The view that pre-Enlightenment Scotland was a kingdom defined by its poverty, feuding, and religious fanaticism is one perpetuated by popular history and mainstream media. While the current historiography on early modern Scotland challenges many of these stereotypes, the field of Scottish history is traditional and deeply conservative. What this means is that, while historians of other regions have expanded their inquiries into subjects other than political history, Reformation Studies, and witch hunts, historians of medieval and early-modern Scotland remain generally fixated in these three major areas of study, with very little deviation.

This is why, if you perform a search on Google, Google Scholar, the Bibliography of British and Irish History, JSTOR, or a number of other databases and search engines, you will find very little scholarship devoted to the intellectual culture of Scotland before the Scottish Enlightenment. Some literary historians have addressed Scottish Renaissance literature within its historical context, but by and large, Scottish historians have treated pre-Enlightenment Scotland as a cultural black hole. To some degree, this has been the consequence of traditional Whig perspectives on the history of Scotland. Deep-rooted, historical prejudices against Scotland and its people resulted in a "British" historiography that gave precedence to the history of England and the accomplishments of Englishmen. Scottish history became a footnote in British historiography, and if mentioned at all, the suggestion was always that whatever good history Scotland might possess was the consequence of its 1707 union with England. This included the Scottish Enlightenment.

This is not to say, however, that Scotland had no historians devoted to its own national narrative. In the wake of nineteenth-century Scottish nationalism, spurred forward by the works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, Scottish antiquaries began compiling and preserving as many papers and documents of personal and national interest as they could get their hands on. In the twentieth century, a new generation of scholars began writing Scottish history through a Scottish lens; however, they were still influenced by the wider trends of early twentieth-century history scholarship. Political history, economic history, religious history and Reformation Studies, witch hunts, and only recently, women's history, gender history, and more specialized histories of crime, deviance, society and culture, emerged in waves. Yet, the history of ideas in pre-Enlightenment Scotland remains woefully understudied. And this is why the idea that Scotland had no intellectual culture before the Enlightenment continues to persist.

This, however, could not be further from the truth.

By the sixteenth century, English literacy had become the default in Scotland following the late medieval shift from Latin and French to the vernacular in the writing of state documents. Latin was not abandoned, of course; it remained salient as a marker of education and persisted, therefore, as the language of formal instruction in most of the nation’s schools and universities while literacy in such languages as French and Italian might have been acquired as a means of polishing a properly Humanist education. Yet at the same time, Gaelic literacy lingered in the Highlands into the seventeenth century, its orthography surviving in the signatures of Highland chiefs and in the manuscript transcriptions of bardic poetry. Although measuring literacy in a precise and meaningful way has presented historians with many challenges, we know at least that literacy was high for elite populations given the survival of both abundant signature evidence and evidence pertaining to the collection and ownership of books.

The state of education in medieval and early-modern Scotland may have, in many ways, been more advanced than it would have been in other areas of Europe within the same period. John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, wrote favorably of Scottish curiosity and scholastic aptitude, contending that the Scottish "vset to delyte in the studie of philosophie: and now lykwyse to be curious anuich obserueris of al externe policie, for as doctrine and leirning now lang hes our myndes manured and vndirstandengs, elegancie hes policed our maners." This generous estimation of Scottish learning is supported by the fact that sixty per cent of the male nobility were able to sign their names by the year 1500 and access to and interest in the education of elites of both sexes seems only to have grown throughout the sixteenth century.

Foundations for rudimentary literacy may have been laid by the Act of 1496, which "ordanit throw all the realme that all barronis and frehaldaris that ar of substance put thair eldest sonnis and airis to the sculis fra thai be aucht or nyne yeiris of age, and till remane at the grammer sculis quhill thai be competentlie foundit and have perfite Latyne." Although what the actual impact of the act might have been is debatable, its enactment does at least suggest an active interest in establishing a culture of learning within Scotland by Scottish legislators. That said, this would have been education according to a Lowland model, with boys (and sometimes girls) sent away from home to attend a grammar school where they would have received a grounding in Latin, sometimes supplemented by an introduction to Greek and Hebrew, and after the Reformation, instruction in catechism, psalms, and other arts and sciences.

Education in the Highlands has always been more difficult to qualify, complicated as matters were by the existence of bardic schools and practices of fosterage, and the tendency, in the central and northern Highlands, at least, to send children to school in the Lowlands even before the Statutes of Iona and the 1616 School Establishment Act attempted to make it compulsory. Whereas the rudiments of learning in the Lowlands, before a child was sent away to attend a grammar school, might have been undertaken under the governance of a private tutor or through the tutelage of the parish or chapel minister, a traditional Gaelic education would have found a chief or laird’s children receiving instruction from the resident bard, not only in Gaelic and Latin, but also in the traditions of bardic poetry, and possibly, in Gaelic orthography.

As a result of this culture of literacy and learning, Scottish intellectuals routinely rose to places of prominence within the European intellectual community. From John Duns (Duns Scotus) in the thirteenth century to George Buchanan in the sixteenth century, Scots thinkers engaged readily with and exercised influence over the most important intellectual debates of their time. Duns Scotus is revered as one of the four most influential philosophers of the High Middle Ages, along with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and William of Ockham. John Mair was active in the conciliarist debate within the Catholic Church and advocated for conciliarist political theory within Scotland itself. John Knox, famous for his contributions to the gynecocracy debate raging through post-Reformation Europe, and George Buchanan, a Humanist scholar respected by Erasmus, used their education and experience to shape the political and religious communities of Scotland from 1560 onwards.