Abstract:

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.