Academical dress was worn routinely at the Scottish universities during the late medieval period and the Renaissance, going into decline between the Reformation and the reintroduction of hoods during the nineteenth century. We shall examine the use of academical dress by graduates and officials in the three pre-Reformation university institutions in Scotland—St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen—from the fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. A discussion of the varying effects of the Reformation on academical dress at each university in the decades following the disruptive events of 1560 will follow. Few known pictorial sources of evidence exist, but there are other sources in the form of contemporary statutes, inventories, and university annals.

The earliest European universities were Bologna, constituted as a guild of students ca. 1088, and Paris, constituted as a guild of masters and granted its charter in 1200. Later institutions usually followed one of these constitutional precedents, or a hybrid of the two. Scotland saw three university foundations in the fifteenth century; in earlier times, students travelled abroad for education—mostly to Paris and to other universities in France. Instruction in the faculties of arts was based on the classical trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy). After graduation, further study in the higher faculties of law (canon and civil), medicine, and theology provided training for legal practitioners, physicians, and the incumbents of many rectories and vicarages; in 1496 all barons and wealthy freeholders were required by law to send their eldest sons to the universities to study the arts and law.

Students, exclusively male during this period, were usually in minor orders, but not all were destined for the priesthood; they went on to form the administrative elite of the country after graduation, and one marker of their status was academical dress, which differed according to educational progression and was worn both within and outside the universities. Such dress was not monastic in nature but was sober and indicated clerkly status; it was generally similar across western Europe in the medieval period and basically consisted of an undertunic (subtunica), an overtunic (supertunica), and a hood (caputium).