The ideas of Italian Renaissance humanism, confined to the peninsula until about 1450, had from the late fifteenth century begun to spread around Europe.

This has influenced Renaissance in the Netherlands, the German Renaissance, French Renaissance, English Renaissance, Polish Renaissance and other national and localized movements, each with different characteristics and strengths.

Sir David Lyndsay’s morality play, The Satyre of the Thrie Estatis, is produced in 1540 as the first literary expression in Scotland of the Renaissance.