MAJOR (John), a scholastic divine and historian, was born at Haddington, in the province of East Lothian in Scotland. It appears from some passages in his writings, that he resided a while both at Oxford and Cambridge. He went to Paris in 1493, and studied in the college of St Barbe, under the famous John Boulae. Thence he removed to that of Montacute, where he began to study divinity under the celebrated Standouk. In the year 1498, he was entered of the college of Navarre. In 1505, he was created doctor divinity; returned to Scotland in 1519, and taught theology
theology during several years in the university of St Andrews. But at length, being disgusted with the quarrels of his countrymen, he went back to Paris, and resumed his lectures in the college of Montacute, where he had several pupils, who afterwards became men of great eminence. About the year 1530, he returned once more to Scotland, and was chosen professor of theology at St Andrew's, of which he afterwards became provost; and there died in 1547, aged 78. His logical treatises form one immense folio; his commentary on Aristotle's physics makes another; and his theological works amount to several volumes of the same size. The masses of crude and useless disquisition, were the admiration of his contemporaries. A work, less prized in his own age, was to make him known to posterity. His book De Gestis Scotorum, was first published at Paris by Badius Ascensius, in the year 1521. He rejects in it some of the fictions of former historians; and would have had greater merit if he had rejected more. He intermingles the history of England with that of Scotland; and has incurred the censure of some partial writers, for giving an authority to the authors of the former nation, which he refuses to those of his own. Bede, Caxton, and Froissard, were exceedingly useful to him. What does the greatest honour to this author is, the freedom with which he has censured the rapacity and indolence of ecclesiastics, and the strain of ridicule with which he treats the pope's supremacy. The style in which he wrote does not deserve commendation. Bishop Spotswood calls it Sorbonnic and barbarous.