Andrew Melville and Humanism in Renaissance Scotland 1545-1622

”’This carefully researched book, with a great bibliography, draws its portrait with a finely pointed pencil allowing us to see past the legendary grandeur to appreciate a gifted professor who labored in study and lecture hall.’’
Joel R. Beeke, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, in: Sixteenth Century Journal,Vol. 43, No. 4, 2012, p. 1148.

“It is with a view to deconstructing the Melville myth and offering a more balanced and up-to-date appraisal of his career that Ernest R. Holloway III has written what amounts to the first detailed intellectual biography of the man. . . [the] account is clear and effective, providing a much-needed corrective to McCrie, while also offering a more considered context for interpreting the memoirs of James Melville, Andrew’s nephew―the most important single source not only for Melville’s biography but also for subsequent Presbyterian mythologising. Holloway’s Melville is altogether more complex and interesting than his hagiographers have allowed. . . [the work] is especially useful in reconstructing the intellectual networks that Melville’s peripatetic education enabled him to establish and that plugged him into various strands of classical and legal, as well as Christian, humanism. . . Holloway has written a substantial and useful biography of Melville. . . .”
Roger A. Mason, University of St. Andrews, in English Historical Review, Vol. 130, Issue 543, 2015, p. 444.

“Ernest R. Holloway III has written the modern study of Melville, Andrew Melville and Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, 1545-1622. . . . The book is especially valuable as a tour through certain aspects of the Northern Renaissance. . . . We are not likely to learn much more about Andrew Melville than what Holloway has provided . . . .”
David G. Mullan, in H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. February, 2013.