Aristotle’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—in Cheke, Ascham, Rainolds, Sidney, and others—are considered in this article, and directions are proposed for future research in what remains a rich and mostly unworked vein of literary history.

An introduction to Greek literacy in Tudor England, paying paticular attention to George Etheridge (1519-1588?), Oxford's Regius Professor of Greek under Edward VI and Mary.

The playful discussion of 'horsemanship' that opens Sir Philip Sidney'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's exordium by focusing primarily on its affiliation to the genre of the 'Art of Poetry'. In Horace'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'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'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.