@article {3179025, title = {The Virtues of Aristotle\&$\#$39;s Poetics}, journal = {Renaissance Studies}, year = {Forthcoming}, abstract = {

Aristotle{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}s Opera omnia agreed that the Poetics numbered, at very least, among the moral works. By the seventeenth century, Patrizi{\textquoteright}s theories had travelled as far north as England, informing Theodore Goulston{\textquoteright}s translation and commentary on the Poetics in 1623 and contributing to developing notions of a civic role for catharsis.

}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {3191272, title = {The Athenian Courtier: Ascham\&$\#$39;s Isocrates, Tudor Statecraft, and Elizabeth\&$\#$39;s Last Tutorial}, journal = {Renaissance Quarterly}, year = {Forthcoming}, abstract = {Roger Ascham{\textquoteright}s Greek Isocrates records two decades of tutorials at the pinnacle of Tudor politics. At the Imperial court at Augsburg in the early 1550s, Ascham and Sir Richard Morison read ancient Athens into the Reformation, as they shaped the events unfolding around them. And almost twenty years later, just six weeks before his death, Ascham was invited back to Hampton Court for one last tutorial. As Elizabeth and her tutor read Isocrates on free speech, frank counsel, and intervention in foreign wars, an anxious faction of humanist courtiers was peering over Ascham{\textquoteright}s shoulder, desperate to influence their headstrong queen.}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @book {3215755, title = {Alexander Nowell\&$\#$39;s Rough Book: The Life and Library of a Reformation Humanist}, year = {2025}, pages = {xvi, 399}, publisher = {The Bibliographical Society}, organization = {The Bibliographical Society}, address = {London}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {3215756, title = {The B\&$\#$39;rith of Tragedy: Jewish Roots of a Stolen Genre in Early Modern Europe}, journal = {Journal of the History of Ideas}, year = {2025}, abstract = {

At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian Jewish theatre director Leone de{\textquoteright} 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{\textquoteright} Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a complex argument against the Catholic canon. De{\textquoteright} Sommi{\textquoteright}s sources were Talmudic, Luther{\textquoteright}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.

}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.0.a976810}, author = {Micha Lazarus} } @article {3179024, title = {Poetry, Patronage, and the Art of the Land-grab: a newly discovered letter to Thomas Wyatt}, journal = {Review of English Studies}, volume = {75}, year = {2024}, month = {2024}, pages = {546-561}, abstract = {

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{\textquoteright}s membership and sponsorship of English humanist networks.\  It offers the first sure evidence of Wyatt{\textquoteright}s contact with Surrey, corroborating the evidence of Surrey{\textquoteright}s poetry.\  It reveals the association of Wyatt, Surrey, and Bryan with evangelical figures: Nowell, later Dean of St Paul{\textquoteright}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.

}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgae039}, author = {Lazarus, Micha and Brigden, Susan} } @article {3166889, title = {Laurence Nowell, Schoolmaster of Sutton Coldfield}, journal = {Notes and Queries}, volume = {71}, year = {2024}, month = {2024}, pages = {25-29}, abstract = {Our decades-long project to disambiguate the two Laurences Nowell is substantially complete. One (c.1516{\textendash}76) was Dean of Lichfield from 1560 to his death, brother of Alexander Nowell, schoolmaster of Westminster and Dean of St Paul{\textquoteright}s. The other (c.1530{\textendash}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{\textquoteright}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.}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjad114}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {3166887, title = {Beware the Cat: Gregory Stremer\&$\#$39;s Westminster Connection}, journal = {Notes and Queries}, volume = {70}, year = {2023}, pages = {243-246}, abstract = {Archival discoveries reported in\ Notes and Queries\ in the past two years have identified the {\textquoteleft}M Streamer{\textquoteright} who narrates most of William Baldwin{\textquoteright}s prose satire\ Beware the Cat\ (1561) with the real historical figure of Gregory Stremer, contradicting a long-held belief that Baldwin{\textquoteright}s narrator was a fiction.The present note sheds another glint of light on Stremer{\textquoteright}s London life. It further establishes him as a living person rather than a confection, and suggests that a connection to Westminster is possible after all, perhaps on precisely the {\textquoteleft}semi-formal or independent basis{\textquoteright} that Parsons conjectures.}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjad086}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @book {3153588, title = {Leon Modena\&$\#$39;s Kinah Shemor}, year = {2023}, publisher = {Edizioni ETS}, organization = {Edizioni ETS}, address = {Pisa}, abstract = {

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{\textquoteright}sKinah 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{\textquoteright}s thought as a bridge between poetry and music and between Jewish and Christian religious communities, and describes the poem{\textquoteright}s afterlife in relation to broader questions of genre theory, critical taxonomy, and the Christian study of Jewish literature in early modern Europe.

}, url = {https://doi.org/10.13136/TS.75}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @inbook {RN12867, title = {Academic Freedom on Trial in Tudor Times: Stephen Gardiner (1483-1555), letter to John Cheke, 15 May 1542}, booktitle = {An Anthology of Neo-Latin Literature in British Universities}, year = {2022}, pages = {31-58}, publisher = {Bloomsbury}, organization = {Bloomsbury}, type = {Book Section}, address = {London}, abstract = {An edition and translation of Stephen Gardiner {\textquoteright}s letter to John Cheke, 15 May 1542, from\ De pronuntiatione Graecae potissimum linguae disputationes (1555).}, doi = {10.5040/9781350160293.ch-001}, url = {http://doi.org/10.5040/9781350160293.ch-001}, author = {Lazarus, Micha}, editor = {Nicholas, Lucy and Manuwald, Gesine} } @article {RN12860, title = {Review: Mark A. Lotito, The Reformation of Historical Thought}, journal = {Renaissance Quarterly}, volume = {75}, year = {2022}, pages = {259-260}, type = {Journal Article}, issn = {0034-4338}, doi = {10.1017/rqx.2022.34}, url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/reformation-of-historical-thought-mark-a-lotito-st-andrews-studies-in-reformation-history-leiden-brill-2019-xx-542-pp-160/17AECD25071926B6283DCFB88EEAB5E4}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN12250, title = {Birdsongs and Sonnets: Acoustic Imitation in Renaissance Lyric}, journal = {Huntington Library Quarterly}, volume = {84}, year = {2021}, pages = {681-715}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {Struck by the solitary beauty of the nightingale{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}s song{\textemdash}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 {\textquotedblleft}the material presence of its signifiers.{\textquotedblright} 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.}, url = {https://muse.jhu.edu/article/860509}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @book {RN12012, title = {Artes poeticae: Formations and Transformations, 1500-1700}, series = {Classical Receptions Journal}, volume = {13.1}, year = {2021}, type = {Edited Book}, abstract = {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.}, isbn = {1759-5142}, url = {https://academic.oup.com/crj/issue/13/1}, author = {Brljak, Vladimir and Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN12403, title = {Introduction: Poetics as Classical Reception}, journal = {Classical Receptions Journal}, volume = {13}, year = {2021}, pages = {1-8}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {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.}, doi = {10.1093/crj/claa028}, url = {https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/13/1/1/6297021?guestAccessKey=89d43a82-8812-4ec0-ba8f-fcc144b21366 https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/claa028}, author = {Brljak, Vladimir and Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN12662, title = {Review: R. M. Thomson, The Fox and the Bees: The Early Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The Lowe Lectures 2017}, journal = {Speculum}, volume = {96}, year = {2021}, pages = {567-568}, type = {Journal Article}, doi = {10.1086/713772}, url = {https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/713772}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @inbook {RN11712, title = {Sublimity by fiat: New Light on the English Longinus}, booktitle = {The Places of Early Modern Criticism}, year = {2021}, pages = {191-205}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, organization = {Oxford University Press}, type = {Book Section}, address = {Oxford}, abstract = {Longinus{\textquoteright}s On the Sublime is thought to have been ushered onto the English literary scene by Nicolas Boileau{\textquoteright}s Trait{\'e} 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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}s brief quotation from Genesis and praise of Moses{\textquoteright}s oratory, clergymen found literary and rhetorical roots for their explorations of divine sublimity. Developing alongside Longinus{\textquoteright}s reception in Christian rhetorics, these citations offer an alternative route for the early association of On the Sublime with Milton{\textquoteright}s Christian epic, and its eventual entry into the literary mainstream.}, doi = {10.1093/oso/9780198834687.003.0013}, url = {http://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198834687.003.0013}, author = {Lazarus, Micha}, editor = {Alexander, Gavin and Gilby, Emma and Marr, Alexander} } @inbook {RN12522, title = {Ascham\&$\#$39;s Bookshelf}, booktitle = {Roger Ascham and His Sixteenth-Century World}, year = {2020}, pages = {297-320}, publisher = {Brill}, organization = {Brill}, type = {Book Section}, address = {Leiden}, abstract = {Identifies twenty-two works owned and annotated by Roger Ascham, with an indicative digest of his notes in each.}, isbn = {9789004382282}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004382282_016}, url = {https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004382282/BP000019.xml}, author = {Lazarus, Micha}, editor = {Nicholas, Lucy R. and Law, Ceri} } @inbook {RN12521, title = {The Scholemaster\&$\#$39;s Memories}, booktitle = {Roger Ascham and His Sixteenth-Century World}, year = {2020}, pages = {226-247}, publisher = {Brill}, organization = {Brill}, type = {Book Section}, address = {Leiden}, abstract = {{\textquoteright}In chapter 11 Micha Lazarus re-examines Ascham{\textquoteright}s\ The Scholemaster. Lazarus{\textquoteright}s assessment, like that by Shrank, highlights the importance of viewing Ascham{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}s own life left behind. Lazarus contends that Ascham{\textquoteright}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.{\textquoteright} (Editors{\textquoteright} introduction by Lucy Nicholas and Ceri Law)}, isbn = {9789004382282}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004382282_013}, url = {https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004382282/BP000015.xml}, author = {Lazarus, Micha}, editor = {Nicholas, Lucy R. and Law, Ceri} } @article {RN12232, title = {Inventory Booklists in Legal Context}, journal = {Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society}, volume = {XVII}, year = {2020}, pages = {75-82}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {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.}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @booklet {RN12575, title = {Review: Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill}, howpublished = {The Library}, volume = {21}, year = {2020}, pages = {540-542}, type = {Journal Article}, issn = {1744-8581}, doi = {10.1093/library/21.4.540}, url = {https://academic.oup.com/library/article/21/4/540/6041827?guestAccessKey=ab653095-c1d4-4cdb-992d-673cb1a1aabf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/775199}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN12342, title = {Review: Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare}, journal = {Translation and Literature}, volume = {29}, year = {2020}, pages = {154-161}, type = {Journal Article}, issn = {0968-1361}, doi = {10.3366/tal.2020.0414}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.2020.0414}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @inbook {RN11497, title = {Sound Aristotelians and How They Read}, booktitle = {The Reception of Aristotle{\textquoteright}s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond: New Directions in Criticism}, year = {2020}, pages = {38-59}, publisher = {Bloomsbury}, organization = {Bloomsbury}, type = {Book Section}, address = {London}, abstract = {

{\textquoteright}Micha Lazarus{\textquoteright} 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{\textquoteright}s meaning in the\ Poetics, on the one hand, led to a {\textquoteleft}legitimate point of methodological departure{\textquoteright}, 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{\textquoteright}s analysis, Lazarus contextualizes Weinberg{\textquoteright}s account as a particular episode in the reception history of the\ Poetics, as a {\textquoteleft}synthesis of a particular kind of reading at a particular time{\textquoteright}. The essay provides a concise synthesis of the reception history of the\ Poetics\ and the text{\textquoteright}s complex relationship with Aristotle{\textquoteright}s\ Rhetoric, beginning with our oldest manuscript exemplar from the mid-tenth century {\textendash} which re-emerged after the fall of Constantinople {\textendash} 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 {\textendash} a practice that Weinberg and his colleagues in the Chicago School vociferously opposed {\textendash} are already present in Aristotle{\textquoteright}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 {\textquoteleft}criticism and its society must be treated as symbiotic{\textquoteright}, 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.{\textquoteright} (Editor{\textquoteright}s introduction by Bryan Brazeau)

}, doi = {10.5040/9781350078963.0009}, url = {http://doi.org/10.5040/9781350078963.0009}, author = {Lazarus, Micha}, editor = {Brazeau, Bryan} } @article {RN11714, title = {Tragedy at Wittenberg: Sophocles in Reformation Europe}, journal = {Renaissance Quarterly}, volume = {73}, year = {2020}, pages = {33-77}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {Amid the devastation of the Schmalkaldic War (1546{\textendash}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.}, doi = {10.1017/rqx.2019.494}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2019.494}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN11710, title = {An Aristotle donated in memory of Mildred Cecil}, journal = {Early Modern Female Book Ownership}, year = {2019}, type = {Journal Article}, url = {https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/2019/02/04/aristotle-operum-philosophorum-omnium-longe-principis-noua-editio-graece-latine-ed-isaac-casaubon-geneva-1590/}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN11711, title = {\&$\#$39;Anonymous to This Day\&$\#$39;: Aristotle and the Question of Verse}, journal = {Rivista di storia della filosofia}, volume = {74}, year = {2019}, pages = {267-285}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {For modern historians of criticism, the rediscovery of Aristotle{\textquoteright}s Poetics was decisive in popularising a definition of {\guillemotleft}poetry{\guillemotright} that hinged on fictiveness rather than verse, a definition typically associated with {\guillemotleft}modern{\guillemotright} as opposed to {\guillemotleft}medieval{\guillemotright} 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 {\guillemotleft}literature{\guillemotright} 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 {\guillemotleft}verse{\guillemotright}, {\guillemotleft}poetry{\guillemotright}, and {\guillemotleft}feigning{\guillemotright} 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.}, doi = {10.3280/SF2019-002006}, url = {http://digital.casalini.it/19725558}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN11709, title = {First night nerves}, journal = {Westminster Abbey Review}, volume = {6}, year = {2019}, pages = {43-47}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {Christmas, 1541 or {\textquoteright}42: Alexander Nowell paces up and down backstage, biting his lip. The boys have been rehearsing Terence{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}s mind: {\textquoteleft}What am I to do?{\textquoteright}}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN9862, title = {The Dramatic Prologues of Alexander Nowell: Accommodating the Classics at 1540s Westminster}, journal = {Review of English Studies}, volume = {69}, year = {2018}, pages = {32-55}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {Alexander Nowell, headmaster of Westminster, left a rough manuscript notebook that contains Latin prose prologues to three classical plays performed by his pupils at Westminster in the 1540s: Terence{\textquoteright}s Adelphoe and Eunuchus, and Seneca{\textquoteright}s Hippolytus. These prologues, a substantial new source in Reformation criticism, are transcribed and translated in full here for the first time, and placed in their historical, literary, and intellectual context. Prefacing Terence{\textquoteright}s comedies, Nowell produces a learned and charismatic address in the Erasmian mode, drawing together a range of pragmatic and theoretical defences of comedy and a robust notion of fictionality remarkable at this early date. His treatment of Seneca{\textquoteright}s Hippolytus is quite different: Nowell draws a detailed and unusual parallel between the classical myth and the scriptural story of Joseph and Potiphar{\textquoteright}s wife that relates him closely to contemporary developments in Reformation neo-classicism in Germany and the Low Countries. These multi-faceted orations paint a complex picture of pedagogy, bureaucratic necessity, and literary thought in the early morning of the English Reformation.}, doi = {10.1093/res/hgx042}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgx042 Author link: https://academic.oup.com/res/article/doi/10.1093/res/hgx042/3829675/The-Dramatic-Prologues-of-Alexander-Nowell?guestAccessKey=5f76fcd3-6b6f-402e-96ad-9e5c7f0a702e}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN11171, title = {Samuel Daniel and Talon\&$\#$39;s Rhetoric}, journal = {Notes and Queries}, volume = {65}, year = {2018}, pages = {560-564}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {The source of an Aristotelian quotation in Samuel Daniel{\textquoteright}s Defence of Ryme (1603) has long puzzled editors. This short essay traces Daniel{\textquoteright}s source to a chapter on versification in Omer Talon{\textquoteright}s Rhetoricae libri duo (1567), and sketches that chapter{\textquoteright}s influence on several other English critics in the decades either side of 1600.}, issn = {0029-3970}, doi = {10.1093/notesj/gjy149}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjy149}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @inbook {RN9308, title = {Aristotelian Criticism in Sixteenth-Century England}, booktitle = {Oxford Handbooks Online}, year = {2016}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, organization = {Oxford University Press}, type = {Book Section}, address = {New York}, abstract = {Aristotle{\textquoteright}s Poetics has been thought to be inaccessible or misunderstood in sixteenth-century England, but this inherited assumption has drifted far from the primary evidence and lagged behind advances in contiguous fields. As a member of the corpus Aristotelicum, the shared foundation of Western education until the late seventeenth century, the Poetics enjoyed wide circulation, ownership, and interest in Latin and Italian as well as the original Greek. Placing the Poetics in its intellectual context suggests a very different narrative for its reception in English criticism, one that accounts for a multiplicity of readings and uses on both sides of the academic divide. Some of those readings{\textemdash}in Cheke, Ascham, Rainolds, Sidney, and others{\textemdash}are considered in this article, and directions are proposed for future research in what remains a rich and mostly unworked vein of literary history.}, doi = {10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.148}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.148}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN9307, title = {Greek in Tudor England}, journal = {The Etheridge Project}, year = {2016}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {An introduction to Greek literacy in Tudor England, paying paticular attention to George Etheridge (1519-1588?), Oxford{\textquoteright}s Regius Professor of Greek under Edward VI and Mary.}, url = {http://hellenic-institute.uk/research/etheridge/Lazarus/Tudor-Greek.html}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN12322, title = {Poetry and Horseplay in Sidney\&$\#$39;s Defence of Poesie}, journal = {Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes}, volume = {79}, year = {2016}, pages = {149-182}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {The playful discussion of {\textquoteright}horsemanship{\textquoteright} that opens Sir Philip Sidney{\textquoteright}s Defence of Poesie has been variously interpreted as a straightforward anecdote about the chivalric arts, or an oblique rhetorical flourish, or something in between. This essay suggests a new context for Sidney{\textquoteright}s exordium by focusing primarily on its affiliation to the genre of the {\textquoteright}Art of Poetry{\textquoteright}. In Horace{\textquoteright}s Ars poetica and other classical, scholastic and Renaissance treatises, horse-men and other unnatural hybrids embody the tension between decorum and poetic liberty. Three major traditions inform this trope: by the Renaissance the centaur could be an allegory of reason{\textquoteright}s struggle with the passions, an emblem of the poetic imagination, or a figure for compositional hybridity associated, especially, with Lucianic satire. Reading Sidney in the light of these traditions, finally, this essay explores aspects of the centaur{\textquoteright}s significance in the Defence and the Arcadia, and suggests that this kind of attention to metaphor might provide a bridge between critical and creative modes of Renaissance poetic thought.}, url = {https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/warburg/jwci/2016/00000079/00000001/art00007 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26322522}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN8106, title = {Greek Literacy in Sixteenth-century England}, journal = {Renaissance Studies}, volume = {29}, year = {2015}, pages = {433-58}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {Recent scholarship has focused on close engagements with Greek literature in sixteenth-century England, but must still contend with the conventional belief that Elizabethans had negligible Greek. The standard accounts on which this belief is based, however, have not kept pace with the last thirty years of developments in the history of Renaissance education; moreover, they have consistently evaluated Greek literacy by the incommensurate standards of Greek philological scholarship. This review of the multiform evidence of Greek language training in the sixteenth century suggests that Greek literacy was in fact more widespread and advanced in England than has been allowed, and establishes a new baseline and chronology of linguistic access for English readers in the period.}, doi = {10.1111/rest.12109}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12109}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN8465, title = {Sidney\&$\#$39;s Greek Poetics}, journal = {Studies in Philology}, volume = {112}, year = {2015}, pages = {504-536}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {Sir Philip Sidney has exemplified the meager access English readers are thought to have had to Aristotle{\textquoteright}s Poetics in the sixteenth century. This article shows, on the contrary, that a passage of his Defence of Poesie was directly translated from the Poetics. Philological analysis across extant translations and contemporary polyglot dictionaries demonstrates, moreover, that Sidney{\textquoteright}s source was the Greek itself, and suggests a revised model for English encounters with this crucial text in the Renaissance.}, issn = {1543-0383}, doi = {10.1353/sip.2015.0022}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2015.0022 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43921936}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} } @article {RN8284, title = {Silent Years and Speaking Books: Nicholas Udall in 1533}, journal = {Notes and Queries}, volume = {62}, year = {2015}, pages = {35-39}, type = {Journal Article}, abstract = {A Greek inscription in a copy of Aristotle{\textquoteright}s works in York Minster Library reveals not only that the volume was owned by Nicholas Udall, schoolmaster and {\textquoteright}father of English comedy{\textquoteright}, but that it was given to him directly by the Basel printer Johann Bebel. This article reviews the known remains of Udall{\textquoteright}s library (now nineteen books), and reconstructs his movements during this period (1529-1533), known as his {\textquoteright}silent years{\textquoteright}, to which this volume is the sole witness.}, doi = {10.1093/notesj/gju211}, url = {http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/62/1/35.short}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} }