Aristotle’s sixteenth-century readers were the first for a thousand years to be in a position to look beyond the reputation of the Poetics to the text itself. What they found took them far beyond the familiar ethical contexts in which poetics had long been located. Reading across the corpus aristotelicum, Francesco Patrizi advanced a detailed argument that cast the Poetics in a civic light, and Jacopo Mazzoni after him labelled it the ninth book of the Politics. Despite disagreement on technical grounds from commentators such as Paolo Beni, numerous editions of Aristotle’s Opera omnia agreed that the Poetics numbered, at very least, among the moral works. By the seventeenth century, Patrizi’s theories had travelled as far north as England, informing Theodore Goulston’s translation and commentary on the Poetics in 1623 and contributing to developing notions of a civic role for catharsis.

Roger Ascham's Greek Isocrates records two decades of tutorials at the pinnacle of Tudor politics. At the Imperial court at Augsburg in the early 1550s, Ascham and Sir Richard Morison read ancient Athens into the Reformation, as they shaped the events unfolding around them. And almost twenty years later, just six weeks before his death, Ascham was invited back to Hampton Court for one last tutorial. As Elizabeth and her tutor read Isocrates on free speech, frank counsel, and intervention in foreign wars, an anxious faction of humanist courtiers was peering over Ascham's shoulder, desperate to influence their headstrong queen.

At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian
Jewish theatre director Leone de’ Sommi both declare that the Jews
invented tragedy and the Greeks took the credit. How to explain this
unlikely alliance over a still unlikelier account of literary history? De’
Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a
complex argument against the Catholic canon. De’ Sommi’s sources were
Talmudic, Luther’s patristic. Across geography, chronology, and faith,
tragedy served as a contested borderland, in which to probe the
boundaries between history and fiction, scripture and apocrypha, pagan,
Jew, and Christian.

Between early summer 1540 and the new year of 1541, Alexander Nowell composed the only surviving Latin letter from England to Sir Thomas Wyatt. On behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral, he asks Wyatt, Sir Francis Bryan, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to help the new foundation resist the expropriation of its properties. The letter fills in several biographical lacunae for this prominent trio of courtiers.  It provides primary evidence of Wyatt’s membership and sponsorship of English humanist networks.  It offers the first sure evidence of Wyatt’s contact with Surrey, corroborating the evidence of Surrey’s poetry.  It reveals the association of Wyatt, Surrey, and Bryan with evangelical figures: Nowell, later Dean of St Paul’s, was already a central figure in Oxford reform.  And it presents an intricate example of the chains of patronage that reached, in the wake of the dissolution, across the universities, the new fleet of cathedral foundations, and the heights of the Henrician court.

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.