Abstract:

'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)