According to the chronicler Fra Salimbene, Frederick attempted to catch Scot out in his calculations of the distance to heaven by scaling from the height of a church tower (by having it secretly lowered).

The efforts of Walter Scott and others to identify him with the Sir Michael Scot of Balwearie, sent in 1290 on a special embassy to Norway, have not convinced historians; though the two may have had family connections.

A legend popular in the late 13th and early 14th centuries said that Scot foresaw that a small stone would strike him in the head and kill him, so he wore an iron skullcap to avoid his death.

He appears in Dante's Divine Comedy, the only Scot to do so,[11] in the fourth bolgia located in the Eighth Circle of Hell, reserved for sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets who claimed they could see the future when they, in fact, could not.

Richard Kay argues that because "the shades in the Dantesque afterworld create surrogate aerial bodies for themselves that are a projection of [their] soul[s]", this description is in reference to "some internal character trait to which [Dante] wished to draw our attention.

"[15] Kay argues that Dante was referencing a physiognomic description taken from Scot's own Liber physiognomiae – namely, that thin and small ribs signify an individual "who is weak, who does little labour, who is sagacious, [and] bad" (the original Latin, found in chapter 88 of the Liber physiognomiae, reads: Cuius costae sunt subtiles et paruae […] significat hominem debilem, pauci laboris, sagacem [et] malum).

Fra Salimbene makes a comparison between Asdente of Parma, a cobbler who predicted the death of Nicholas III and election of Martin IV, and the " Abbot Joachim, Merlin, Methodius, the Sibyls, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Daniel, the Apocalypse, and Michael the Scot.

In John Leyden's ballad Lord Soulis, Michael Scot is credited with teaching magic to the protagonist, the evil sorcerer William II de Soules, who ends up being boiled alive.

In Footnotes 12/13, he credits him with conquering an indefatigable demon, after it had succeeded in splitting Eildon Hill into its three distinctive cones, by challenging it to weave ropes from sea-salt.