Identifies twenty-two works owned and annotated by Roger Ascham, with an indicative digest of his notes in each.

'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)

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.

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

Amid the devastation of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), 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.