IN ONE OF THE most important artistic survivals from sixteenth-century Scotland, David Lyndsay's drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, there is a protracted seduction scene in which a young man is tempted by a female protagonist who is sensuality incarnate. This occurs within the allegorical template of the play's first part: it portrays a monarch's fall within a larger drama about rightful sovereignty, and the nature of social and political justice. In staging the king's undoing through desire, this scene exemplifies one of the most pervasive ways in which masculinity is imagined in early modern Scottish literature. Yet specifically as a portrayal of vulnerable masculinity, it has been overlooked, perhaps because it depicts a highly conventional late medieval moral and gendered conflict between reason and sensuality. It may also reflect the broader lack of critical attention given to masculine bodies, selves, and identities in early modern Scottish writing compared to recent scholarship in English and French Renaissance cultures. While work on women writers and representations of femininity has begun to reveal some interrelationships between gender and cultural agency, the subject of masculinity, either ‘as an analytical category’ or as a sphere of literary representation, is relatively unexplored. Literature, however, can interestingly refract and reflect sociocultural norms and ideals. As a beginning step in exploring the relationship between masculinity and the early modern literary imagination, this chapter discusses lyric poetry drawn from two important poetic miscellanies: the Bannatyne and Maitland manuscripts. In the present context this chapter cannot comprehensively survey their diverse material, or provide a detailed account of provenance and context (further sources are suggested in endnotes). Its focus is on selected poems that are thematically preoccupied with questions of sexual desire and social conduct. This subject matter most vividly illuminates the fault lines and fragilities of the masculine identities that are projected as both normative and ideal – men in the roles of lovers, fathers and sons.