Scottish literature in the Middle Ages is literature written in Scotland, or by Scottish writers, between the departure of the Romans from Britain in the fifth century, until the establishment of the Renaissance in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century. It includes literature written in Brythonic, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, French and Latin.
Much of the earliest Welsh literature was composed in or near the country now called Scotland, in the Brythonic speech, from which Welsh would be derived. This includes the epic poem The Gododdin, considered the earliest surviving verse from Scotland. Very few works of Gaelic poetry survive from the early Medieval period, and most of these are extant in Irish manuscripts. There are religious works that can be identified as Scottish. In Old English there is the Dream of the Rood, from which lines are found on the Ruthwell Cross, making it the only surviving fragment of Northumbrian Old English from early Medieval Scotland. What is probably the most important work written in early Medieval Scotland, the Vita Columbae by Adomnán, was also written in Latin.
As the state of Alba developed into the Kingdom of Scotland from the eighth century, a flourishing literary elite there regularly produced texts in both Gaelic and Latin, sharing a common literary culture with Ireland and elsewhere. It is possible that much Middle Irish literature was written in Medieval Scotland, but has not survived because the Gaelic literary establishment of eastern Scotland died out before the fourteenth century. After the Davidian Revolution of the thirteenth century, a flourishing French language culture predominated, while Norse literature was produced from areas of Scandinavian settlement.
In the late Middle Ages, Middle Scots became the dominant language of the country. The first surviving major text in Scots literature is John Barbour's Brus (1375). This was followed by major historical works in Latin, including the Chronica Gentis Scotorum of John of Fordun. There were also Scots versions of popular French romances. Much Middle Scots literature was produced by makars, poets with links to the royal court. Many of the makars had a university education and so were also connected with the Church. Much of their work survives in a single collection: the Bannatyne Manuscript, collated around 1560. In the late fifteenth century, Scots prose also began to develop as a genre. The first complete surviving work is John Ireland's The Meroure of Wyssdome (1490). The landmark work in the reign of James IV was Gavin Douglas's version of Virgil's Aeneid, the Eneados, which was the first complete translation of a major classical text in an Anglic language, finished in 1513, but overshadowed by the disaster at Flodden in the same year.