Michael Scot was a legendary scholar of the Middle Ages. He was born in 1175 in the border regions of Scotland and northern England. He was an advisor court astrologer to Emperor Frederick II. Scot studied in Oxford and Paris. He was a theologian and appears to have been ordained by Pope Honorius III. He knew many languages and translated important texts from Greek and Arabic, including Aristotle. It was a contemporary of Fibonacci and it is possible he influenced the presentation of his famous Fibonnaci sequence. Noted during for his scholarship in his lifetime, Scot quickly became a legend in the years following his death c. 1232. He gained posthumous fame variously viewed as an alchemist, occultist, sorcerer, and warlock. He is the only Scot to appear in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Originally published in 1897, Brown’s work remains an important full-length enquiry into Scot’s life and legend.