving poem, his verse rendering of the chorography in George Buchanan's Rerum scoticarum historia. Melville's manuscript ‘Florentum archiepiscopale’ is listed in the bibliography but never discussed. All too often other writings – his poem to Henry Scrimgeour, his epigram for Cornelius Bertram's Hebrew and Aramaic grammar, his 1584 Apology for going into exile, his Prosopopeia apologetica (a defence of himself when in imprisoned in the Tower), and much more – are simply noted with neither analysis nor translation. Instead of focusing on what Melville actually said, Holloway presents potted biographies of people whom Melville encountered without making any serious connections between their ideas and his.

More troubling still is Holloway's treatment of major intellectual themes within Melville's thought. Following Reid, Holloway notes Melville's ambivalent regard for the logic and educational methods of Peter Ramus. Yet what Ramism actually is, what its implications might be, or how all of this featured in Melville's educational programme just never surface. Readers who want to know about these matters, and truly understand Melville, will need to turn to Reid's Humanism and Calvinism: Andrew Melville and the universities of Scotland, 1560–1626 or to Reid and E. A. Wilson's Ramus, pedagogy and the liberal arts. Holloway summarises the translations of Melville's poems appended to McGinnis and A. H. Williamson's George Buchanan: the political poetry, and still more closely replicates the commentary on them and on their eschatological meanings. Yet Melville's apocalyptic vision, which shaped his outlook and so much of his writing, does not emerge. At one point Holloway tosses off in passing that Melville embraced a ‘defiant Neo-Stoicism’ (p. 262). What that might mean never becomes apparent. At several points we are told that Melville never considered Neo-Platonist thought (pp. 23, 99, 301). Yet a close reading of Melville's lengthy poem ‘Antichristus’ (which Holloway declines to mention, much less discuss) strongly suggests that Platonism did inform his outlook. Further, it does not inspire confidence when Holloway refers to the French courts, the parlements, as ‘Parliament’ (pp. 273, 282, 332).

Holloway rightly observes a civic dimension to the training of ministers who would not only be of service to the Church but also ‘an ornament to the commonwealth’ (et reipublice ornamento, p. 180). Yet Holloway misses the engaged and controversial nature of virtually everything that Melville ever wrote. Melville's poems were not ‘therapeutic’ (pp. 233, 258, 297 and passim) but combative. Melville's learning was in no way incidental but fully integral to the confessional, ecclessiological and political struggles of the age. To separate them out is to miss the man and his moment.

Alan MacDonald's revisionist assessment of Melville portrays the reformer as a relatively marginal figure rather than the key leader of any Melvillian movement. Inevitably, Holloway dissents. By 1590 Patrick Adamson spoke of a ‘Melvillian faction’ while Melville had become emblematic of militant Presbyterianism earlier still. Still, Melville's actual role in Church and University, Holloway concedes, proved more collaborative than commanding. He was less a dominant force than one (loud) voice among many. Yet MacDonald's assessment involves rather more. He argues persuasively that the Presbyterian ‘two jurisdictions’ between Church and civil authority was by no means an a priori assumption, but instead arose in the 1590s from confrontation, break-down and setback. It is precisely such political and ideological dimensions, so crucial to Melville's world, that this book signally fails to address.

Andrew Melville and humanism in Renaissance Scotland incorporates much recent scholarship, but lacks close analyses of the primary sources and the basic texts. In the end it becomes an open question just how much further this biography has gone beyond that of the Revd Thomas McCrie.