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.

Sir Philip Sidney has exemplified the meager access English readers are thought to have had to Aristotle’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’s source was the Greek itself, and suggests a revised model for English encounters with this crucial text in the Renaissance.

A Greek inscription in a copy of Aristotle's works in York Minster Library reveals not only that the volume was owned by Nicholas Udall, schoolmaster and 'father of English comedy', but that it was given to him directly by the Basel printer Johann Bebel. This article reviews the known remains of Udall's library (now nineteen books), and reconstructs his movements during this period (1529-1533), known as his 'silent years', to which this volume is the sole witness.