Michael Scot Among the Wizards: Boccaccio, Dante's Commentators, and the Lay of the Last Minstrel

Michael Scot carries a checked edge to Merlin because British legend eventually filed both men under the same heading, a great wizard of the past whose reputation could be extended by whichever storyteller needed one. Giovanni Boccaccio, writing the Decameron within a generation of Scot's death, already assumed his readers would recognize the name, placing a fictional necromancer in Bologna and remarking that Michael Scot had lived there too, evidence that his reputation as a magician was current in Italy within decades of his death and not only a later medieval accretion. Dante had already sent him to the eighth circle of the Inferno among the false prophets and diviners, and J. Wood Brown's study records that later medieval commentators on the Divine Comedy added still more supernatural episodes to Dante's brief mention, embroidering the legend further with each retelling. The tradition reached its fullest modern form five centuries later in Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which staged Michael Scot as a magician of the first rank, his memory then invoked wherever the poem wanted an authority on the supernatural. Merlin supplied English legend with essentially the same office centuries earlier, and it is this shared narrative role, the named wizard a storyteller reaches for, rather than any claimed meeting or shared story, that the edge between the two records.