Maior [Mair, Major], John

(c.1467Ð1550), historian, philosopher, and theologian

by Alexander Broadie

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Mair [Major], John (c.1467-1550), historian, philosopher, and theologian, was born into a farming family in the village of Gleghornie near Haddington, south-east of Edinburgh. He attended the grammar school at Haddington and went on, though not perhaps immediately, to university. Although it has been supposed that Mair was a student at St Andrews University, a passage in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (In primum sententiarum, fol. 34r) makes it clear that as late as 1510 he had not been in that city. So far as is known his first university, exceptionally for a Scot, was Cambridge, where he spent a year, about 1491-2, at Godshouse, a college in the parish of St Andrew--perhaps the reason, a sentimental one, why he chose it.

Mair next moved to Paris, to the Collège de Ste Barbe. He received his master's degree in 1494 and the following year incepted as regent in arts, at the same time beginning his studies in theology under Jan Standonck at the Collège de Montaigu. With his colleague Noel Beda he took charge of the college in 1499, on Standonck's banishment from Paris, though about that time Mair also became attached to the Collège de Navarre.

In 1506, while still at Navarre, Mair took his doctorate in theology; he then began to teach theology at the Collège de Sorbonne, the pre-eminent college for theology in Paris and one of the great centres in Europe in that field. The membership, which consisted solely of doctors of theology of Paris, was a highly conservative body: as late as August 1523, after discussing the translations of sacred texts, it passed judgment that such translations from Greek into Latin, or from Latin into French, should be entirely suppressed and not tolerated. Throughout his life Mair remained a conservative on doctrinal matters, despite his periodic severe criticism of the behaviour of the church and of churchmen.

Mair was not wholly opposed to the encroachment of Renaissance humanism. When, against a background of official criticism, the Italian scholar Girolamo Aleandro introduced the teaching of Greek to Paris, Mair was one of his pupils. Aleandro wrote: 'There are many Scottish scholars to be found in France who are earnest students in various of the sciences and some were my most faithful hearers--John Mair, the Scot, doctor of theology and David Cranston, my illustrious friends' (Renaudet, 614 n.).

Few writers of his day were more prolific than Mair. He began in 1499 with a work on exponible terms such as only, except, and in so far as, expressions which contribute in interesting logical ways to the validity or otherwise of syllogisms. Thereafter he contributed to a wide range of fields: ethics, metaphysics, theology, biblical commentary, history, and above all logic, at which he was pre-eminent. As regards ethics, for instance, Mair was the first writer to see the need to place discussions of the appropriate treatment of the American Indians within a moral theological framework, and he went on to provide such a framework in his own In secundum sententiarum (1510). His great intellectual drive is demonstrated by the fact that, despite recurrent bouts of illness, he had within twenty years of the start of the series already completed at least forty-six books.

Mair left Paris in 1518 at the height of his reputation--a reputation based on three things. The first was the quality of his writings, many of which ran to several editions and became textbooks for a large number of students in Paris and across Europe. The second reason was the quality of his teaching. There are numerous indications of the respect which his teaching inspired. Juan Gomez, writing to Jerome de Canbanyelle, the Spanish king's envoy in France, said:

I am following the theology course of John Mair with great interest as he is a deeply knowledgeable man whose virtue is as great as his faith ... May the eternal king deign to grant him long life that he may for long years be useful to our alma mater, the University of Paris. (Lax, dedication)
The third reason for his reputation was his high-profile leadership of a team of scholars, in most cases former pupils of his, the majority from Scotland or Spain, including, among the Scots, David Cranston (d. 1512), George Lokert (c.1485-1547), Robert Galbraith (c.1483-1544), William Manderston (c.1485-1552), and Gilbert Crab (c.1482-1522); and, among the Spaniards, Juan de Celaya (c.1490-1558), Antonio Coronel (d. c.1521), Fernando de Enzinas (d. 1523), and Gaspar Lax (1487-1560).

Mair returned to Scotland to become principal of the University of Glasgow, a post he occupied for five years. He was also appointed vicar of Dunlop, in Ayrshire, and a canon of the Chapel Royal in Stirling. During this period he wrote not only his History, but also a set of questions on metaphysics, and about this time he also began work on his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. His commentary on the four gospels must also have been in incubation at that time.

Mair is perhaps best-known today for his History of Greater Britain, England and Scotland (Historia majoris Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae--which may also be translated A History of Mair's Britain), published in 1521. It is possible that he wrote the book with the intention (among others) of promoting the idea of a union of the two countries; and the dedicatee, James V, son of James IV and grandson of Henry VII, was an appropriate symbol of the close relations between the two countries. But the reason Mair gave for writing the book was that 'you may learn not only the thing that was done but also how it ought to have been done'. He adds that the first law of the historian is to tell the truth and that it is 'of more moment to understand aright, and clearly to lay down the truth on any matter, than to use elegant and highly coloured language' (Mair, History, cxxxiii). Having told the truth, he had a good deal to say about what ought to have been done or ought not. For example, he criticized David I of Scotland for endowing religious foundations with great wealth in the early twelfth century, arguing that such endowments eventually caused great damage to the church. Similarly, in a discussion of the excommunication in 1217 of the Scottish king Alexander II, Mair writes:

If it [an excommunication] is unjust to the degree of being null, it is in no way to be dreaded ... unjust excommunication is no more excommunication than a corpse is a man ... Whence it comes that we reckon a vast number of excommunicated persons who are in a state of grace. (Mair, History, 172-3)
In June 1523 Mair left Glasgow for the University of St Andrews, where he was incorporated on the same day as Patrick Hamilton, who had studied under Mair's colleague Manderston at Paris, and who was, five years later, burned before the bishop's palace in St Andrews, so becoming the first martyr of the Scottish Reformation. Mair made it clear that he was utterly opposed to Hamilton's heretical views. His attitude emerges in the dedicatory epistle of his commentary on the gospel of St Matthew, published in 1529 shortly after Hamilton's martyrdom. The dedication is to Mair's friend Archbishop James Beaton of St Andrews, and congratulates Beaton for 'removing, not without the ill-will of many, a noble but unhappy follower of the Lutheran heresy'.

Apart from Hamilton, a strong reminder for Mair of his Paris days was the presence in St Andrews of his own former pupil George Lokert, who a year earlier had been elected rector of St Andrews University. During the years 1523-5 Mair was assessor to the dean of the arts faculty and in this capacity served on a committee, on which Lokert also sat, which revised extensively, and along Parisian lines, the St Andrews forms of examination. As well as carrying out administrative duties during this period, Mair also gave courses of lectures in both arts and theology.

By 1526 Mair had returned to Paris, where he resumed his teaching career. During this period students working in his field, who may therefore be assumed to have heard him lecture, included John Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, François Rabelais, and George Buchanan. Mair continued to write, and in 1529 published his commentary on the four gospels, In quatuor evangelia expositiones, in which, as in his History, he is frequently judgemental about matters of current concern. For instance, he attacks plural holdings, commendations, absenteeism, the extensive neglect of ordinary pastoral duties, and the personal laxness of many clergymen. In reference to such cases of ecclesiastical corruption, he says: 'Those deceive themselves who think that the approval of even the supreme pontiff can reconcile such things to the dictates of conscience' (Mair, Commentary on Matthew, fol. 80). But this criticism, as also his criticism of 'the grasping abbots who make things hard for the husbandmen' (Commentary on Matthew, fol. 74v), went hand in hand with Mair's unwavering support on doctrinal matters.

After the commentary on the gospels Mair produced one more book, his commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (1530). It was dedicated to another friend, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Mair gives three reasons for the dedication. The first, harking back to a theme of his History, was a shared love of 'our common country', for Scotland and England are 'enclosed in one Britain'. The second reason was their common religion and field of study, and the third was his desire to express his gratitude for the frequent hospitality he had enjoyed in England. It is in this dedicatory note that we learn of the year Mair spent at Godshouse in Cambridge, and we also learn here of Wolsey's offer to Mair of a teaching post in Christ Church, Oxford, the college that Wolsey had just founded. Indication of the genuineness of Mair's feelings for Wolsey is found in the fact that the dedication was written after Wolsey had fallen from grace and had been stripped of his honours.

A year after the publication of the commentary on the Ethics, Mair returned to Scotland, to St Andrews, where he remained until his death. A major source of information, the lengthy, chatty, often gossipy, introductory letters to his books dry up following that last publication, and his motives for returning to Scotland are unknown. Perhaps he was simply homesick. Years earlier in the dedication in his commentary on the fourth book of the Sentences he had written: 'Our native soil attracts us with a secret and inexpressible sweetness and does not permit us to forget it'.

Mair held two major appointments after his return to St Andrews. From 1534 he was provost of St Salvator's College, and he was also dean of the faculty of theology. Among the friends with whom he was reunited on his return was William Manderston, who had been elected rector of the university in 1530. During this lengthy final period of his life he tutored John Knox, who probably matriculated in St Andrews in 1529. In a famous phrase Knox refers to Mair as a man 'whose word was then held as an oracle on matters of religion' (History of the Reformation, 1.15). Knox was a leading instigator of the new order, whereas his teacher Mair was to the end a schoolman of the middle ages. Mair's scholasticism is nowhere revealed more clearly than in his summation of Aristotle at the start of his commentary on the Ethics: 'In almost all opinions he agrees with the catholic and truest Christian faith in all its integrity ... in so great and manifold a work [the Ethics] if it be read as we explain it, you meet scarcely a single opinion unworthy of a Christian gentleman'. By the time Mair died, in 1550, just ten years before the Reformation in Scotland, he must have known that the world to which he had dedicated his life was gone for ever.

Alexander Broadie

Sources  
A. Broadie, The circle of John Mair (1985)
A. Broadie, The shadow of Scotus (1995)
J. K. Farge, Biographical register of Paris doctors of theology, 1500-1536 (1980)
A. Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d'Italie, 1494-1517, 2nd edn (Paris, 1953)
J. Durkan, 'The school of John Major: bibliography', Innes Review, 1 (1950), 140-57
J. Mair, Ethica Aristotelis peripateticorum principis cum Johannis Maioris theologi Parisiensis commentariis (1530)
J. Mair, In primum sententiarum (1510)
I. Major [J. Mair], Quartus sententiarum (Paris, 1509)
A history of greater Britain ... by John Major, ed. and trans. A. Constable, Scottish History Society, 10 (1892)
J. Mair, In quatuor evangelia expositiones (1529)
G. Lax, De oppositionibus (1512)
John Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland, ed. W. C. Dickinson, 1 (1949), 15
J. Mair, In secundum sententiarum (1510)
Durkan and Kirk, The University of Glasgow, 1451-1577, 155


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