Our decades-long project to disambiguate the two Laurences Nowell is substantially complete. One (c.1516–76) was Dean of Lichfield from 1560 to his death, brother of Alexander Nowell, schoolmaster of Westminster and Dean of St Paul’s. The other (c.1530–69), of greater interest to intellectual history, was an antiquary, cartographer, and pioneer in Old English scholarship, cousin to Alexander. Some outstanding questions, however, remain. In the present note, I adduce evidence from the Vice-Principal’s Register at Brasenose demonstrating that it was Laurence Nowell, not his elder brother Alexander, who left Brasenose to become a schoolmaster in 1546; and Laurence the future Dean of Lichfield, not his cousin Laurence the antiquary, who served as master of the grammar school at Sutton Coldfield from 1546 to 1550.

Archival discoveries reported in Notes and Queries in the past two years have identified the ‘M Streamer’ who narrates most of William Baldwin’s prose satire Beware the Cat (1561) with the real historical figure of Gregory Stremer, contradicting a long-held belief that Baldwin’s narrator was a fiction. The present note sheds another glint of light on Stremer’s London life. It further establishes him as a living person rather than a confection, and suggests that a connection to Westminster is possible after all, perhaps on precisely the ‘semi-formal or independent basis’ that Parsons conjectures.

In 1584, shortly after his bar-mitzvah, the young Italian Jew Leon Modena (1571-1648) composed an eight-line poem so remarkable that it has never been rivalled in its own genre. Known as Kinah Shemor in Hebrew, Chi nasce muor in Italian, this elegy makes sense simultaneously in both languages. It stands at the head of a little-known tradition of short poems, fragments, and fragments of memories of short poems, often composed by Jews and operating at the borders between Hebrew and romance vernaculars, Jewish and Christian communities. More than merely bilingual or macaronic, for Modena the form seems to have existed somewhere between language and music. Yet for want of a formal name, this tradition has long slipped through the cracks of the critical canon.

Leon Modena’s Kinah Shemor publishes the first critical edition and English translation of the poem to take into account all three of its primary witnesses. It places Kinah Shemor in Modena’s thought as a bridge between poetry and music and between Jewish and Christian religious communities, and describes the poem’s afterlife in relation to broader questions of genre theory, critical taxonomy, and the Christian study of Jewish literature in early modern Europe.

An edition and translation of Stephen Gardiner 's letter to John Cheke, 15 May 1542, from De pronuntiatione Graecae potissimum linguae disputationes (1555).

Struck by the solitary beauty of the nightingale’s song, poets and musicians across the literatures of Renaissance Europe drew on an ancient literary topos to contemplate its meaning. Lamenting a lost love, grieving chicks fallen under the plow, puffing and strutting on the springtime prowl: whatever it was, the little bird became an emblem of the work of poetry itself, transmuting experience into song to be captured and transcribed. Yet a parallel branch of this tradition was attracted to another quality of the nightingale’s song—to its pure vocality, its very senselessness. Rather than hear birdsong as a kind of human speech, this countertradition was prompted instead to hear human speech as a kind of birdsong. From Greek to Latin to Italian to English, the nightingale topos became a coded invitation to translingual wordplay, sonic experimentation, and, at its limits, the dismissal of sense entirely in favor of a poetics of pure sound.

This description sounds distinctly modern; musicologists and theorists of translation have begun only recently to look beyond the sense of language to what has been called “the material presence of its signifiers.” This essay makes a first attempt to show, however, that these acoustic phenomena in verse have been mostly overlooked by criticism precisely because of their diffidence toward the work of making sense. Virtuosic displays of sound over sense were not only audible in poetry before the Romantic period (where much recent commentary on lyric imitation has congregated) but even familiar, as a game played on the borders between speech and song, written lyric and musical setting, and the polyglot lyric cultures of Renaissance Europe.

Gathers path-breaking new work on the literary criticism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and Latin America, a domain of literary and intellectual history which represents one of the richest and most enduring strains of the classical heritage in this period.

Gathers path-breaking new work on the literary criticism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and Latin America, a domain of literary and intellectual history which represents one of the richest and most enduring strains of the classical heritage in this period.

Longinus’s On the Sublime is thought to have been ushered onto the English literary scene by Nicolas Boileau’s Traité du Sublime (1674). The search for antecedents to Boileau has yielded some scattered references in Rainolds, Chapman, Junius, Milton, and a few rhetorical textbooks, but nothing that seems to indicate a school of thought or even particular enthusiasm. The reception of Langbaine’s Latin translation of 1636 hardly predicts the vast literary influence the treatise would wield by the end of the century. A more promising readership may, however, be suggested by a string of citations in seventeenth-century sermons. In Longinus’s brief quotation from Genesis and praise of Moses’s oratory, clergymen found literary and rhetorical roots for their explorations of divine sublimity. Developing alongside Longinus’s reception in Christian rhetorics, these citations offer an alternative route for the early association of On the Sublime with Milton’s Christian epic, and its eventual entry into the literary mainstream.

Identifies twenty-two works owned and annotated by Roger Ascham, with an indicative digest of his notes in each.

'In chapter 11 Micha Lazarus re-examines Ascham’s The Scholemaster. Lazarus’s assessment, like that by Shrank, highlights the importance of viewing Ascham’s work within the parameters of his own life and the people he knew. Analysing this work, Lazarus is able to identify evidence of the impact both Cambridge and Cheke had on Ascham, intellectually and culturally. However, Lazarus argues, it is not the case that these merely signify records of the past, but rather that they are memorialised and then resurrected within the narrative as living examples to follow. This is a tendency that Lazarus sees running through the work, whereby the linguistic and literary precepts Ascham expounds are personified, and the title of the book becomes less a description than a reality. To the extent that this book proffers living models, we can perhaps take more seriously some of the contemporary eulogies of Ascham referred to at the start of this introduction which attested to the examples for imitation that Ascham’s own life left behind. Lazarus contends that Ascham’s approach puts a very new gloss on the fundamentally educational function of The Scholemaster, and prompts him to grapple, as Shrank does with the Toxophilus, in novel ways with the question of the genre of this work, in which elegy, example and pedagogy could co-exist. Lazarus shows us an Ascham who stands at the cutting-edge of Renaissance literature and whose work in its complexity and depth of aspiration must be considered as part of under-documented but broader genre of commemorative writing that developed at that time.' (Editors' introduction by Lucy Nicholas and Ceri Law)

Probate inventories are among the best evidence we have of sixteenth-century book ownership and patterns of reading, due to the individuated booklists - recording individual authors or titles - that inventories taken between the 1530s and 1580s contain. Outside this 50-year period, however, numbers of individuated booklists diminish; books are more likely to be recorded at inventory under catch-all headings such as "and all his books." Whereas previous accounts have explained this phenomenon in terms of personnel changes at the Registry offices, or overworked or lazy clerks, I reconstruct the taking of inventory as a legal tool with considerable financial incentives for all parties to an estate. Laziness is not a plausible explanation when money was on the line. I argue that the drop in individuated booklists is better explained by shifting economic conditions in the book market across the course of the sixteenth century.

'Micha Lazarus’ chapter delves into the critical stakes of how the Poetics was read by the Chicago School, examining how their ideological investment in the stability and conceptual unity of Aristotle’s meaning in the Poetics, on the one hand, led to a ‘legitimate point of methodological departure’, yet, on the other hand, also crystallized an influential methodological view that framed the 2,000-year fragmented history of the text as a history of error and deviation. While Baldassarre, Gehl and Markey detail the material conditions and bibliographical contexts of Weinberg’s analysis, Lazarus contextualizes Weinberg’s account as a particular episode in the reception history of the Poetics, as a ‘synthesis of a particular kind of reading at a particular time’. The essay provides a concise synthesis of the reception history of the Poetics and the text’s complex relationship with Aristotle’s Rhetoric, beginning with our oldest manuscript exemplar from the mid-tenth century – which re-emerged after the fall of Constantinople – through to the reception of the text on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Lazarus demonstrates, sententious readings of tragedy as a source from which to draw maxims – a practice that Weinberg and his colleagues in the Chicago School vociferously opposed – are already present in Aristotle’s own writing and cannot simply be viewed as a later distortion imposed by his Renaissance commentators. The chapter concludes with engaging reflections on our own critical moment, reminding us that ‘criticism and its society must be treated as symbiotic’, enjoining us to reflect on the effect that new forms of communication today might have on the fragmentation, commonplacing and even moral readings of literary texts, and the types of criticism that will emerge in future.' (Editor's introduction by Bryan Brazeau)

Amid the devastation of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), Philip Melanchthon and his colleagues at Wittenberg hastily compiled a Latin edition of Sophocles from fifteen years of teaching materials and sent it to Edward VI of England within weeks of his coronation. Wittenberg tragedy reconciled Aristotelian technology, Reformation politics, and Lutheran theology, offering consolation in the face of events that themselves seemed to be unfolding on a tragic stage. A crucial but neglected source of English and Continental literary thought, the Wittenberg Sophocles shaped the reception of Greek tragedy, tragic poetics, and Neo-Latin and vernacular composition throughout the sixteenth century.

For modern historians of criticism, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics was decisive in popularising a definition of «poetry» that hinged on fictiveness rather than verse, a definition typically associated with «modern» as opposed to «medieval» poetics. Renaissance critics and translators, however, approached the crucial passage in the Poetics with more caution than this triumphal narrative would suggest. The Greek text was problematic, and appeared to contradict the obvious truth about ancient epic; lacking a word for «literature» in general, Aristotle was forced to communicate in terms that obfuscated as much as they clarified. When the Poetics arrived in England, moreover, it met a lexicon of «verse», «poetry», and «feigning» that had its own internal coherence, and prompted deep reflection on the relationship of classical poetics to modern literary composition. This paper explores the intersections of these new Aristotelian categories with long-standing English taxonomies of literary composition, and their consequences in modern critical historiography.

Christmas, 1541 or ’42: Alexander Nowell paces up and down backstage, biting his lip. The boys have been rehearsing Terence’s Eunuch for weeks; Phaedria and his clever slave Parmeno are already in costume, nervous with tension. Quid igitur faciam? the opening lines of the play echo in Nowell’s mind: ‘What am I to do?’