For modern historians of criticism, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics was decisive in popularising a definition of «poetry» that hinged on fictiveness rather than verse, a definition typically associated with «modern» as opposed to «medieval» 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 «literature» 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 «verse», «poetry», and «feigning» 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.

Christmas, 1541 or ’42: Alexander Nowell paces up and down backstage, biting his lip. The boys have been rehearsing Terence’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’s mind: ‘What am I to do?’

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’s Adelphoe and Eunuchus, and Seneca’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’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’s Hippolytus is quite different: Nowell draws a detailed and unusual parallel between the classical myth and the scriptural story of Joseph and Potiphar’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.

The source of an Aristotelian quotation in Samuel Daniel's Defence of Ryme (1603) has long puzzled editors. This short essay traces Daniel's source to a chapter on versification in Omer Talon's Rhetoricae libri duo (1567), and sketches that chapter's influence on several other English critics in the decades either side of 1600.

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.

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.