ReMembering the Borderlands: with Mary Craig

An evening with historian and storyteller Mary W Craig, exploring one of the most extraordinary — and most forgotten — figures the Scottish Borders has ever produced.

This Evening: Duns Scotus — The Subtle Doctor

Born in Duns around 1266, John Duns Scotus became one of the most influential philosophers of the medieval world. A Franciscan friar whose thinking on free will, the nature of being, and the relationship between faith and reason shaped European thought for centuries, he was known as the Doctor Subtilis — the Subtle Doctor.

His ideas were so challenging that those who couldn't follow his reasoning were dismissed as "dunces" — a word that comes directly from his name. Yet in the Borders, the place that made him, he's largely forgotten.

Mary Craig explores the life and legacy of a man whose hometown still bears a statue in his honour, and asks what does it say about the Borders that it produced a mind like this?