Reassessing Tudor Humanism

Reassessing Tudor Humanism Edited by Jonathan Woolfson

REASSESSING TUDOR HUMANISM

Also by Jonathan Woolfson PADUA AND THE TUDORS: English Student in Italy, 1485–1603

Reassessing Tudor Humanism Edited by

Jonathan Woolfson School of History University College Chichester

Editorial matter, selection, Introduction and Chapter 10 © Jonathan Woolfson 2002 Chapter 1–9, 11–12 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0-333-97144-2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reassessing Tudor Humanism / edited by Jonathan Woolfson p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–97144–2 (cloth) 1. England – Intellectual life – 16th century. 2. Latin literature, Medieval and modern – Appreciation – England. 3. Classicism – England – History – 16th century. 4. Classical literature – Appreciation – England. 5. Humanism – England – History – 16th century. 6. England – Civilization – European influences. 7. Great Britain – History – Tudors, 1485–1603. 8. England – Civilization – 16th century. 9. Humanists – England. I Woolfson, Jonathan. DA320 .R427 2002 942.05–dc21 2001059001 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vii

Abbreviations

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Preface

xi

1 Introduction Jonathan Woolfson

1

2 Humanism before the Tudors: On Nobility and the Reception of the studia humanitatis in Fifteenth-Century England David Rundle 3 Richard Pace’s De fructu and Early Tudor Pedagogy Cathy Curtis

22 43

4 The Trouble with English Humanism: Tyndale, More and Darling Erasmus Alan Stewart

78

5 Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors: Gian Matteo Giberti as a Case Study James P. Carley

99

6 Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period: John Leland’s Poetic Praise of Painting Susan Foister

129

7 Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo, 1547–1553 M. A. Overell

151

8 John Foxe and Tudor Humanism John N. King

174

9 The Humanist Latin Tradition Reassessed J. W. Binns

186

v

vi Contents

10 Between Bruni and Hobbes: Aristotle’s Politics in Tudor Intellectual Culture Jonathan Woolfson 11 Humanism and Science in the Elizabethan Universities Robert Goulding 12 Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais Warren Boutcher

197 223

243

Select Bibliography

269

Index

277

List of Figures 1. Hans Holbein, Edward, Prince of Wales, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 2. Hans Holbein, John Colet, drawing, The Royal Collection 3. Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas Wyatt, woodcut from John Leland’s Naeniae 4. Hans Holbein, Brian Tuke, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

vii

134 137 139 140

Abbreviations BL CWE LP STC

British Library, London. The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto and Buffalo, 1974–). Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner et al. (London, 1862–1910). A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn (London, 1986).

viii

Notes on the Contributors J. W. Binns is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of York, where he has taught since 1984. He is the author of Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1990), and the editor, with Shelagh Banks, of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia (2002). He is a General Editor of Oxford Medieval Texts, and has written many articles on Anglo-Latin. Warren Boutcher is Lecturer in Renaissance Studies in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. He has published numerous articles on late Renaissance humanism and on Montaigne. James P. Carley is Distinguished Research Professor at York University, Toronto and an associate of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. He has written extensively on Glastonbury Abbey and on the dissolution of the English monasteries. His most recent book is The Libraries of King Henry VIII (2000). Cathy Curtis submitted her PhD thesis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’, to the University of Cambridge in 1996. Now an independent scholar with research interests including Sir Thomas More, she has been a Junior Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Susan Foister is Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery. She is a joint author of Giotto to Dürer (1991), Dürer to Veronese (1999) and Making and Meaning: Holbein’s Ambassadors (1997). Robert Goulding is Cotsen Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in the History of Science at Princeton University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at the Warburg Institute, University of London, on the mathematical papers of Sir Henry Savile, and has held fellowships at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. His current research interests include the problem of circlequadrature in the Renaissance and the history of optics. ix

x Notes on the Contributors

John N. King is Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of many articles on the English Renaissance and Reformation. His books include English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (1982); Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (1989); Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (1990); and Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (2000). He is an editor of Literature and History and of Reformation, and is actively involved in the British Academy John Foxe Project. M. A. Overell is Research Associate and Tutor at the Open University. Her research focuses on cultural and religious cross-currents between England and Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, on which she has published many articles. She is currently working on the Nicodemism of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon. David Rundle is Lyell Research Fellow in Palaeography at Oxford University. He is working on a study of the library of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester and has published articles on Renaissance political thought and on the tradition of humanist interest in fifteenth-century and early Tudor England. Alan Stewart is Reader in Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (1997); Philip Sidney: A Double Life (2000); and, in co-authorship with Lisa Jardine, Hostage to Fortune: The Toubled Life of Francis Bacon, 1561–1626 (1998). He is currently editing Bacon’s Correspondence for the Oxford Francis Bacon. Jonathan Woolfson is Senior Lecturer in History at University College Chichester. He is the author of Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (1998) and of articles on humanism, collecting, manuscripts, universities and travel.

Preface This book has travelled a long way from its origins in a two-day colloquium, which took place at the Warburg Institute, University of London, in 1999. The aim of that event, substantially also the aim of this book, was to present new explorations and interpretations of humanism in sixteenth-century England to a new audience, and to reinvigorate and open up the field. I am grateful for all the support and advice I received, both from within and beyond the Warburg, in organizing that event, in particular from Mo Collins, John Guy, Nico Mann, Alan Stewart, Jill Kraye and Joe Trapp. The last two of these stimulated the proceedings by chairing sessions, as did Lisa Jardine and Steven Gunn. In the process of this project becoming a book my debts have accumulated; they are owed especially to Susan Brigden, Maria Dowling, David Rundle and Luciana O’Flaherty of Palgrave. Above all, thanks are owed to the contributors to this volume, who have put their knowledge, experience, expertise and advice at our collective disposal, and have been prepared to move quickly at short notice to meet pressing deadlines. The making of this book has been a genuinely collaborative adventure which we hope will generate new possibilities in the study of Tudor and Renaissance culture. Jonathan Woolfson

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1 Introduction Jonathan Woolfson

Formulating problems of intellectual history is surely one of the most difficult things in the world to do. The first reason for this lies in its vocabulary. In no other branch of history is the terminology in use so specific to each nation or so difficult to acclimatize elsewhere, indeed, simply to translate into another language or transfer to a different intellectual context… But do similar realities lie behind these different worlds? Is the object that they designate so diversely unique and homogenous? Nothing seems more unsure. Roger Chartier1 A considerable range of recent specialized studies and broader surveys has taught present generations of students, scholars and general readers a great deal about the nature of humanism in Renaissance Europe.2 With its origins deep in the Middle Ages, this movement was predicated on the recovery, assimilation, reinterpretation and dissemination of the textual remains of antiquity; and from Italy it spread in the fifteenth century all over Europe, including to England. The movement generated one of the characteristic figures of late medieval and early modern history, the ‘humanista’ or humanist, usually but not always a male, whose public and private identities were steeped in cultural remains – often material as well as textual ones – from the ancient world. The humanist’s scholarly activity, operating in contexts as diverse as schools, universities, monasteries, princely courts, aristocratic households, academies, private libraries, printing houses and informal intellectual circles, involved the study, teaching, publication and adaptation of an ever-increasing range of different aspects of antiquity. Although rooted in pre-Renaissance classicizing and 1

2 Jonathan Woolfson

rhetorical traditions, the anti-scholastic rhetoric of the humanists, their increasing numbers and superior technical and persuasive proficiency, had dramatic effects, especially when their work was tied to the printing press or to individual and institutional patronage; it in fact transformed the intellectual and cultural milieux in which later Renaissance élite Europeans thought and communicated. The ‘studia humanitatis’, the core university subjects taught by the late Quattrocento ‘humanista’ consisted of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. Throughout the Renaissance these continued to undergird the humanist pedagogical programme and to generate some of the most influential literary products of European culture. However, from the mid-fifteenth century at the latest the humanists began seriously to engage with other areas of ancient sentience and enquiry: law, medicine, botany, mathematics, scripture and patristics, art, and others. At the same time, the movement extended itself beyond the classical languages of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, penetrating – and simultaneously shaping and expanding – the European vernaculars. Finally, humanism was here to stay. Rather than dying out at the onset of the Reformation or ‘Scientific Revolution’, the movement established for the ancient world an enduring place in European élite culture and had an impact on popular culture as well. In a European context, the fundamental advances in recent research have demonstrated both humanism’s cultural breadth and its longevity. Along the way, we have learnt to discard the romantic and anachronistic constructions which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interpreters invested in the Renaissance. Whilst areas of disagreement continue to exist, the dominant historiographical consensus now rarely considers Renaissance humanists to have espoused, as an inherent part of their activity as humanists, a particular moral, philosophical or religious message: the classical world as it came to be available to the Renaissance was simply too capacious and wideranging for that. Levels of intensity of engagement with that world varied enormously or were combined creatively – and sometimes uneasily – with other intellectual and cultural traditions. We find Catholic and Protestant humanists, conservative and radical ones, Platonic and Aristotelian and sceptical ones, scientific and magical ones, republican humanists, ‘civic’ humanists, pessimistic and optimistic humanists; and we find rhetoricians, more adept at persuasion than conviction. Above all, we find scholars. This is not to say that individuals, groups or institutions might not have engaged with classical texts in such a way as to derive a particular ideology from their

Introduction 3

experience, but this depended on myriad variants: political, religious and social conditions, the nature of local intellectual traditions and the availability of particular texts. Humanism as a whole, then, was an educational and rhetorical programme, a vision about learning and what learning should be, a method for intellectual and scholarly exploration and discovery, a powerful and immensely flexible vehicle for the expression of many things, all of this predicated on a partially recoverable ancient world. Broadly speaking, the question addressed by this collection of essays is: how, if at all, does Tudor England fit into all this? It is an urgent question, taking place as it does in the context of a significant reorientation in the historiography of early modern Britain, one that is addressing England’s complicated relationships with Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as well as with its own border regions, and which is also beginning, in fresh ways, to take account of a wider Europe. It is also an urgent question because, despite much recent work in the field, the historiography yields little consensus about the nature of Tudor humanism. In an important, iconoclastic essay of 1986, Alistair Fox, commenting on the bewilderingly contradictory interpretations of historians on this subject, remarked that ‘one sympathizes with the modern student who tries to make sense of the views laid before him’.3 Fifteen years later, the student will probably be just as baffled. Fox himself argued that early Tudor humanism did not in fact represent a coherent movement, that differences between humanists were more significant than similarities, and that the single thing they had in common was ‘a specific commitment to the idea that classical learning is valuable or efficacious’. In the context of the writers Fox was arguing against, this involves the application to England of the definition, based above all on research on fifteenth-century Italy, associated with the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller, who is cited by Fox approvingly.4 In particular, it confirms Kristeller’s view that humanism was rooted in the ancient textual heritage and did not, in itself, purvey a particular philosophy or necessarily anthropocentric values. For England, it is precisely this issue which has failed to yield consensus, with ramifications not only for our understanding of humanist culture but of the period as a whole. Although Geoffrey Elton was so impressed by Fox’s article as to describe its author as ‘a rather formidable cat from New Zealand’, many scholars of Tudor humanism continue to invest the term with some kind of ideological or philosophical meaning.5 There are at least three reasons for this. First, although the ‘studia humanitatis’ can be

4 Jonathan Woolfson

presented as nothing more than a particular cycle of learning, it was one that was promoted and justified as supplying the practical skills and moral formation appropriate to lay public life. In the context of some strains in medieval Christian and scholastic thought, it was, therefore, albeit in a very unsystematic way, ideologically positioned. Second, the classical ideals and educational methods, based on Latin instruction, bequeathed by the Renaissance to Europe at large, have been transformed so dramatically in the last century or so as to render their Renaissance ancestry virtually unrecognizable, especially in England and America: as we are less and less inclined to take the ancient world for granted as a central aspect of our cultural heritage, the worth and appeal of humanism no longer seem quite so obvious and self-evident as they once did: if humanism, as an historian’s conceptual tool, is emptied of ideological or philosophical meaning, it risks the danger of being reduced to a cultural fashion, the appeal of which is historically inexplicable and the significance of which is historically unmeasurable. Third, as we shall see in more detail below, scholars of Tudor England have identified humanism with activities usually taking place outside the narrow scholarly and ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ confines of the philologist’s study; in these more public and ‘active’ contexts Tudor humanism has an instrumental and pragmatic air: if it is not inherently ideological itself, it is at least the essential tool of other ideological purposes. The following historiographical survey does not aim at any kind of comprehensiveness, but instead identifies three general areas for brief consideration: the literary, the religious, and – broadly conceived – the political. Despite the obvious inadequacy and artificiality of this procedure, it has the merit of reflecting the very significant fact that scholars have been primarily interested in relating humanism to these dominant strains of scholarship in sixteenth-century studies. The potentially antiquarian, but also potentially rewarding, endeavour of describing humanist output and activity for itself, as a phenomenon of cultural history per se, is rarely to be found: is this because humanism did not exist for itself, was not in possession of its own distinctive cultural physiognomy? A few recent studies on different moments within the Tudor age and on different materials combine to suggest otherwise. For example, J. B. Trapp’s investigations of humanistic manuscript and printed books and their collectors in the early Tudor period evoke a world of distinctive cultural artefacts which were treasured for themselves both as texts and objects.6 And the cumulative effect of Maria Dowling’s prosopographically-led study of Henrician humanists is also to

Introduction 5

demonstrate the existence of an autonomous phenomenon, though even she is particularly concerned to map humanism onto political and religious change.7 And although J. W. Binns locates the subject of his massive study of late Tudor and early Stuart Latin writing within a neo-Latin longue durée, humanism as a cultural phenomenon which is characteristic of that age is also very much a part of his story, a view he develops further in this collection.8 For historians schooled in revisionist critiques of Whiggish, Marxist and progressivist interpretations of early modern English history, the way in which significant numbers of literary scholars have been able to adapt Burckhardtian notions about the Renaissance so as to relate English humanism to the notion of individualism is striking. In this way humanism has been seen as playing a role both in the formation of selfhood and subjectivity in early modern England and in the development of an incipient but identifiable modernism; the constitution of the self in this period and the related notion of the Renaissance as the threshold of modernity are in turn aspects of a vast and vigorous critical and theoretical literature which on the whole – and in spite of its historicist dimensions – has conspicuously failed to engage with the scepticism and revisionism of historians.9 The connection between humanism and selfhood – and the related sense that humanism was an identifiably modern phenomenon and was also a response to, or expression of, emergent capitalism – continues to inform accounts of some of the greatest products of Tudor Latin and vernacular literature, in particular the works of More, Sidney and Spenser. In their writings an optimistic faith in man’s capacity for virtue, action and perfectibility is sometimes identified as humanist. This has been contrasted, as, for example, in the work of Alan Sinfield, with a countervailing Calvinist pressure towards pessimism, powerlessness and a sense of sin.10 Arthur Kinney, in an erudite exploration of the classical sources of major works of sixteenth-century English literature, identifies humanism with this neo-Burckhardtian complex of ideas. He writes that Tudor humanist poetics ‘hewed closely to the lessons of the Tudor humanist grammar schools and university curricula, which taught the value of human dignity, encouraging self-respect through philosophic discussion of man’s educability – even perfectibility’; and ‘the revolutionary influence of these pagan writings released men from their concentrated study of the Church Fathers, of spiritual contemplation and the afterlife, taking them, with fresh excitement, to a new sense of personal liberty and accomplishment that was the chief historical legacy of Greek culture as the Renaissance redrew it’; and ‘man’s total

6 Jonathan Woolfson

freedom for self-fashioning, then, created a vital need for humanist teaching’.11 Furthermore – perhaps because Marxist and Foucauldian models remain influential in this area, and certainly because of their sensitivity to textual nuance – literary scholars have recently been more successful than historians at relating humanism to patterns of economic development, the changing nature of social relations and the roles of patrons. But the results are more ambivalent than in Kinney’s picture. For Jonathan Dollimore, Renaissance humanism constituted the self in a particular way, but not yet as unified and autonomous, which was the work of the Enlightenment.12 Mike Pincombe’s recent characterization of Elizabethan humanism, based on close semantic analysis of ‘humanity’ and its cognates, both succeeds in moving away from the ahistorical assumptions of other literary scholars and identifies a humanism in the vernacular imaginative literature of the period laden with conflicted values and with problematic relationships to courtesy, courtliness, wit, polymathy, grammar, sacred learning and pedantry.13 For Lorna Hutson, drawing on humanistic approaches to ancient moral philosophy, and especially texts on household management, humanism had ramifications for notions of masculinity and for relations between women and men, tending to turn women, at least in the humanists’ fictional imagination, into objects of exchange;14 for Alan Stewart it had ramifications for relations between men.15 These two writers give humanism an instrumental role as not simply reflecting changing social relations but as generating those changes. They build both on Mervyn James’ notion of a transformation in the sixteenth century from a ‘lineage’ to a ‘civil’ society, and on Anthony Grafton’s and Lisa Jardine’s influential critique of Renaissance humanist pedagogy, which generated interpretative spaces between humanists’ stated ideals and practices.16 Their From Humanism to the Humanities did not posit liberty and individualism as the result of the humanist schoolroom, but rather their opposite, a general crushing of spontaneity and ‘a docile attitude towards authority’.17 Why then did humanism succeed? Why did so many people, in their reading, writing, and personal and institutional patronage, make an act of faith in antiquity and reiterate time and again a value judgement about its cultural superiority? Why, in the Elizabethan period, did significant segments of the English population send their male children to humanist-inspired grammar schools so as to produce a governing élite steeped in Roman history and politics, certainly the most conspicuous manifestation of humanism’s success in England in the Tudor period? These are the biggest and hardest questions of all. Part of Stewart’s

Introduction 7

answer is that, like any successful product, humanism, by way of its ambitious practitioners, marketed itself and generated its own demand through a set of powerful fictions about social relations. But the view of humanism as being ‘complicitous with repressive authoritarianism’ has itself been challenged, in relation, for example, to classically inspired Tudor drama. Indeed in Pincombe’s Elizabethan Humanism, Kent Cartwright’s Theatre and Humanism and David Norbrook’s Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, literature is capable of questioning and subverting a sometimes embattled set of humanist values even while it utilizes and advocates them. And in Rebecca Bushnell’s investigation of humanist pedagogy, which reopens – but this time specifically for the English context and not just for women – Grafton and Jardine’s gauntlet-throwing question, ‘Education for what?’ ambivalence is the key word: an ambivalence between ‘the philologist’s historicism and the moralist’s search for relevance’ – an issue I will return to – and, more importantly here, between disciplinary and authoritarian impulses and ‘liberal’, individualistic ones. Partly through the influence of Foucault, this last dichotomy remains a substantial theme in literary scholars’ discussions of Tudor pedagogy, and thematically though not methodologically provides a significant point of contact between their discussions of humanism and those of historians interested in its political ramifications, which are briefly surveyed below.18 The relationship between Tudor humanism and religion has been equally fraught with disagreement. For the pre-Reformation period – but with important ramifications for the Reformation itself – the related concepts of ‘Erasmianism’ and ‘Christian humanism’ have been matters of contention. Brendan Bradshaw, James McConica and Lucy Wooding have argued for a genuine and influential synthesis, in the writings of Erasmus and his English contemporaries such as Thomas More, of Christianity and humanism. The upshot was an irenic, liberal and reformist tendency in pre-Reformation intellectual and religious culture which reinterpreted both the Christian message and the ancient texts of Christianity in the light of pagan learning.19 While for Bradshaw this synthesis lost its discrete character during the Reformation, for McConica it continued to endure at least to the end of the reign of Edward VI, inspiring a great deal of the reformist initiatives characteristic of the reigns of the second and third Tudor monarchs. More recently, Wooding has claimed for it in addition a shaping influence on Catholic as well as Protestant and government thought from the 1520s to the 1550s, while Margo Todd regards

8 Jonathan Woolfson

Erasmian humanism as the inspiration for much Protestant social thought and activism in the Elizabethan period; in doing so she proposes an important link between two central dimensions of later Tudor experience and two rather separate historiographical traditions.20 But despite the considerable influence and longevity of McConica’s work in particular – his English Humanists and Reformation Politics is the oldest book by far to be cited in this review of recent scholarship – these views have been challenged at many levels. Grafton, Jardine, Fox and Sinfield have argued that the Christian humanist synthesis was always incoherent, superficial or subject to contradictions or destabilization;21 and Elton and others have argued that Erasmianism is far too vague and doctrinally misleading a term to describe accurately the progress of the early Reformation.22 Did early Tudor humanism prepare the way for the Reformation? Dowling and Richard Rex, in studies adopting partly prosopographical methodologies, have shown that many humanists remained conservative in their religious convictions: there was no necessary reason why a humanist should be attracted to evangelical ideas.23 While Bradshaw argues that the political thought of the humanists was founded on a particular optimistic religious conception of the world which put them at odds with Lutheran pessimism about fallen man – ‘the humanists baptized the classical ideal of the vir humanus by subsuming it under the biblical ideal of Man as the imago Dei’24 – Rex in effect argues the reverse, that inasmuch as humanists supported religious reform, it was for broadly political reasons or motivations. However, the fact that many humanists remained religiously conservative does not rule out the possibility that early Tudor humanism, with its pronounced religious and reformist character, particularly evident in the work of Colet, Erasmus and More, in the aims of major clerical patrons of humanists, and in the statutes of humanistic schools and colleges, provided the intellectual climate – and emphatically nothing more systematic than a climate – which for others made possible a commitment to evangelical belief: there is scarcely a single early Henrician description of humanist studies which does not justify them in explicitly religious terms. Such a characteristic certainly seems less surprising and less distinctive in the light of recent research on Italian humanism, which has revealed the intimate role played by Christian sources and ideas in some of its most characteristic manifestations.25 This intellectual climate was inevitably responsive to critiques of the existing Church and to reassessments of the status and meaning of biblical and patristic texts. This is not to minimize doctrinal differences between conservative humanists and

Introduction 9

evangelicals. But the Reformation was not – and this perhaps is the crux – just about doctrine: it was also about superstitious practices, perceived ecclesiastical corruption, papal power, the nature of lay piety and the role of education in Christian regeneration; in all these areas Erasmian humanists could make common ground with reformers. As several studies in this collection suggest, we disregard the relationship between humanism and the Reformation only by reducing both to monoliths.26 It is thus only in the realm of the broadly political that many scholars from different disciplines are united in attributing to Tudor humanism a complex of relatively coherent and influential, if still rather general and quite open, ideas and methods. These ideas include a commitment to the ‘vita activa’, to the pragmatic application of a fairly eclectic range of classical learning, to service to the common weal, and to quasi-republican traditions of political participation, drawn especially from ancient Roman rhetorical, historical and broadly political sources. The ideas attached to the term ‘civic humanism’, which survive in the historiography of the Italian Renaissance only in an attenuated and much disputed state, have flourished in an open and dilute form in England as nowhere else, and have been allotted a significant role in the making not only of great minds and canonical writings, but also of early modern political forms and practices themselves (as well as in the undoing of the monarchy in the middle of the seventeenth century).27 Here a tradition of historical writing exists which is both well established and the most lively current dimension of Tudor humanist historiography. It ranges very widely in sources, methods and emphases, and includes important recent contributions on a wide variety of sub-themes by Thomas Mayer, John Guy, Brendan Bradshaw, Markhu Peltonen, David Norbrook, Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, Stephen Alford, Margo Todd, David Womersely, William Sherman, Richard Rex and Warren Boutcher.28 A remarkable recent account of the broadly political ramifications of Elizabethan humanist pedagogy, Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (part I), also stands as further testimony to the success of the humanist programme in grammar schools.29 To summarize so far this brief survey of the historiography, it appears that, despite disagreement on a number of particular issues, many scholars of Tudor humanism have attributed to English humanists a range of ideological or philosophical commitments and social, political and religious attitudes which are inherent to their activities as humanists. According to this picture, sixteenth-century English

10 Jonathan Woolfson

humanism therefore had a particular character. It drew fundamentally on a range of European sources but adapted them in such a way as to remain a distinctive local manifestation of a broader phenomenon. There is, of course, no necessary reason why the English experience of humanism should have replicated, in microcosm as it were, a wider European experience. For England as for anywhere else, the manifold influences on cultural developments created by particular political and social structures and ideological needs cannot be ignored.30 On the other hand, only by robbing culture of any historical autonomy can such influences be made to tell the whole story. There are interpretative pressures tending in the opposite direction. For example, in terms of cultural transmission, geopolitical boundaries are immensely permeable; so permeable, in fact, that one is sometimes led to wonder whether, for the study of humanism, ‘nations’ offer any kind of historically authentic, rather than historiographically convenient, unit for historical analysis: in the era of print especially, and of expanding educational possibilities, and in relation to an intellectual tradition which had Latin at its centre, we would expect an ever-increasing level of cross-fertilization, and indeed a succession of historians of English humanism has found it, a project which is developed further in this book. They have given particular attention to the impact of Erasmus and of Italy; the role of French humanism in England may be identified as an area in need of much more work; while one pioneering study of the interaction of centres and periphery in the careers and perceptions of humanists within England demonstrates variety even in the local context.31 At the very least we are thus engaged, on several levels, with the complex processes by which one locality adapts and domesticates what it takes from another. In investigating these processes, one of the biggest dangers is to confuse different national historiographical traditions with different historical realities.32 One such English historiographical tradition used to argue that humanism dried up at the early Reformation, and a notable advance of more recent work – implicit in what has already been said – has been in showing that humanism in various manifestations continued to be a force well after the early Reformation. But the proposition that it died a death around 1600 is still often encountered. Sometimes it is said to have given way to the ‘new science’, an argument often illustrated by Francis Bacon’s proposal to challenge classical authority with empirical observation. Sometimes sixteenth-century Ciceronianism (optimistic and therefore characteristically ‘Renaissance’) is said to have given way to a pessimistic Taciteanism. Yet Bacon was himself heavily indebted to

Introduction 11

the classical tradition and Tacitus was an ancient author: the ancient heritage continued to be a vital force, as Skinner’s study of Hobbes has shown. His picture for the seventeenth century is strongly backed up by Mordechai Feingold’s account of the humanities at Oxford University in that period and by J. W. Binns’ account of Jacobean Latinate culture.33 A striking dimension of the ‘political’ interpretation of Tudor humanism of which Skinner’s book forms a notable part is the phenomenon of a largely secular ‘pragmatic humanism’, which has drawn attention to itself as scholars move their interests away from the earlier to the later Tudor period. Students approaching Renaissance humanism for the first time are likely to read somewhere that part of the originality of the humanists lay in their profoundly historical approach to ancient texts. The humanists, abhorring scholastic anachronism, attempted through grammar and philology to locate those texts in their original historical and linguistic contexts. Several scholars have shown that this is only one side of the humanist coin.34 The opposite approach to ancient texts coexisted with this one, a bluntly utilitarian and more historically superficial approach which habitually ripped passages, words, maxims and so on out of their original context in order to deploy them for present purposes: the two approaches are as different as chalk and cheese, or as different, for example, as Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament and his De copia, one historical, one ‘presentist’. There is a consensus that the latter approach predominated in later Tudor England; humanism caught on not because of a Petrarchan longing for the ancient world, whose authentic reconstruction required some act of forgetting about a troubled present, but, on the contrary, because of the perceived relevance and utility of selected ancient texts and rhetorical skills in the public sphere. In this picture humanism, particularly in its pedagogical and vernacular manifestations, is first and foremost an aspect of a developing national culture. It explains both why commonplace books drawing on ancient sources were so ubiquitous in England, as Mary Crane and Margo Todd have demonstrated, and also why sixteenth-century Englishmen are largely conspicuous by their absence from studies of high-level early modern classical scholarship.35 Meanwhile Grafton and Jardine have provided a seminal case study of what this pragmatic late Tudor humanism looks like; the emphasis here is on deriving useful political lessons from Roman histories and rhetorical works above all, in a highly engaged political context: Cicero especially, and Livy, then Tacitus, are the crucial ancient authors, read in combination with various moderns.36

12 Jonathan Woolfson

However, there are problems with this dichotomy between the historical-philological and the pragmatic-’presentist’. As Mordechai Feingold has shown, in the early seventeenth century, one of the reasons sometimes offered for the absence of great classical scholars in England was that university students were diverted at an early stage of their educations to theological training and polemic.37 If so, why does the ‘pragmatic’ humanism that several scholars have uncovered have such a secular character? (Perhaps, Margo Todd’s study would suggest, it was in fact thoroughly religious.) Moreover, it is possible to see the commonplace culture itself as deriving from an historical sensibility established primarily by philologists: once the student accepts the ancient world as located in a different temporal and cultural space from one’s own world, he is free to review it critically, to take from it what is useful and discard the rest. And yet this only begs the question of why knowledge of this distant, alien, pagan world was considered so easily usable in the public sphere. Rather than there necessarily being a smooth continuum between classical studies and the world of public action, perhaps the distance of the ancient world could have been an intrinsic part of its educational function, offering not an invisible elision with present concerns, but, rather, a separate intellectual space in which to think, within the relatively safe boundaries of school and university. This might help us to understand why some of the most prolific generators of ‘pragmatic humanism’ in the Tudor and Stuart periods – and consequently just the people we would expect to be centre-stage in the public sphere – were in fact conspicuously thwarted in their public careers. All this indicates that the pragmatic and the historical approaches to the classical past coexisted in Tudor England: this, surely, is what the long conflict over different kinds of Ciceronian imitation suggests. So too does an area in which English humanists did make important contributions: translation, which necessarily involves an attentive mediation between past and present.38 Furthermore, it remains possible that more technical philology was carried out than we know about, but it has not attracted the attention of historians precisely because it did not engage in direct ways with the political, and also because it did not see its way into print. As for humanist endeavour in general, the relatively small scale of the English printing industry in this period is always in danger of concealing a bigger and richer intellectual environment; only recently has the measurement of book consumption rather than production, as revealed in inventories and library lists, begun to compensate for the limitations of the picture supplied by the (nevertheless indispensable) Short Title Catalogue, a project continued here at the very élite level by James Carley.39

Introduction 13

Because of its apparently medical and natural historical bias, what English philological activity we do know about raises important questions about the origins of seventeenth-century science; philology, with its ‘empirical’, ‘scientific’ approach to words and texts, is in some senses analogous with, and potentially allied to, or preparatory to, observation of the world beyond the book. This work took place in pedagogical contexts and so related to the ‘presentist’ concerns of teaching practice in fundamental, if ambivalent, ways. In other words, as Feingold’s work tends to suggest, the dichotomy between the pragmatic and the historical is a false one, or at the very least, as Rebecca Bushnell shows, the ambivalence about pedagogical relevance and historical authenticity is inherent to humanistic practice at every level, which is one of the reasons why the purposes of humanism, like the purposes of the humanities, refuse to be reduced to any single satisfactory formula. Scholars give, in their thinking and writing, differing emphases to different pasts and presents; they locate them in different parts of their selves; and consequently they enable them to have different kinds of dialogues with each other. We have not been able to locate precisely the ancient world within the Tudor psyche because there was not one Tudor psyche. Granted England did not produce a Poliziano or a Scaliger. But in a period when real and important advances were made in historical method, Englishmen were surely capable of the same ‘interpretative schizophrenia’ which Anthony Grafton has attributed to their continental counterparts.40 * It is hoped that this collection of essays is received more in the spirit of pluralism than of schizophrenia. It has been put together in the belief that the humanist experience in Tudor England was genuinely wideranging and can be restricted to a narrow group of areas or commitments only with a considerable amount of historical distortion. This means that some of the themes discussed above are considered here from new perspectives and using new source material, while other areas which have received scant attention in mainstream scholarly discourse also feature in this book. It is hoped that by juxtaposing studies on established themes with less known areas of connectivity – and in a way which has never been attempted before – a wider audience will be able to appreciate Tudor humanism’s multiple guises. Read as a whole this book, therefore, attests to the enormous impact of humanism in many different fields, but is sceptical of most existing reductive or

14 Jonathan Woolfson

overarching patterns. It rejects the grosser anachronisms implicated in reading humanism as identifiably modern. It argues instead for a nuanced and rigorously contextualized understanding of the Tudor engagement with humanist culture; consequently, while leading figures of the humanist pantheon, such as Thomas More and Erasmus, receive serious reconsideration here, they are also joined by less wellknown – but it is hoped equally interesting – figures. This is an approach that allows for a variety of responses to humanism and for creative or problematic juxtapositions of humanism and other cultural and intellectual forces, such as Renaissance art or scholastic Aristotelianism; religious forces, above all the Reformation; political forces such as the development of the court and of diplomacy; and social forces such as the various consequences for schools, universities and individual households of new wealth in the sixteenth century. All these things can themselves be illuminated by paying attention to characteristic humanist responses. Furthermore, this approach recognizes that different humanistic models involving, for example, different attitudes to Latin, Greek and the English vernacular, different models of expression within these languages, and different choices of ancient and contemporary texts – all areas which receive considerable attention in this book – competed for supremacy in the sixteenth century itself, as they sometimes do in today’s historiography. And above all this approach insists that Tudor England’s cultural and intellectual experience needs to be understood in European context. For these reasons, outstanding scholars from a wide range of fields and employing different methodologies have been called upon to provide specialist studies in their areas, and thus to contribute to a general reassessment of the field. Where contributors disagree with each other they have not been forced into an artificial consensus; as befits a collection that aims to break new ground, sometimes the reader is invited to make difficult choices as well as unexpected connections. Nevertheless, attention should be drawn here to two general patterns which emerge from this book. The first concerns chronology. Chapters have been placed in broadly chronological order so that readers can follow the developing transformations in Tudor humanism across more than a century. Placed in this order, one transformation in particular stands out: as the sixteenth century progresses and new wealth generates greater social mobility and increased educational opportunity, humanism, its intellectual scope, its institutional base and above all the range of its practitioners expand enormously. As Warren Boutcher points out in the final chapter, by the Elizabethan period

Introduction 15

there is no longer a relatively tight-knit circle such as that adhering to Thomas More and Erasmus in the early sixteenth century – and a correspondingly limited range of intellectual issues and historiographical authorities – around which to plot our history of the development of English humanism – a state of affairs which leads Boutcher to propose here a completely different paradigm for later Tudor humanism from that currently on offer. Humanism in this later period has been less intensively studied than early Tudor humanism; the practical effect for this book is that later chapters appear more thematically diffuse than earlier chapters: there are simply more stories to tell, more relationships yet to be uncovered. The second pattern concerns three different ways in which humanism might be said to relate to the subject matter of different chapters. Because this book explores the full range of humanistic activity it necessarily pays attention to other cultural traditions; sometimes it explores humanistic activity on what appear to be, historiographically, the margins of the humanist enterprise. Consequently, some chapters deal with what might be called ‘core’ humanistic subjects and materials, for example, the fortuna in England of the humanists’ most favoured ancient texts, the uses of ancient rhetoric, the role of the ‘studia humanitatis’, humanist pedagogy and Latin literature; other chapters, by contrast, analyse the relationship of humanism with fields that were not themselves quintessentially humanistic: these chapters are as concerned with how these other fields might be better understood in the light of humanistic responses to them and humanistic influences on them as they are with how humanism itself was shaped by them; a third group of chapters deals with the ‘special case’ of humanism’s ambivalent relationship to the Reformation. By way of conclusion, this Introduction will summarize chapters in the order suggested by this pattern. We begin with central aspects of humanistic experience and, more particularly, with the fifteenth century. Thanks to the work of J. B. Trapp and David Carlson in particular, humanism in the reign of Henry VII, particularly as it relates to the history of the book, has not suffered the neglect usually accorded to the history of the first Tudor monarch.41 But a major problem for anyone working in the field remains a lack of pre-Tudor contextualization. Roberto Weiss’ somewhat Whiggish interpretation of a crucial period, Humanism in England in the Fifteenth Century, which stopped short of the reign of the first Tudor, is now dated and barely an adequate foundation on which to build an interpretation of what followed. In chapter 2 David Rundle therefore

16 Jonathan Woolfson

presents a critical re-examination of the subject, in particular of the role of aristocratic patronage in the history of English humanism in the fifteenth century; his chapter also offers us the opportunity to ponder what was genuinely new about Tudor cultural experience. Although relations with Italy form a major aspect of his interpretation, he gives a far more instrumental role to Englishmen than Weiss did, and therefore argues for the variety and vitality of English humanism before the Tudors. Moving into the Tudor period itself, in chapter 3 Cathy Curtis offers a major re-examination and reassessment of a work whose modern reception has been in the main lukewarm, Richard Pace’s De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur. She explores the rich ancient rhetorical traditions on which it is modelled, its place between Italianate and Erasmian humanist pedagogical visions, and its unexpected role in the history of Tudor education. In chapter 9 J. W. Binns places his subject, Elizabethan Latin writing and its contemporary transmission and availability, in a context which extends outside the Tudor period, and shows that the later Tudor episode in this very rich tradition marks a period of growth in Latinate production. His chapter also presents a challenge to received views about the nature of the English Renaissance literary canon. At the end of our period and at the end of the book, so too does this challenge emerge from Warren Boutcher’s study of late Tudor vernacular humanism (chapter 12), albeit a challenge derived from a very different approach. Boutcher opens up continental influences beyond Italy, arguing for the centrality of a polyglot humanism in the later Elizabethan period, predicated on England’s function as a major consumer of continental books. He also provides an historiographical overview and proposes a way forward which in some important respects departs from, and goes beyond, the one presented here. Four chapters deal with humanism’s place in four identifiable historical disciplines: the history of the book, the history of art, the history of political thought and the history of science. In chapter 5 James Carley offers a case study for the role of humanist books deriving from Italy in the politics of the reign of Henry VIII. In so doing he brings us into contact with Tudor humanism in its most fundamental physical manifestation, but he also shows, in revealing some of the secrets of the Henrician library, that books returned to their original context assume a political meaning which both encompasses and reaches beyond their immediate physical and textual significance. In chapter 6, Susan Foister reminds us that in a European context humanism has been seen to engage with, inform and respond to the innovative visual

Introduction 17

culture of the age in significant ways. Through a fresh consideration of until now unpublished manuscript material, she shows that the same was true for England, and proposes that the humanist valuation of painting be redated to the early Tudor period, rather than to the later sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. Her approach also offers the opportunity to reassess the contemporary reception and appreciation in England of Holbein’s art. In chapter 10, I consider the role of a major ancient political text in Tudor England and its reception under the combined impact of humanism, medieval scholastic tradition and contemporary political structures. In chapter 11, Robert Goulding, opening up a neglected area, draws our attention to the ambivalent relationship between humanism and science, especially mathematics and astronomy, in the later Tudor universities. Placing Oxford and Cambridge in the context of continental universities and of the developing scientific community of London, he offers a reassessment of the teaching and culture of the universities where, unlike the new grammar schools, the nature of humanism’s impact is still not particularly well understood; and he demonstrates that the brand of humanism on offer in these institutions had critics who deserve to be taken seriously. Finally, three chapters deal with the vexed question of the relationship between humanism and the Reformation. Although dealing with the two major ‘Christian humanists’, Erasmus and Thomas More, and with their relationship with the reformer William Tyndale, Alan Stewart’s focus in chapter 4 is not so much on climates of belief in their own right as on the politics of translation and amicitia, during a crucial moment in the relationship of Latin to the English vernacular; revisiting the print controversies of the early Reformation, he argues that the disjunction between Erasmian humanism and Protestant reform was located more in issues concerning the vernacular than in doctrinal questions per se. In the belief that the Henrician period has received the lion’s share of historical attention on the relationship of humanism and Reformation, two experts here develop some of the issues raised by Stewart, but with the mid- and later Tudor periods as their focus. In chapter 7, Anne Overell, setting mid-Tudor humanism in a continental, especially Italianate context, reminds us not to treat Italy as a monolith by showing how far the Italian world itself had changed from its alleged High Renaissance ‘heyday’ by the reign of Edward VI. And by examining the English fortuna of a fundamental text of the Italian Reformation, she argues for a very close relationship between humanist endeavour and Protestant belief in courtly circles in

18 Jonathan Woolfson

England at that time. Finally, in chapter 8, John King takes the question of the continuity of Erasmianism into the Elizabethan period, and focuses on its role in the making of Elizabethan Protestant identity through a major reconsideration of John Foxe. Here we also see that the modern historiography of ‘Christian humanism’ has its roots in the sixteenth century itself: Foxe offered his readers a history of the Church, which was also a history of the humanist movement. * There is a lot we know, but even more which is yet to be discovered or understood. It is hoped that the overall picture presented in this collection demonstrates the richness, diversity and central role of humanism in sixteenth-century English culture, and that these essays will stimulate further work in the field.

Notes 1 R. Chartier, ‘Intellectual History and the History of Mentalités: A Dual Re-evalution’, in his Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Cambridge and Oxford, 1988), pp. 20–1. 2 Recent general studies in English include J. Kraye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996); C. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995); and A. J. Rabil, ed., Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy (Philadelphia, 1988). 3 A. Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, in A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 9. 4 Ibid., p. 31. 5 G. Elton, ‘Humanism in England’, in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. A. Goodman and A. MacKay (New York, 1990), p. 276. 6 See especially his Erasmus, Colet and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London, 1991); Essays on the Renaissance and the Classical Tradition (Aldershot, 1990); ‘The Humanist Book’, in L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1400–1557 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 285–315. 7 M. Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (Beckenham, 1986). 8 J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990). 9 See most famously S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980); but also, for example, E. Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 1998). 10 A. Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, 1560–1660 (London, 1983). 11 A. F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England (Amherst 1986), pp. xi, 3, 6.

Introduction 19 12 J. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (London and New York, 1989). 13 M. Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow and London, 2001). 14 L. Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1994). See also the section entitled ‘Humanism after Feminism’ in Hutson, ed., Feminism and Renaissance Studies (Oxford, 1999), pp. 21–126. 15 A. Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1997). 16 M. James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986); A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1986). 17 Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, p. xiv. 18 K. Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1999); D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984); R. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, 1996). See also R. Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca and London, 1991), pp. 19–60. 19 J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965); B. Bradshaw, ‘Controversial Thomas More’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXXVI (1985) 535–69; ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 96–131; L. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000). 20 M. Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987). But cf. Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism, esp. pp. 41–2, who argues that humanism was identifiably separate from divine or sacred learning. 21 Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 138–49; Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, passim; Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies’, pp. 19–24. 22 Elton, ‘Humanism in England’, in Goodman and MacKay, Impact of Humanism, p. 268; Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge and London, 1973), pp. 4–8. 23 Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII, passim; Dowling, ‘Humanist Support for Katherine of Aragon’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, CXXXV (1984) 46–55; R. Rex, ‘The Role of English Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’, in The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. N. Scott Amos, A. Pettegree and H. van Nierop (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 19–40. See also his ‘The New Learning’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XLIV (1997) 26–44. In a recent essay on European humanism and the Reformation, Rex presents a less restrictive account of the links between the two movements: ‘Humanism’, in The Reformation World, ed. A. Pettegree (London and New York, 2000), pp. 51–72. See also P. Matheson, ‘Humanism and Reform Movements’, in Goodman and MacKay, Impact of Humanism, pp. 23–42. For

20 Jonathan Woolfson

24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31

32

33

34

England cf. S. Brigden and N. Wilson, ‘New Learning and Broken Friendship’, English Historical Review, CXII (1997) 398–411. Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, p. 103. See, for example, T. Verdon and J. Henderson, eds, Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento (Syracuse, NY, 1990); and Umanesimo e padri della Chiesa: manoscritti e incunaboli di testi patristici da Francesco Petrarca al primo Cinquecento, ed. S. Gentile (Florence, 1997). And cf. Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism, pp. 41–2. See further J. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380–1580 (Chicago and London, 1984); and Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism. See now J. Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge, 2000). T. F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Common Weal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989); J. Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. D. Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 292–310; B. Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’; M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Norbrook, Poetry and Politics; Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities; A. Grafton and L. Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, CXXIX (1990) 30–78; S. Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 9–42; Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order; D. Womersley, ‘Sir Henry Savile’s Translation of Tacitus and the Political Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts’, Review of English Studies, XLIII (1991) 313–42; W. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the Renaissance (Amherst, 1995); R. Rex, ‘The Role of English Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’; W. Boutcher, ‘Vernacular Humanism in the Sixteenth Century’, in Kraye, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, pp. 189–202. Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996). See, for example, M. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986). W. Boutcher, ‘Pilgrimage to Parnassus: Local Intellectual Traditions, Humanist Education, and the Cultural Geography of Sixteenth-Century England’, in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, ed. N. Livingstone and Y. L. Too (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 110–47. This problem has been especially pronounced for French humanism, where the extent of the impact of Italian humanism in relation to native medieval traditions has long been in dispute. See Jean-Claude Margolin, ‘Humanism in France’, in Goodman and MacKay, Impact of Humanism, pp. 164–201. More generally, see P. Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1998). M. Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in The History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 211–358; Binns, Intellectual Culture. See, for example, A. Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA and London, 1991), pp. 23–46.

Introduction 21 35 Todd, Christian Humanism; M. T. Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993). Cf. the remarks of Binns, Intellectual Culture, p. 194; Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, pp. 261–9; J. Loewenstein, ‘Humanism and Seventeenth-Century English Literature’, in Kraye, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, pp. 271–2. See also the discussion by V. Kahn, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory’, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. P. Parker and D. Quint (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 373–396; and the remarks of Halpern, Poetics, pp. 47–8. 36 Grafton and Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”’; see also L. Jardine and W. Sherman, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England’, in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. A. Fletcher and P. Roberts (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 113–24; Sherman, John Dee; Boutcher, ‘Vernacular Humanism’; and for the seventeenth century, K. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London, 2000). 37 Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, pp. 262–3. 38 See Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. P. France (Oxford, 2000), pp. 45–55; and also Boutcher’s contribution in this volume. 39 See also James Binns’ contribution in this volume (chapter 9). For epigraphy see, for example, R. White, Aelia Laelia Crispis (Padua, 1568). For philology, see V. Nutton, John Caius and the Manuscripts of Galen (Cambridge, 1987), and my ‘John Claymond, Pliny the Elder, and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford’, English Historical Review, CXII (1997) 882–903. For book ownership, see especially M. L. Ford, ‘Importation of Printed Books into England and Scotland’ and ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’, in Hellinga and Trapp, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, pp. 179–228, and references therein. 40 A. Grafton, Defenders of the Text, p. 37. 41 Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More; D. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto, 1993).

2 Humanism before the Tudors: On Nobility and the Reception of the studia humanitatis in Fifteenth-Century England David Rundle

The Sienese humanist and future pope, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, knew how to be patronizing. When, in 1444, he received a letter from an Englishman, Adam Moleyns, he expressed himself pleasantly surprised by its elegance. Not, however, that he overburdened Moleyns with praise, for Piccolomini surmized that there was another, much more significant character who should be showered with compliments: Many thanks are due [he declared] to that most famous and learned prince the Duke of Gloucester who, through his utmost interest, has introduced into your country the studia humanitatis… From this, indeed, more eloquent Englishmen will follow, since just as the princes are, so the citizens follow suit, and slaves imitate the interests of their masters.1 Quales sunt principes tales et cives esse consueverunt. As Aeneas Sylvius went on to explain, great is eloquence; where the well-turned phrases of Piccolomini and of his fellow-humanists have guided readers’ attention, there later generations of scholars have been persuaded to follow. That most famous prince – Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, protector to his nephew, Henry VI – was no stranger to humanist praise. Piccolomini’s letter repeats sentiments already peddled by several of his scholarly colleagues. Their image of him as a generous and engaged patron was one with an illustrious history ahead of it. Tudor writers, like their Italian predecessors, remembered Good Duke Humfrey as a learned prince; the antiquarian and humanist John Leland described him as ‘that singular phoenix of erudition’ for whose patronage scholars – and 22

Humanism before the Tudors 23

here Leland refers in particular to Italian humanists – vigorously competed.2 In more recent historiography, it has been received wisdom that Humfrey, son, brother and uncle of kings, was also father of English humanism.3 This is an interpretation that claims much for Humfrey’s character, but also – unconsciously echoing the Ciceronian truism that subjects imitate their rulers – rests on assumptions about the significance and nature of princely patronage. There may be room for debate about the efficacy of the noble efforts of Humfrey or of his successor as humanist patron, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, but what seems undisputed is that humanism ventured into England only under aristocratic protection. It is as if fifteenth-century Englishmen, lacking any innate nobility of character, had to rely on those who were noble by birth for an introduction to the studia humanitatis. This, though, is an interpretation that is ripe for reassessment. As far as the following overview has a polemical purpose, it is to question the assumed relationship between noble patronage and humanist interest – between, if you will, kind arts and coronets. It will provide a corrective to the tendency to succumb to what I would call magnate attraction – that is, the pull towards placing noble involvement at the centre of the narrative. In short, it is time that we read the influential rhetoric of a Piccolomini or of his colleagues not as articles of faith but as pious frauds. The conventional interpretation of humanism before the Tudors does not just overestimate the importance of nobles such as Humfrey of Gloucester or John Tipoft; in the process, it also understates the vitality and range of English humanist interest. That range of interest most often happened around or, indeed, away from the famous aristocrats: it is better represented not by a prince but by a lesser character, like Piccolomini’s correspondent, Adam Moleyns.4 In his career of ecclesiastical and royal service – he became Bishop of Chichester and Keeper of the Privy Seal – Moleyns exemplifies the English equivalent to the clerical humanist who could make professional use of the studia humanitatis. Similarly, in that his career was curtailed by premature death – he was killed by the rebels of 1450 – he shares a dubious honour with both Tiptoft and the likes of John Free, the gifted scholar who died in his mid-thirties in Rome. Moreover, just as his life was incomplete, so is the evidence for Moleyns’ literary accomplishments: in the sixteenth century, he was placed in the lists of English writers, but very little of his work survives.5 In this Moleyns is at his most typical, for the evidence for fifteenth-century humanist interest is frustratingly fragmentary. The scale of loss – loss, in part, perpetrated during the sixteenth century – contrasts with the fortunate survival of

24 David Rundle

sources for Tudor humanism. Yet, while the reconstruction of the shards of evidence may be painstaking, it is also worthwhile. It reveals a tradition of interest which in certain aspects foreshadows and, indeed, enlightens what comes in the next century; but, in as many significant ways, it is distinct from ‘Tudor humanism’ – or, rather, from that strand of lay vernacular humanism which arguably came to dominate after the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Fifteenth-century English humanist interest, in other words, is not Tudor humanism writ small; it has to be judged on its own terms and its own context. That context, I suggest, is its critical role in the Europe-wide marketing of the studia humanitatis. * Italian humanists were unashamedly élitist.6 Their self-congratulatory intellectual coteries defined themselves both, at times, against each other and, always, against the barbarian. In their stereotyped cosmography, anywhere beyond the Alps could be dismissed as uncivilized, but distant England was quintessentially so – and, thus, in need of civilizing. Who would take on this onerous task, the wise man’s burden of bringing civilization to the unlettered? These same humanists offered themselves as educators to Europe and its princes; they would give the barbarians the benefit of their learning, their studia humanitatis. This rarely meant that they would travel abroad to become a school-teacher or professor (though a few did), or that they would strictly confine themselves to lecturing on the subjects which a humanista taught. Studia humanitatis certainly became the title for a curriculum, but it also held a vaguer, grander meaning: it was one of the slogans for the self-appointed avantgarde’s intellectual agenda.7 It was as such, for example, that Piccolomini employed it in his letter to Moleyns; and, as we shall see, fifteenthcentury Englishmen, for their part, perceived the Italians’ work as educational in a general, not a narrowly pedagogical, sense. It is undoubtedly with these humanists that the phenomenon of magnate attraction had its origins. In their pursuit of money and reputation (not necessarily in that order), it served these ambitious scholars well to flatter potential patrons, however far removed such princes were from the centre of their civilization. Humfrey of Gloucester was by no means the only English candidate for humanist importuning in the first half of the fifteenth century, but of the other possibilities, many were not unreceptive, some had royal blood, but very few had both combined.8 In the process of lionizing Humfrey, however, these

Humanism before the Tudors 25

scholars created an image of him as both unprecedented in his association with the studia humanitatis and highly interested in the works he received. Both these claims are open to question. Humfrey’s contacts with the humanists seem not to date before the early 1430s.9 In the preceding decades, however, humanists had sought out English readers and conversely Englishmen had sought out humanist works. So, for instance, the pre-eminent Florentine humanist, Leonardo Bruni, arranged in 1408 for a copy of his Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum to be made for an elusive ‘Thomas the Briton, an outstanding man’. Again, in the 1420s, the diplomat Nicholas Bildeston hoped to purchase on his Roman business trips both classical and Petrarchan texts.10 It is no accident that these examples concern Florentine authors; it must be said that, just as modern scholarship has concentrated on Florentine studia humanitatis at the expense of humanist circles that flourished in other city-states, so similarly early English humanist interest shared this bias. Yet, this was not totally to the exclusion of other varieties of reading. A significant strand of English interest focused on the works of Gasparino Barzizza of Bergamo who, like his contemporary, Bruni, was an avid student of Cicero, but who gathered a coterie of students around him in north-east Italy; from 1408 to 1421 he was a professor at the University of Padua.11 English interest in Barzizza began early: probably in the late 1420s, the Benedictine monastery of St Mary’s, York received a collection of humanist speeches and letters which included pieces by Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini but in which the dominant figure was Barzizza. Other Englishmen had perused the manuscript before it reached York – one reader, probably somewhere in the Midlands, had actually transcribed it.12 Two manuscripts hardly make a publishing sensation, but they do suggest a strand of reading which, in its confined circulation, is in fact typical: if sixteenth-century England was comprised of a range of local humanist traditions, a fortiori in the manuscript culture of the fifteenth century, disparate, localized fashions were the rule.13 Moreover, neither Barzizza’s name nor this type of anthology was unknown beyond these instances. On the contrary, across the fifteenth century, there were pockets of interest in Barzizza’s writings, increasingly focusing on his dictaminal works which gave guidelines for good writing. At the same time, the genre of the formulary, providing examples of good (that is, Ciceronian) writing through a compilation of humanist orations and epistles, provided one of the enduring ways that interest in the studia humanitatis was expressed.14 The purpose of these examples is to emphasize that to begin the tale with Humfrey’s patronage would be to start in media res. By the time

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that humanists have forged links with Humfrey, some of the salient characteristics of English humanist interest are already in place. The duke’s role was not as father of English humanism, not even its midwife; perhaps we should say he was its fairy godmother, wishing up a supply of new manuscripts that he had either purchased or (at least as often) had been sent unsolicited. Yet, humanist epistles and dedications repeatedly claim, Humfrey provided this service with interest and engagement. Once more, this image of Humfrey directing ‘his’ scholars and paying close attention to their works, is, I would suggest, more trope than truth. There is, in fact, a lack of evidence to demonstrate his reading of humanist works; his annotations to his manuscripts, confined in the main to adding a French ex-libris or a motto at the beginning or end of a volume, suggest greater concern to demonstrate ownership than readership. What is more, as I have argued elsewhere, we may have positive reason to doubt the duke’s credentials as an attentive reader.15 We can, however, go further and question what reasons Humfrey might have had for his supposedly engaged patronage; for it is sometimes argued that he may have been impelled to act Maecenas by ‘a very subtle estimate’ of the propaganda value that these literary productions might provide.16 This is a claim I wish to investigate by briefly discussing the English career of Tito Livio Frulovisi, Humfrey’s secretary from 1436 to 1438.17 Among historians, the name of Tito Livio is mainly associated with his Vita Henrici Quinti, which became the main source for the first English life of Henry V, produced in 1513 or 1514 when another second king of a dynasty hit upon the idea of seeking glory on French battlefields.18 For palaeographers, Frulovisi is perhaps known as the scribe of an attractive littera antiqua, and one, by the by, that seems to have influenced some of the first English attempts at humanist script.19 By neo-latinists, Frulovisi, if remembered, is arguably best forgotten, for his verse has been described (with less clemency than honesty) as ‘wretched’.20 The main evidence for this accusation is his Humfrois, a work transforming Humfrey’s uneventful Calais expedition of 1436 into something close to an epic encounter.21 Yet such aesthetic judgements do not seem to have troubled Humfrey himself: Frulovisi was employed as the duke’s ‘poet and orator’.22 We do not know whether Humfrey himself modestly suggested that his exploits were worthy of an epic. However, if we assume he did so, and if we assume that it was in the belief that even bad poetry can make good publicity, there is a curiosity: no evidence survives to suggest that the work was in fact propagated among the English political community: the only extant copy was written in Italy.23

Humanism before the Tudors 27

If in the case of the Humfrois the supposed propaganda machine of its eponymous hero somehow missed a trick, what about that other work of Frulovisi’s, the Vita Henrici Quinti? This was certainly a work that the duke commissioned; its purpose has struck some historians as equally certain: to inspire its dedicatee, the young Henry VI, to promote the hawkish policy Humfrey himself espoused. The work can, undeniably, be read as a resounding call to arms, yet there are problems with this interpretation. In the first place, this reading of the Vita’s genesis allows Frulovisi a smaller role than he would have assigned himself: it is often noted that, in the preface, Frulovisi states that Humfrey ‘ordered me to write those deeds’ (gesta mihi scribenda mandavit); it is less often commented that Frulovisi also claims that this command was ‘at my request and importuning’ (rogatu supplicationibusque meis). In other words, the duke ordered his secretary, but the secretary advised his duke to make the order.24 Frulovisi may have had his own reasons for stressing his part in conceiving the work; perhaps he hoped, through presenting his biography to the king, to be able to move from ducal to royal service. However that may be, it appears Humfrey soon found his secretary surplus to requirements. We next meet Frulovisi touting round for another patron and approaching John Stafford, Bishop of Bath and Wells, with a copy of the Vita.25 Now, if we can talk of factions at this stage of Henry VI’s reign, Stafford was certainly not of Humfrey’s group; this being the case, it is striking that Frulovisi thought it appropriate to present the bishop with a work which was apparently propaganda for Humfrey’s policy. If the Vita were intended to be a partisan political tract, this may have come as a surprise to its author. Indeed, the use in the next years of Frulovisi’s work as the main source for the biography of Henry V known as the Pseudo-Elmham, which was presented to Walter, Lord Hungerford, another character not necessarily sympathetic towards Humfrey, suggests the same conclusion: rather than being perceived as a manifesto for a particular future policy, such a biography was a homage to a king who all could agree had presided over English greatness.26 In other words, if the Duke of Gloucester imagined that the production of Frulovisi’s biography would provide a pointed weapon for his political arsenal, he may have found he ended up with nothing sharper than a paper knife. More likely, however, Humfrey agreed to commission the work with a general realization that such an act would reflect his generosity or magnificence. His involvement, as Frulovisi might like us to believe, may have been little more than that, although scholars usually assume that the duke took time to narrate the events of

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more than twenty-five years earlier to his historian. Unsurprisingly, Frulovisi makes no mention of such oral history as a source for his work; instead, he says that his biography was based on gathering together (conquistis) all the monuments of the late king’s deeds.27 Perhaps, then, Humfrey’s involvement extended to providing his secretary with a book allowance. Unfortunately, none of those sources, though they can be identified, can be traced to Humfrey’s library.28 However, we do have codicological evidence for Frulovisi’s reading of at least one other manuscript that belonged to the duke: it involves a Florentine codex of Bruni’s translations of Plutarch’s Lives.29 This manuscript includes not just running heads and a contents list by Frulovisi; it also has repeated textual corrections written in his hand. Incidentally, as well as a series of later English gothic hands, this codex includes a note by Antonio Beccaria, Frulovisi’s successor as Humfrey’s secretary. In fact, Beccaria’s script appears more often in Humfrey’s manuscripts than does Frulovisi’s. Beccaria was the ducal servant apparently responsible for carrying out Humfrey’s correspondence with the Milanese humanist Pier Candido Decembrio; the result of this contact was not only the dedication of Decembrio’s translation of Plato’s Republic to that philosopher-prince, Humfrey, but also the provision for the duke’s library of various classical and humanist works. Several of the resulting manuscripts survive and in some, while the evidence for Humfrey’s interest is confined to the fly-leaves, there are marginalia by Beccaria.30 It is as if the duke’s book-buying habits were directed by the literary tastes of his secretary. This is not to suggest that only émigré Italians made use of Humfrey’s library at Greenwich; English members of his household like Thomas Bekynton could use the duke’s manuscripts to compile their own formularies.31 A much wider audience, however, was not achieved until after the books left the ducal court: in some cases this was in 1444 when Humfrey’s third donation to Oxford University included several humanist manuscripts; in others it was after Humfrey’s death in 1447 when his remaining collection entered royal hands, was quickly, if improperly, dispersed by the appointed administrators, and a remnant entered the library of the new royal foundation of King’s College, Cambridge.32 Ironically, those manuscripts that followed the uncertain path of dispersal and private ownership have a higher survival rate than those presented to Oxford or, indeed, to Cambridge. This, it should be added, owes much to the deprivations suffered by institutional libraries in the middle of the sixteenth century when, in the name of new learning and religious zeal, previous generations’ human-

Humanism before the Tudors 29

ist interests were disparaged and destroyed. Tudor humanism turned its back on the English tradition of humanist reading.33 To that tradition of humanist reading we will turn in a moment, but first I should clarify the implications of this discussion of Humfrey and ‘his’ scholars. At least one contemporary, the English translator of Palladius, did provide a somewhat idiosyncratic list of authors whom he considered as forming a circle around Humfrey.34 But what, it might be questioned, is a circle if not a figure nought? The duke, on my submission, did not stand at the cultural centre, presiding over the productions of ‘his’ scholars; his patronage transcended mere details. For him, the political use of appearing a learned patron was the general, magnificent image it created; any particular commission would have limited political impact. The circle – if such it was – was created by those scholars gravitating around the ducal figure, and those on the circumference defined the persona of the centre-point. However, in this, it should be stressed, Humfrey’s patronage is not atypical: this example stands for many incidents of noble or royal patronage in Renaissance Europe. To give just one parallel which is not inapposite: at Henry VII’s court, his grex poetarum (‘flock of poets’) hardly needed a sheep-dog to cajole them to the pen; they sought out his patronage rather than being called to his feet.35 All that was required of the royal patron was that he showed his indulgence of their presence by occasional financial reward. They, in turn, would write flattering phrases, though ones which might respond to their own interests rather than his. So, for instance, Henry may have named his first son Arthur with his British pedigree in mind, but poets like Pietro Carmeliano preferred to write of him in the classicizing terms of a New Golden Age.36 In other words, few noble patrons wished to be a presiding genius, a Philip Sidney avant la lettre; few aristocrats thought it necessary to be as personally engaged as Sidney has been claimed to be.37 If, however, Humfrey’s activities are fairly typical of aristocratic patronage, he was not, of course, exemplary of English humanist interest. While he might not have paid much attention to his manuscripts, others certainly did. In some cases, the readers may not even have been aware that the manuscript they perused had such an august provenance – the dispersal of his library after Humfrey’s death often involved the erasing of his ex-libris.38 In Oxford, with its single largest collection of his books, more respect was shown; scholars like Thomas Gascoygne recorded his beneficence, while scribes copied the dedications as well as the texts from his humanist manuscripts (and, sometimes, if rarely, they transcribed the dedication alone).39 Yet Oxford’s

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good manners to its benefactor should not mislead us: as we shall see, the tradition of humanist interest that centred on the university did not feed off Humfrey’s codices alone; nor, indeed, was ‘Oxford humanism’ the only brand available in mid-fifteenth-century England. It may have been the market leader, exporting its interest, for example, to the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, but it did not hold a monopoly. Nor was this, it should be added, humanist interest as it might be defined for the next century. The reception of humanism has sometimes been examined as the institutional adoption of the studia humanitatis as a course of study.40 If this were the test, fifteenth-century ‘humanism’ would have to take re-sits. Particular foreign visitors, like Stefano Surigone or Cornelio Vitelli, might teach Latin (and Greek) after the humanist fashion; individual home-grown teachers like John Anwykyll might emulate humanist grammar; but there was no curricular overhaul in Oxford in these years.41 The tale of such institutional changes is, indeed, the domain of historians of Tudor humanism; in contrast, the fifteenth century suggests how humanist interest could survive without educational reform. It was an interest that thrived within institutions but was not institutional. This is to say that if the studia humanitatis is defined as a particular school curriculum, it was largely absent from fifteenth-century England; but if the term is taken as a shorthand for the preoccupations of an intellectual avant-garde, then Englishmen were patently aware of and responsive to that agenda. The Italians’ agenda was also one that reformed itself from generation to generation; similarly, the enduring fashion of humanist interest in England underwent repeated transformation. Let us, as it were, freeze the frame and focus on one of those moments in the cycle of fashion. In mid-century Oxford, works that had been presented to Humfrey were enjoying a particular vogue, with selections copied into what might be called humanist samplers. I have elsewhere discussed one such compilation which survives in several copies – what I have called the ‘Virtue and Vice’ collection.42 We do not know who compiled that collection but, in another case, we can put a name to a fascicule. The character is John Manyngham, registrar of the university between 1447 and 1451; from his activities in these years two manuscripts survive.43 Manyngham is unusual in that he had these codices compiled not for personal use but for presentation to particular figures; in other ways, however, Manyngham may be taken as exemplifying the dominant strand of mid-century humanist interest. Of the two manuscripts, the earlier is a collection mainly of humanist texts presented to John Tiptoft, recently created Earl of Worcester.44

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Slightly later is a codex presented to Reginald Boulers, even more recently created Bishop of Hereford.45 Common to both manuscripts was a Latin version of a pseudo-Platonic text, the Axiochus, complete with the preface of the original humanist translator, but with, in both cases, the wording altered so that the address is redirected to the new dedicatee.46 In the case of Boulers, the association of a text counselling equanimity in the face of death with a man who had attracted the unfriendly attentions of the 1450 rebels may seem less than tactful, but the choice of this work suggests how some readers responded enthusiastically to the moralism inherent in many humanist works. Such a memento mori also had an enduring interest; one morbid Catholic reader of the sixteenth century wrote in the Boulers manuscript that to have the image of death before one’s eyes was the repeated advice of that most holy martyr, John Fisher.47 For us, the Axiochus has another relevance: there is no evidence that Humfrey owned a copy. Indeed, in the case of this and several of the texts in Tiptoft’s manuscript, they appear to derive from a manuscript that circulated in Oxford at the beginning of the 1440s and which was also copied by a scribe for William Gray, the future Bishop of Ely.48 That is to say, while Humfrey’s collection probably provided a large proportion of the humanist texts available in Oxford, his manuscripts were not the only source. So, for example, the volume presented to Boulers opened with a copy of Petrarch’s Secretum, a dialogue which Humfrey had certainly owned and presented to the university; but, equally, there were other copies available which could have acted as Manyngham’s prototype.49 There has been a tendency speculatively to trace the origins of as many copies of humanist works as possible back to Humfrey’s library; this is one temptation – or one aspect of the lure of magnate attraction – that we should particularly strive to resist. If, as I am suggesting, one reason for the popularity of humanist works was the moralistic (some might say ‘medieval’) element inherent in them, it did not provide the only impulse to reading these fashionable texts. While a dialogue like the Axiochus might favour inner contemplation, other works popular in England in the mid-fifteenth century suggest a more political understanding of the studia humanitatis. This is particularly marked in the first pages of the compilation Manyngham presented to John Tiptoft: the volume opens with Leonardo Bruni’s translation of Xenophon’s Hiero (a dialogue on the woes that befall a tyrant), followed by Guarino da Verona’s translation of Isocrates’ Nicocles (an oration on good kingship). These advice-forprinces texts proved popular in fifteenth-century England, with the only abnormality in this manuscript being the choice of humanist

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translation of Isocrates: the English reception of that author more usually (but, in European terms, atypically) focused on the translations of Lapo da Castiglionchio, who had sent a copy of his versions to Humfrey.50 The next item in Tiptoft’s volume is even more striking: it is an emended version of Giovanni Aurispa’s translation of a Dialogue of the Dead by Lucian.51 In Aurispa’s rendition, Alexander, Hannibal and Scipio argue their relative merits before Minos, with the judge of the underworld declaring that Scipio takes the palm. In Manyngham’s version, however, the competition attracts a late entrant (in all senses): before Minos can make his decision, Henry V interjects. He, in his turn, accuses all the speakers of being tyrants, unlike him who was fighting merely for his right; they suffered ignominious deaths, unlike him who died among friends; they left no worthy heir, unlike him who was succeeded by the glorious Henry VI. Faced with such reasoning, Minos could not but accord him victory. If this addition had been written, as was once thought, before 1440, perhaps it could be considered misguided optimism and accounted an early example of literary nationalism to be placed alongside the myriad examples spawned by Tudor humanism.52 However, as, instead, the codicological evidence makes it clear that this addendum was composed for Manyngham’s manuscript in 1450 or 1451, the addition becomes more problematic.53 Can this simply be a tour de force of wishful thinking? Or is this, in its incongruity, a means of covertly criticizing the present regime? This curious addition is remarkable for two reasons. First, in its political topicality it is unusual, though certainly not unique: there are other instances when a humanist text is adopted or adapted for specific political purposes.54 More often, a reader notes the contemporary relevance of a text; indeed, it may be that the troubled politics of the 1450s and 1460s spurred Englishmen to read such specific lessons into the works before them. So, to give one example, in his copy of the latinized Lives by Plutarch, James Goldwell, Bishop of Norwich, repeatedly comments on passages referring to civil discord. Against a passage in the Life of Coriolanus, he writes ‘note the danger of civil discord’; and in the Life of Camillus, where it is explained that Rome avoided internal strife by turning such hatreds against external enemies, Goldwell thinks he has hit upon sage advice: his marginal note reads: ‘Englishman, you should do likewise.’55 Yet, for all their interest, such topical readings are in the minority; instead, it was more common for works to be read and noted for their general political advice. This, I would suggest, was the dominant trend of humanist reading in the fifteenth century, but it was by no means the only one. And this brings

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us to the second way in which Manyngham’s compilation stands out: it was an example of political humanism presented to a man whose literary interests were rarely political. For John Tiptoft provides our second example of a nobleman whose humanist interests are out of the ordinary.56 The Earl of Worcester, I should stress, was no second Duke of Gloucester. In birth and political pretensions, Tiptoft was no match for Humfrey: nor, consequently, was he as big game for those intrepid patronage-hunters, the humanists. Yet, if he differed in nobility of birth, he also contrasted by virtue of his inclinations. While we have little proof of Humfrey’s reading, there can be no doubt that Tiptoft perused his manuscripts, regularly drawing a distinctive pointing-hand in the margins.57 Again, while political engagement was Humfrey’s family duty, Tiptoft preferred, at least for a time, to remove himself from the tense arena of Henry VI’s court. With a timeliness which perhaps suggests he was impelled as much by self-preservation as higher devotion, the Earl of Worcester took himself on pilgrimage and, returning from the Holy Land, broke his journey in Italy. He remained there from 1458 to 1461, spending most of his time at Padua but also managing to visit Ferrara before the revered pedagogue, Guarino da Verona, died. He was not, of course, the only Englishman to sit at Guarino’s feet: the list of his fellow pupils, including William Gray, John Free and Robert Flemyng, may sound like a roll-call of early English humanists – not surprisingly, as this was how they were remembered in the sixteenth century by men like John Leland.58 But here, as in other respects, the Tudor memory was wilfully selective. Guarino’s was hardly a household name in England, despite John Free’s claim to that effect.59 Indeed it is striking that Guarino’s works received a relatively small circulation in this country – a fine example of the general point made earlier that English interest centred on Florentine authors at the expense of other humanists. Guarino’s English reputation was, it would seem, less as an author than as a teacher.60 Those fortunate enough to hear Guarino teach (if fortunate is the right word, considering John Free’s hurried lecture notes) were not the sum-total of Englishmen interested in the studia humanitatis, nor even were they the majority. Theirs was just one approach to appreciating the new learning.61 Guarino’s pupils differ from their less well-travelled compatriots in another respect: the interests of this circle were notably unpolitical.62 So John Free, for example, presented two works to his patron John Tiptoft; the first was a set of now-lost poems celebrating an eternal

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truth, the virtues of wine; the second was a Latin translation of a recherché text by Synesius of Cyrene of which the English title (as given in its Tudor translation) is A Paradoxe proving … that Baldness is much better than Bushie Haire. One wonders whether Free undertook his translation with a nod to his patron’s pate.63 With such works, it could be criticized, we see a flight to belles-lettres, an interest in translating for translation’s sake rather than for the moral or political messages it could teach. If this is the case, though, it should be added that such productions were not necessarily out of step with their Italian hosts: Tiptoft was also, for instance, presented with Latin translations by Ognibene da Lonigo and Francesco Griffolini, the first of Xenophon’s little tract on hunting, the second of Lucian’s ekphrasis of the Calumny of Apelles. So John Free’s choice of text might not reflect as much a peculiarly English dilettante streak as a wider cultural shift in humanist productions; the generation of scholars to which Free belonged found themselves the heirs of a tradition of humanist translation – a tradition that left them with the choice of attempting to better a rendition made by one of their predecessors or selecting instead something rarer but as yet untranslated. What is more, it is worth remembering that for all their new found frivolity such works served a serious and timehonoured purpose: the pursuit of money. Whatever the text translated, the production of a Latin version proved one’s scholarly credentials – it demonstrated that one had learnt what we are now taught to call ‘transferable skills’. And transfer their humanist training to political use some of this circle certainly did. Concentration on John Free, who died young, is liable to overlook that others of this group, like John Gunthorp, outgrew this phase: Gunthorp was employed as a diplomat, producing orations with an impressive grasp of the Italianate fashion for Ciceronian Latin.64 Less positively, of course, contemporaries would have pointed to the political career of John Tiptoft himself; as he climbed the scaffold in 1470, the crowd bayed for his blood, accusing him of introducing the law of Padua in the summary justice he had meted out to dissident Lancastrians. This has been glossed as an instance of humanism ruthlessly being applied to Realpolitik, but we should not be over-hasty to term Tiptoft a pretended Renaissance prince, steeped in culture but short on morality.65 Indeed, his learned interests may suggest that Tiptoft can exemplify how the ‘literary’ and ‘moral’ readings of humanist works could coexist – if, that is, he wrote the English translation of Buonaccorso’s De nobilitate usually attributed to him. It has recently been questioned whether Tiptoft was a translator at all; the

Humanism before the Tudors 35

alternative proposed being William Worcestre, Sir John Fastolf’s longsuffering servant.66 Perhaps misattribution of his works should be accounted another indignity that William has suffered, but if the translation is misattributed, it is a mistake that happened early. It was William Caxton who, in printing the dialogue, attributed it to the ‘right vertuous and noble Erle’ who (he declared elsewhere) ‘in his tyme flowred in vertue and cunnyng to whom I knewe none lyke emonge the lordes of the temporalite in science and moral vertue’. 67 Perhaps, indeed, this is the most significant point: that Caxton, ever the salesman, wished to associate the work with a well-known name. He too could not resist the pull of magnate attraction. It should be added that, whoever translated De nobilitate, the curiosity lies not so much in selecting a text which was conventional in its moralism as in considering English a worthy tongue for its rendition.68 Fifteenth-century Englishmen faced with a humanist text rarely felt the urge (to which their Spanish contemporaries, for example, were particularly prone) to reduce its Latin to the vernacular.69 Indeed, the fifteenth-century tradition of humanist interest was overwhelmingly Latin-based. In being so, it stood out from both the immediate past and the dominant ‘English Renaissance’ future, as is reflected in the changing English fortunes of Petrarch. For Wyatt and Surrey, as for Chaucer before them, their point of contact with him was his volgare verses. In the fifteenth century, by contrast, Petrarch was read in Latin (or, sometimes, French); on the only two occasions when he was put into English, in each case the translation was of a Latin prose work, and in each case the version survives in a single manuscript.70 Such general insouciance to promoting the mother tongue might, with hindsight, appear a failure – but, if it were, it was one shared by the early quattrocento humanists themselves. For, the classicizing agenda of the studia humanitatis was predominantly a Latin agenda. In other words, the English concentration on reading and writing Latin texts was in line with their Italian humanist contemporaries; it only appears out of step if judged by the alien standards of the sixteenth century. This is not to suggest that an iron curtain – or a veil of ignorance – falls between the subject of this chapter and that of the following contributions. Technological, cultural and social innovations did transform the humanist tradition, in both England and Italy, at the turn of the century: the impact of print, for example, or changes in diplomatic practice.71 However, the period I have described is by no means a hermetically sealed unit; that chapter in history does not, as it were,

36 David Rundle

end with the imminent last sentence of this chapter. Tudor humanism shares similarities with and continuities from the fifteenth-century tradition. For instance, the nature of patronage was certainly altered by the advent of print, but it remained fundamentally centred upon the author rather than the patron: this might be the lesson to be drawn, for instance, from Gian Matteo Giberti’s dealings with Henry VIII.72 Again, the English humanists of the first decades of the sixteenth century – figures like Richard Pace – provide a continuum of the Latinate tradition I have described.73 Nor did the vitality of Latin die with the Reformation, though equally, it perhaps came to be perceived in certain circles as conservative – as, if you will, an unEnglish activity.74 It was hardly a subtle manoeuvre of English-writing Protestants to define themselves in terms of a mythology of Englishness, but it provided a petty nationalism absent from the fifteenth-century tradition.75 This, though, is not to deny that characters like John Manyngham could appropriate a text to a particular English situation, just as his sixteenth-century successors did with Aristotle’s Politics.76 However, the subjects of the English monarch could also be citizens of the res publica litterarum: any particularism sat alongside or, rather, within a capacious tradition of cosmopolitanism.77 This cosmopolitan character was no creation of Tudor humanism: engagement and responsiveness were as much features of the fifteenth century, if, that is, we look beyond the often misinterpreted instances of noble patronage and focus instead on the less exalted readers, and authors, of humanist texts. Though geographically distant from the fulcrum of the studia humanitatis, Englishmen were complicit in that agenda: they were willing executors of the humanist enterprise.

Notes 1 R. Wolkan, ed., Der Briefwechsel des Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, i, part 1 (Vienna, 1909), no. 143, p. 325. 2 J. Leland, Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, ed. A. Hall (Oxford, 1709), pp. 437, 442–3. 3 The seminal work on the fifteenth century remains R. Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1941). 4 On Moleyns generally, see A. B. Emden, Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford, 1957–59), sub nomine. On his literary accomplishments, see Weiss, Humanism in England, pp. 80–3. 5 Leland, Commentarii, p. 454 includes ‘Adamus Molendinus’ on the basis of a reference in a letter of Hermann Schedel which I can not find in his published correspondence (P. Joachimsohn, ed., Hermann Schedels Briefwechsel

Humanism before the Tudors 37

6

7

8

9

10

11 12

13

14

15

(1452–1478) (Tübingen, 1893). Leland could also have quoted Poggio Bracciolini’s allusion to this humanissimus atque ornatissimus vir : E. Walser, Poggius Florentinus (Berlin, 1914), p. 454. I intend to explain and develop the general points made in the next few sentences in a book-length study of Italian humanism as a European phenomenon. For Paul Oskar Kristeller’s influential definition of the studia humanitatis as a curriculum, see his ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’ in (for example) Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (New York, 1961), pp. 92–119. See, however, B. Kohl, ‘The Changing Concept of Studia Humanitatis in the Early Renaissance’, Renaissance Studies, VI (1992) 185–209. There were humanists, for example, who attempted to gain Henry VI’s patronage – a thankless task. On this, see D. Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants: Aspects of Quattrocento Humanist Writings and their Reception in England, c. 1400–c. 1460’ (DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1997), pp. 232–3. Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 102–58. On Humfrey’s relations with humanists, see in particular A. Sammut, Unfredo duca di Gloucester e gli umanisti italiani (Padua, 1980). L. Mehus, ed., Leonardi Bruni … Epistolarum libri (Florence, 1740), no. II/18 (renumbered by F. Luiso, Studi su l’epistolario di L. Bruni (Rome, 1980) as II/25 and tentatively dated to February–March 1408); leaving aside the troublesome possibility that vir egregius Thomas Britannus could allude to a Breton, a possible identification is made at Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, p. 66n. On Bildeston’s humanist interests, see Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. H. Harth, i (Florence, 1983), no. 48 and, for discussion, D. Rundle, ‘Two Unnoticed Manuscripts from the Collection of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester: Part II’, Bodleian Library Record, XVI (1998) 299–313. On Barzizza generally, see R. Mercer, The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza (London, 1979). The York manuscript is now London, British Library, MS Harleian 2268 (i); its copy is BL, MS Cotton Tiberius B. vi; both of these are discussed in detail in Rundle, ‘Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 80–7, 393–414. W. Boutcher, ‘Pilgrimage to Parnassus: Local Intellectual Traditions, Humanist Education and the Cultural Geography of Sixteenth-Century England’, in Pedagogy and Power, ed. N. Livingstone and Y. L. Too (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 110–47. For later interest in Barzizza, see (for instance) Oxford, Balliol College, MS 132 and, a transcription of it, Winchester, Winchester College, MS 41, as well as the Christ Church, Canterbury manuscript, now Tokyo, Imperial University Library, MS A. 100. 1300. For other formularies, see, for example, the list of speeches at the front flyleaf of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 9. 8, or the collection of speeches copied by John Rybow at Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 218, fols 149–78. D. Rundle, ‘On the Difference between Virtue and Weiss: Humanist Texts in England During the Fifteenth Century’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital, ed. D. Dunn (Stroud, 1996), pp. 181–203, at pp. 195–7; the issue – and a parallel case of a plagiarized text being presented to Humfrey – is discussed further in Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 142–8, 188–93.

38 David Rundle 16 Weiss, Humanism in England, p. 41. 17 There is now a biography of Frulovisi by G. Arbizzoni in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1960– ), i, pp. 646–50; the seminal work remains R. Sabbadini, ‘Tito Livio Frulovisi’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CIII (1934) 55–81. See also C. Previté-Orton, Opera Hactenus inedita T. Livii de Frulovisiis (Cambridge, 1932); Weiss, Humanism in England, pp. 41–8, and contrast H. Jocelyn, ‘The Two Comedies of Tito Livio de’ Frulovisi Allegedly Written in England’, Studi umanistici piceni, XII (1992) 135–42; and G. A. Smith, ‘Frulovisi, Humanist Writer: A Career Abandoned’, Fifteenth Century Studies, XXIV (1998) 231–41. 18 T. L. Frulovisi, Vita Henrici Quinti, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1716); The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth, ed. C. Kingsford (Oxford, 1911). Both are discussed by A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England (London, 1982), ii, pp. 210–13, 217–19. 19 Duke Humfrey and English Humanism (Oxford, 1970), pp. 3–4 and cf. pl. xxi (hand of Simon Aylward). 20 R. Weiss, ‘Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and Tito Livio Frulovisi’, in Fritz Saxl: Memorial Essays, ed. D. J. Gordon (London, 1957), pp. 218–27. 21 For the context, see J. A. Doig, ‘Propaganda, Public Opinion and the Siege of Calais in 1436’, in Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. Archer (Stroud, 1995), pp. 79–106. 22 T. Rymer, Foedera (The Hague, 1745), x, pp. 661–2; this job description of 7 March 1437 may suggest that the Humfrois, the only poetic composition of Frulovisi’s time with Humfrey, was written before that date; perhaps, indeed, Frulovisi presented it to Humfrey in a bid to enter his favour. 23 Weiss’ hypothesis (‘Humphrey and Frulovisi’, p. 222) that the copy of Frulovisi’s De republica that Humfrey gave to Oxford may have included a copy of the Humfrois (followed by Sammut, Unfredo, p. 81, no. 241) cannot be substantiated. Weiss assumed that as the sole surviving copy of the Humfrois in Seville, Biblioteca Colombina, MS 7/2/23 is preceded by De republica, a similar arrangement would have occurred in Humfrey’s copy. However, the two items in the Seville manuscript form separate fascicules. The Humfrois is clearly intended for an Italian audience, with its marginal explanations of the barbara nomina (fol. 64). 24 Frulovisi, Vita, p. 2. 25 The copy was itself later transcribed as BL, MS Cotton Claudius E. iii, fols 334–55. On Stafford more generally, see E. F. Jacob, ‘Archbishop John Stafford’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., XII (1962) 1–23. 26 The Pseudo-Elmham was edited by T. Hearne, Vita et gesta Henrici Quinti (Oxford, 1727). On Hungerford, see J. S. Roskell et al., The House of Commons, 1386–1421 (Stroud, 1992), iii, pp. 446–53. On Henry V’s posthumous reputation, see D. Morgan, ‘The Household Retinue of Henry V and the Ethos of English Public Life’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. A. Curry and E. Matthew (London, 2000), pp. 64–79. 27 Frulovisi, Vita, p. 2. 28 Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 210–13. 29 BL, MS Harleian 3426, on which see Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School, 1488–1988 (Oxford, 1988), no. 37, and (for Frulovisi’s intervention), Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 415–20.

Humanism before the Tudors 39 30 On Humfrey and Decembrio, see Sammut, Unfredo, pp. 29–44. For an example of a manuscript annotated by Beccaria (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS latin 7805), see A. C. de la Mare, ‘Manuscripts Given to the University of Oxford by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’, Bodleian Library Record, XIII (1988–9) 30–51 and 112–21, at pp. 115–18. 31 For example, Bekynton copied letters relating to Decembrio’s Plato translation into his formulary, now Oxford, Bodleian, MS Ashmole 789, fols 218–19. 32 On the donations to Oxford, see Sammut, Unfredo, pp. 60–84, and A. C. de la Mare, ‘Manuscripts Given to the University of Oxford’. On the dispersal of the remaining library after the duke’s death, see Rundle ‘Two Unnoticed Manuscripts … Part II’. 33 For recent discussion of the impact of the visitations, see A. G. Watson, ‘The Post-Medieval Library’, in J. Catto et al., Unarmed Soldiery: Studies in the Early History of All Souls College (Oxford, 1996), pp. 65–91, at pp. 70–3. Cf. Nigel Ramsay’s chapter in J. Raven, Lost Libraries (forthcoming). 34 E. P. Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (New York, 1965), p. 205, quoted for example by D. Carlson, ‘The Civic Poetry of Abbot John Whethamstede of St. Albans († 1465)’, Mediaeval Studies, LXI (1999) 205–42, at p. 227. 35 On the grex poetarum, see in particular the works of David Carlson: ‘Politicizing Tudor Court Literature: Gaguin’s Embassy and Henry VII’s Humanists’ Response’, Studies in Philology, LXXXV (1988) 279–304, and his English Humanist Books (Toronto, 1993), esp. pp. 60–1. 36 D. Carlson, ‘King Arthur and Court Poems for the Birth of Arthur Tudor in 1486’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, XXXVI (1987) 147–83. 37 The arch-priest of the cult of Sidney in the twentieth century was J. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London, 1954). Note also the contrast in attitude to writing discussed by D. Carlson, ‘Morley’s Translations from Roman Philosophers and English Courtier Literature’, in ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, ed. M. Axton and J. P. Carley (London, 2000), pp. 131–51. 38 On this, see my forthcoming chapter in Raven, Lost Libraries. 39 On Gascoygne, see Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School, p. 49; on the copying of texts, see ibid., pp. 87–97, noting that Oxford, Bodleian, MS Auct. F. 6. 2 (Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School, no. 83) includes only Bruni’s dedication of the Politics to Humfrey, not the work itself. 40 The classic statement of this is D. Hay, ‘England and the Humanities in the Fifteenth Century’, in his Renaissance Essays (London, 1988), pp. 169–231, an article which fittingly first appeared in the Kristeller festschrift Itinerarium Italicum, ed. H. Oberman et al. (Leiden, 1975). 41 On Surigone, see Weiss, Humanism in England, pp. 138–9 and his ‘Humanism at Oxford’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 1937, p. 28. On Vitelli, see C. Clough, ‘Thomas Linacre, Cornelio Vitelli and Humanistic Studies at Oxford’, in Linacre Studies: Essays on the Life and Works of Thomas Linacre, c. 1460–1534, ed. F. Maddison et al. (Oxford, 1977), pp. 1–23. On Anwykyll, see C. Blackwell, ‘Niccolò Perotti in England – Part I’, Res Publica Litterarum, V (1982) 13–28. 42 Rundle, ‘Virtue and Weiss’, pp. 199–201.

40 David Rundle 43 On Manyngham, see Emden, Biographical Register; W. O’Sullivan, ‘John Manyngham: An Early Oxford Humanist’, Bodleian Library Record, VII (1962) 28–39. 44 Now Dublin, Trinity College, MS 438, on which see M. L. Colker, Trinity College, Dublin. Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Latin Manuscripts (Dublin, 1991), ii, pp. 867–70, with further discussion in Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 348–54. 45 Now Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 336A; for a description see Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 312–15. On Boulers generally, see Emden, Biographical Register; on his fortunes in 1450, see I. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion (Oxford, 1991), pp. 34, 64, 66, 128; and P. Johnson, Duke Richard of York (Oxford, 1988), pp. 83–4. 46 The changes to Cencio da Rusticci’s preface have received comment in, for example, N. Mann, ‘Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles’, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, XVIII (1975) 139–509, at pp. 151–2, but that a similar procedure has occurred in the Dublin manuscript has not previously received comment. 47 Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 336A, fol. 15v: sanctissimus ille martyr Iohannes Fissierus Episcopus Roffensis suos admonere solitus ut omnis meditatio colloquia essent de morte Effigiem mortis prae oculis habere nonihil ferat. 48 Oxford, Balliol College, MS 315, on which see R. A. B. Mynors, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College, Oxford (Oxford, 1963), pp. 332–3; Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School, pp. 87–8, no. 70; Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 431–3. On Gray generally, the best work remains Mynors’ introduction to his Catalogue, pp. xxiv–xlv. 49 Sammut, Unfredo, p. 79, no. 223, is Humfrey’s copy; in 1450, perhaps in London, Theoderic Werken transcribed a copy of the Secretum for Richard Bole, which is now Oxford, Balliol College, MS 127, fols 5–66. 50 On Isocrates’ fortuna generally, see L. Gualdo Rosa, La fede nella paideia (Rome, 1984); on Isocrates in England in the early sixteenth century see Alan Stewart’s contribution to this volume. On Lapo’s relations with Humfrey, see Sammut, Unfredo, pp. 26–7, 165–71; his Isocrates translations, sent to Humfrey with his original dialogue, the Comparatio studiorum et rei militaris, and probably given to Oxford in 1444, are perhaps to be identified with item no. 232 in Sammut, Unfredo, p. 80; they were copied into the ‘Virtue and Vice’ collection: see Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 434–41. 51 On Aurispa’s translation, see R. Förster, ‘Zur Schriftstellerei des Libanios’, Jahrbücher für classische Philologie, CXIII (1876) 209–25; D. Cast, ‘Aurispa, Petrarch and Lucian: An Aspect of Renaissance Translation’, Renaissance Quarterly, XXVII (1974) 157–73. Manyngham’s addition is printed by O’Sullivan, ‘Manyngham’, pp. 37–9. 52 A. Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity (Cambridge, 1994). 53 For the evidence to date this addition to 1450–1, see Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 351–2. The pre-1440 dating (and the improbable identification of Frulovisi as author) was suggested by Weiss (Humanism, 3rd edn, 1957, p. 197) to O’Sullivan (‘Manyngham’, pp. 36–7). 54 For example, Thomas Bekynton invoked a passage from Petrarch in his De Iure Regum Anglorum; on this, see N. Mann, ‘La prima fortuna del Petrarca in

Humanism before the Tudors 41

55

56 57

58

59

60

61 62 63 64

65

66

67 68

69

Inghilterra’, in Il Petrarca ad Arquà, ed. G. Billanovich and G. Frasso (Padua, 1975), pp. 279–89, at pp. 283–4 and also his ‘Petrarch’s Role in Humanism’, Apollo, XCIV (1971) 176–83, at p. 179. Oxford, New College, MS 286, fols 179v (nota periculum intestine seditionis) and 127v (anglice tu quoque fac simile); I must thank Professor A. C. de la Mare for drawing my attention to these marginal comments. A parallel example of ‘topical’ reading is the vogue for copies of Sallust in the third quarter of the fifteenth century; see, in particular, Oxford, Balliol College, MS 258. For Tiptoft’s biography, see R. Mitchell, John Tiptoft (London, 1938). On this, see A. C. de la Mare’s comments in Manuscripts at Oxford: An Exhibition in Memory of R. W. Hunt (Oxford, 1980), pp. 99–101, and Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School, pp. 70–80. Leland’s ‘Instauratio bonarum litterarum’ is printed and discussed by H. Hudson, ‘John Leland’s List of Early English Humanists’, Huntington Library Quarterly, II (1939) 301–4. For Free’s comment that Guarino’s name was in ore omnium qui Anglie fines colunt see J. E. Spingarn, ‘Unpublished Letters of an English Humanist’, Journal of Comparative Literature, I (1903) 47–65, at p. 61. Guarino’s best-known work in England was his contribution to the Scipio/Caesar controversy; in some cases, the controversy was copied incompletely, ending with his contribution: see Seville, Biblioteca Colombina, MS 5/5/28, fols 49–69. On Guarino’s teaching, see A. Grafton and L. Jardine, ‘Humanism and the School of Guarino’, Past and Present, XCVI (1982) 51–80. A possible exception to this is Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 218, discussed in Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 262–3 and 448–51. On Free, see R. Mitchell, John Free (London, 1955). The 1579 English translation by Abraham Fleming is STC, no. 23,603. Gunthorp’s orations survive in Oxford, Bodleian, MS Bod. 587, fols 73–87 and are partially edited by P. Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, Part I (London, 1982), i, pp. 234–53. See also M. Lowry, ‘The Arrival and Use of Continental Printed Books in Yorkist England’, in Le livre dans l’Europe de la Renaissance, ed. P. Aquilon and H. J. Martin (Paris, 1988), pp. 449–59. I discuss this further in ‘Was There a Renaissance Style of Politics in Fifteenth-Century England?’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England, ed. S. J. Gunn and G. Bernard (forthcoming). A. Sutton and L. Visser-Fuchs, ‘Richard III’s Books: XII. William Worcestre’s Boke of Noblesse’, The Ricardian, IX (1991) 154–65, at pp. 160–1. A difficulty with this suggestion could be that Worcestre in his original work, the Boke of Noblesse, mentions De nobilitate but muddles up the speakers – a schoolboy error one would have hoped the dialogue’s translator would not make. W. J. B. Crotch, ed., The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton (London, 1928), pp. 44–7. On the conventionality of Buonaccorso’s work, see M. Keen, ‘Some Late Medieval Ideas about Nobility’, in his Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms (London, 1996), pp. 187–207. For some sense of the comparative interest in vernacular versions of humanist works, see the suggestive listing of translations of Bruni in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, ed. G. Griffiths et al. (Binghamton, 1987),

42 David Rundle

70

71 72

73

74

75 76 77

pp. 353–5 (noting that the two English manuscripts listed – both sixteenthcentury – represent distinct translations). For an introduction to Spanish humanism in the fifteenth century, see J. Lawrance, ‘Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula’, in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. A. Goodman and A. MacKay (London, 1990), pp. 220–58. The translations are of De remediis and the Secretum: F. Diekstra, A Dialogue between Reason and Adversity (Assen, 1968); E. Wilson, ed., The Winchester Anthology (Cambridge, 1981). On Petrarch’s fortuna generally, see Mann, ‘La prima fortuna’ and ‘Petrarch’s Role’. On this last point, see my essay in R. Bacchielli, ed., Polidoro Virgilio (forthcoming). On Giberti and Henry VIII’s library, see James Carley in this volume, chapter 5. More generally on the changes wrought by print, see Carlson, English Humanist Books. On this generation, see J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London, 1991); on Pace in particular, see Cathy Curtis, this volume, chapter 3. On the neo-Latin tradition, see J. W. Binns, this volume, chapter 9; on the conservatism of humanism in Lutheran eyes, see Alan Stewart, this volume, chapter 4. On John Foxe’s creation of a Protestant pre-history, see John King, this volume, chapter 8. On English readings of Aristotle, see Jonathan Woolfson, this volume, chapter 10. For an episode in this cosmopolitan history, see Warren Boutcher, this volume, chapter 12. See also J. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge, 1998).

3 Richard Pace’s De fructu and Early Tudor Pedagogy1 Cathy Curtis

The English humanist, cleric and diplomat Richard Pace was a close friend of Thomas More and Erasmus.2 Pace and More met on the road to Calais on 25 October 1515 and had a short conversation. In the wake of French victory at the battle of Marignano against the Swiss, Henry VIII hoped to work with the Emperor Maximilian I and buy Swiss soldiers in order to counteract the intrigues of the papal and French emissaries; and to this end Pace was journeying to Switzerland on a difficult and protracted diplomatic mission which would continue into late 1517. More was returning to England from the embassy on which he reputedly wrote the second book of Utopia.3 In late December 1517 or early in 1518, and only months after the first appearance of Utopia, Pace published De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (On the Fruits of a Liberal Education).4 Johann Froben, publisher of De fructu as well as the Basel edition of Utopia of 1518, praised Pace in a letter to More of November in that same year, placing him among those heroes of letters of the English humanist circle – Tunstall, Colet, Linacre, Latimer, Croke and Grocyn.5 Erasmus, however, achieved some success in his efforts to suppress the work between 1518 and 1520. He wrote from Louvain in early March 1518 that Pace had risked the wrath of the same theologians who had taken such exception to his own Praise of Folly, and had embarrassed him by portraying him as married to Lady Poverty because of the neglect of potential patrons in the English court.6 Erasmus wrote to More that he was filled with extreme discomfort and regret; citing Horace he likened De fructu to ‘sick men’s dreams’ in its incoherence, and from Lucian he borrowed the adage ‘cinders for gold’.7 Pace had mentioned Erasmus’ name so often – with kindly intent perhaps – but in such a way that an enemy could not have done 43

44 Cathy Curtis

him more harm.8 In further letters to Lord Mountjoy and Paolo Bombace in March 1518, Erasmus similarly denigrated the stylistic transgressions and uncharacteristic lack of judgement of De fructu, while praising the author and his scholarship.9 Erasmus informed his correspondents that he had taken measures to ensure that it would not be reprinted without revisions by the author and that he had prevented another of Pace’s works, a letter to Martin van Dorp, from reaching the press. He heartily wished that De fructu had not been printed, or else not under Pace’s name; and that in future Pace might confine himself to the safety of translations from the Greek. Erasmus wrote to Pace in October, however, that the book was being read avidly by the Germans, although some in Constance had been offended by being characterized as bereft of learning and fond of drinking.10 By 1520 at least, an Apologia ad Pacaeum was circulating in Germany and Switzerland, and Erasmus was placating the canon of Constance, John Botzheim; Pace should be excused because he was esteemed by Henry VIII and was the loyal supporter of Erasmus in the latter’s learned disputes with Edward Lee, the Dominicans and the theologians.11 Accepting Erasmus’ judgement, commentators of the twentieth century have been swift to criticize the apparent incoherence and disconcerting shifts in tone and diction of De fructu. Frank Manley and Richard Sylvester, who have produced the only modern printed edition, regard it as a ‘topsy-turvey book indeed, and where, through it all, is our learned humanist and royal secretary, Richard Pace?’12 They remark that the Latinity is at one moment extraordinarily lively and highly colloquial and at the next assumes a respectable Ciceronian eloquence.13 According to Alistair Fox, ‘Pace does not feel that a liberal education has any real utility at all’, and his Erasmianism, ‘if it existed at all, was only a thin veneer’.14 Edward Surtz acknowledged that Pace and Erasmus had no falling out over the trenchant criticism levelled at De fructu, and that Pace continued to be lauded as a man of letters. Erasmus’ objections ‘can be reduced to one: lack of judgement or prudence in Pace’, and do not touch the heart or substance of the text, but only discredit ‘the crude method and lifeless style’.15 Surtz concluded that the subject matter was not inaccurate, but rather that De fructu was badly written and constructed. George B. Parks, on the other hand, described the book as ‘a lively piece of writing which speaks well for Pace’s cultivation and literary sense, and may be read as an enlightened view of the learning of the time’.16 The unfavourable view has prevailed. After barely considering the contents of De fructu, Pace’s only biographer, Jervis Wegg, concluded that ‘it was not another Utopia’.17

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I have argued at length elsewhere that Erasmus’ hostility to De fructu stemmed only in part from aesthetic reservations.18 Pace gave support to Erasmus’ Greek New Testament and programme of humanist scriptural exegesis at a time when Erasmus had decided on a strategy of appeasement with the Louvain theological faculty in particular. Pace also transgressed the Erasmian rule neither to name names nor to descend to scurrility in his satirical and potentially libellous attacks on the papacy, clergy and courts of Europe. The expression of conciliarist opinion in De fructu, in the context of the schismatic Pisan-Milan Council and the failures of the Fifth Lateran Council, further disturbed the ever-cautious Erasmus. Most importantly, Pace appears to have claimed authorship – albeit obliquely – of one of the most notorious and frequently published satires of the sixteenth century, the anonymously issued Julius exclusus, which at that time was being attributed to Erasmus despite his vehement denials. I wish here to restrict myself to a consideration of Pace’s contribution to Tudor pedagogy, so long neglected, through which he hoped to effect reform in both the secular and the ecclesiastical realms. De fructu rewards attention because it is one of the earliest statements by an Englishman of humanist methods and theories of education, and is a mediating text between Italian humanism and Erasmianism. Furthermore, it is the first neo-Latin rhetorical handbook by a Renaissance Englishman – and one most unlike the later systematic codifications of rhetorical theory written in English by Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham and Thomas Farnaby.19 My discussion begins with the genesis and printing of De fructu. I then turn to consider De fructu as a textbook of the liberal arts, its encyclopaedic and Menippean form, and the traces left by readers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My remarks are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather illustrative of a fresh approach to De fructu, based on an understanding of the textual conventions upon which it rests.

St Paul’s Grammar School It has been well recognized that the educational ideas of Erasmus developed in association with Colet’s refounding of St Paul’s Grammar School in 1512.20 Erasmus wrote a number of works especially for use in the school, including the Concio de puero lesu, the reworked De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo and the De ratione studii, the two aforementioned dedicated to Colet.21 Erasmus had begun the De copia and De ratione studii in Italy and left drafts with Pace in Ferrara. William Lily, one of the earliest Greek scholars in England and

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appointed as first high master to St Paul’s, was probably commissioned to write a Latin syntax in English called the Grammaticis rudimenta. This grammar was later to be printed with Colet’s own Aeditio, a Latin accidence in English.22 Linacre also wrote a Latin grammar for the school, which Colet rejected as too advanced for his purposes. The statutes of St Paul’s may have referred to the teaching of Greek as well as Latin, but Colet did not intend the school to be ‘notably humanistic’, preferring to restrict the boys to explicitly Christian authors such as Lactantius, Prudentius and Probus.23 His conservative emphasis was on religious and ethical considerations despite Erasmus’ attestation to Colet’s breadth of interest in both humanist and scholastic texts.24 The amount of Greek that was actually taught in the early years, despite the provision of the statutes, was probably not great, and it appears from Pace’s prefatory letter to Colet in De fructu that Lily was restricted to bringing the Roman tongue to Britain.25 It was after Colet’s death, and presumably with the appointment of Pace as Dean of St Paul’s in 1519, that the curriculum was modernized.26 Lisa Jardine has argued that Utopia, particularly Cuthbert Tunstall’s ‘presentation’ copy bound with elementary classroom texts for the teaching of Greek and Hebrew, may have been associated with ‘the grooming of John Colet in Greek studies, which was at that time a project in which the group of friends (Tunstall, John Clement, More and Erasmus) was taking a lively interest’.27 Clement, a former pupil of St Paul’s and teacher in More’s household, tutored Colet in Greek in 1516. More himself was interested in the progress of the grammar school, supporting Colet against many conservative theologians and scholastics who were critical of the venture.28 De fructu was part of the same programme, I believe, commissioned for use at St Paul’s school by Erasmus on behalf of Colet. Not only designed to be a praelectio for students in the upper forms – that is, an introduction to the liberal arts as a preparation for the more advanced branches of philosophy and theology – the text was also an encouragement to Colet and his students to pursue Greek studies alongside Latin, and suggested as well the importance of Hebrew for biblical exegesis.29 It must be said, however, that the prefatory letter in De fructu to all professors of scientia, and the praise and blame of continental pedagogues, indicates an audience beyond England. It has been thought that Pace delivered an oration on the study of Greek at Venice in 1504, printed soon after by Froben at Basel, and this has tentatively been associated with the campaign of some of the friends of the Venice printer Aldo Manuzio in that year to promote the study of Greek.30 But

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it would seem that Wegg, noticing that the British Library copy of De fructu owned by Thomas Cranmer, and later Lord Lumley, was bound up with Scipio Catero’s Oratio de laudibus literarum Graecarum, mistook the latter for Pace’s own composition.31 Both texts were in fact issued by Froben in 1517 and were part of a Basel campaign orchestrated by Erasmus to promote the study of Greek in northern Europe more generally.32 Froben reissued a number of Aldine editions in these years for this purpose, including the Adagia of 1513, Aesop’s Fables, Theodore Gaza’s Greek grammar and Erasmus’ translations from Euripides. Catero’s Oratio and Pace’s De fructu are comparable in their praise of Greek as the basis of all the arts and sciences; in their recommendation of classical Greek authors, including the ancient commentators on Aristotle; and in their emphasis on the value of the Aldine editions. Both belong to that tradition of praising the study of Greek exemplified by Demetrius Chalcondylas’ oration at Padua of 1463.33 And what were Pace’s qualifications to attempt such a task? De fructu is an extended and self-conscious account of Pace’s education in Italy, a celebration of English humanism nourished south of the Alps. It was during this period that Pace first met Erasmus and studied with him. Such an education had equipped Pace to rise through the ranks of the civil service, as secretary for Latin and Italian letters to Cardinal Bainbridge in Rome, then into diplomatic service for Wolsey before becoming first secretary to Henry VIII, as the title-page informs the reader. Pace’s education, he tells us, had begun in the ‘domestic school’ of Thomas Langton, who valued the humanities so highly that he provided for the teaching of boys and youths in grammar and music privately at Wolvesley, his palace in Winchester.34 The bishop sent the musically gifted and academically promising Pace to study bonae literae (‘good letters’) at the University of Padua around 1498 when he was about fourteen years of age. When Langton died in 1501 his will bequeathed to Pace £10 a year for seven years’ further study in Italy.35 It appears that Abbot de Bere, much interested in the study of Greek, also assisted financially.36 Pace studied in the universities of Padua, Bologna and Ferrara under the supervision of famous humanist scholars and translators in the fields of Latin, Greek, rhetoric, medicine, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and the natural sciences – such as Niccolò Leonico Tomeo of Padua,37 Paolo Bombace of Bologna38 and Nicolò Leoniceno of Ferrara.39 Cuthbert Tunstall, William Latimer and John Clerk, along with Erasmus, are also cited as intellectual companions and teachers. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to detail Pace’s intellectual formation, but a few comments are apposite.40

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In his own published collections of translations, Pace reflected the interests of Leonico Tomeo in Plutarch and Lucian as excellent means through which to teach Greek, ethics and the ars eloquentiae.41 While in Ferrara Pace translated the neo-Platonic preface to Simplicius’ commentary on the Aristotelian Categories, and at some point was preparing a treatise on arithmetic along Pythagorean and neo-Platonic lines, neither of which was published.42 De fructu itself adheres to the conception of the liberal arts and sciences as bound together in the encyclopaedia of knowledge as advocated by Chalcondylas, Ermolao Barbaro, Angelo Poliziano, Giorgio Valla, Leonico Tomeo, Leoniceno and many other Italian humanists. Pace’s hierarchy of the scientiae follows that of such humanists, partly inherited from the medieval categories of the arts curriculum.43 In the revised 1508 Adagia, which Erasmus had worked on in Bologna with the help of Pace’s mentor Bombace in the previous year, Pace’s expertise in Greek and Latin is praised, and we are told that Pace intended to make a collection of notable classical metaphors and allegories as a companion volume to the Adagia; it was given advance advertisement in 1516 but never appeared.44 Before his departure from the household of Pace, with whom he had been staying in Ferrara, Erasmus entrusted a number of papers to him, including the Antibarbari, De copia and De ratione studii. This suggests that Pace had been well apprised of Erasmian pedagogy since his student days, and indeed that Erasmian pedagogy owed part of its formation to Pace’s Italian milieu.

The genesis and printing of De fructu De fructu begins with a letter from Paolo Bombace to the reader and his epigram in praise of England’s eloquent men, together with Pace’s three prefaces variously addressed to all professors of scientia, to young students and to John Colet. While all the letters are an interpretative window on the text, those from Bombace to the reader and from Pace to professors are of particular importance as they discuss the genesis, composition and publication of De fructu. In addition, these letters designate the work’s audience and playfully unfold the humanist pedagogical theory underlying the text that follows.45 Pace muses to his professors that readers will marvel at his book, written in the space of a month in Constance in a public inn and published so quickly; such conditions would seem to preclude the success of his work.46 He goes on to provide a psychological analysis of his process of writing. Pace was confused and unsettled in his mind as to

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whether he should leave Constance immediately or linger there. Because of his uncertainty he was initially unable to decide how to occupy himself, but then decided to devote his otium (‘leisure’) to learning, in humanist fashion.47 Remembering the scarcity of both books and learned company – the usual requirements for writing – Pace was persuaded by his reason that he should try to discover the worth of his mind by itself. Material was lacking and from that lack was found the fruits of a liberal education.48 As he wrote, many things read both long ago and more recently came to his memory. De fructu is, then, an extempore exercise in memoria, as well as in inventio, dispositio, elocutio and pronuntiatio, the five parts of rhetoric.49 For classical authors such as Cicero and Quintilian, as for Renaissance pedagogues such as Leonico Tomeo and Erasmus, one of the aims and benefits of study in the liberal arts was the eruption of copious speech in improvization and extemporization. De fructu aims to demonstrate that very conception.50 Bombace, introduced as learned in languages and Pace’s former teacher from Bologna, arrived in Constance and corrected Pace’s ‘trifles’, approving the joke and the witticisms, as well as the serious matter.51 Pace remarks that Bombace was an excellent critic who spoke not in flattery but critically, suggesting the expansion of the section concerning the labours of study and the strengthening of the satirical content. Pace complied with all his directions and, not daring to contradict the judgement of his erudite master that it should be published, quickly despatched the manuscript. Pace expects some to be affronted by the mixture of serious matter and jest, but maintains that it will do no harm to the reader to laugh a little; and the benefit of the work rests in the remarks he makes about the precepts, exhortations to learning and exercises in writing, which are based on Pliny the Younger.52 If his book appears childish, then the reader must recall that it was written for children.53 Pace explains the other reasons for the rapid publication: ‘I am free by nature but not by choice. For I have bound myself to serve my invincible king as the servant of the wise cardinal of York. To serve one’s country exceeds all freedom.’54 His book is a Stoic consolation and therapeia amidst the dangers of diplomatic life.55 He prefers to die as a man, not a beast, by leaving behind an encouragement to others to attempt a revival of learning, even if this beginning is imperfect. Pace’s fears for his life and health were not exaggerated.56 In his prefatory letter Bombace confirms Pace’s history of the genesis of the text and its publication. An internal colloquy dramatizes the scene in Constance in which the old master finds his former pupil, and

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resonates with the classical conception of the letter as a halved dialogue, or part of a conversation with an absent friend.57 Pace explained that Bombace was not interrupting his negotium (‘business’) since the king’s affairs were in the doldrums and he had decided to write some nonsense.58 Bombace presents his former student in an intimate domestic scene, gathering up his scattered papers in order to describe the central idea and reading many selections of his manuscript to him – perhaps a scene repeated by Bombace, Pace and Erasmus in their days together at Bologna. Many sections of De fructu would lend themselves to precisely this type of oral delivery, especially the warm and personal colloquies between humanist friends and the fractious one-upmanship of the personified Liberal Arts. We are told that Pace asked Bombace’s opinion, not intending to publish but merely to circulate the manuscript to some students in England. After weighing carefully and critically the entire work in a more polished form a few days later in Zurich, Bombace regarded Pace’s script so highly that he ordered a servant to despatch it to Basel for printing immediately. He praises the style, variety, wit and moral precepts of De fructu effusively, insisting on its utility for students and the learned alike.59 And if anyone thinks that he has acted rashly, he asks only that an opinion of his judgement be formed from the text itself.60 Those who do not consider the work highly can judge him ignorant in literary matters. In his prefatory letter to Colet, Pace presents his book as a gift to the learned theologian who alone established and continues to maintain the monument of St Paul’s Grammar School. In appointing William Lily, Colet has imitated Isocrates in choosing a virtuous and learned teacher from whom boys and young men can absorb good character as well as knowledge.61 Pace indicates that he himself would have wished to further Colet’s important work but must realize his pedagogical ambitions through words rather than deeds. He suspects that this is the case for many others as well. In fact, in the spring of 1520, Pace was invited to put his words into action when Henry VIII offered him £10 annually for a lecture in Greek to be read and taught within the University of Cambridge.62 With respect to the book’s introduction to Colet’s boys, Pace instructs that: If the content is as good as the title, I almost think that students should read it first, before anything else. For people are usually willing to take pains with something they can clearly see will benefit them. But if my meagre talent has deceived me, I leave it to you and

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to others to imitate Vergil and gather gold from dung and make a living face from a mask. In fact, I’ll be content with this thought alone, that I’ve furnished you and them with an excellent subject for exercise, which is certainly useful for all studious young men.63 Pace relates that he was induced to compose his text by an encounter at a banquet with a hunting and hornblowing nobleman. It took place during his trip to England from Rome some few years earlier.64 In an inner colloquy in this letter, the hornblower quotes Greek and the letters of Erasmus (rather ironically) to argue that scholars are paupers, even the greatest such as Erasmus, and that the sons of the nobility should rather know how to hunt and blow a horn properly and leave the study of bonae literae to rustic boys.65 Pace rejoins that if the son of the nobleman was called on to answer a foreign royal ambassador (orator), he would only be able to blow his horn and the learned country boys would be called on to answer him. The learned rusticus would be preferred to the hunter and hawker, and since learning gives liberty, he could say to the noble son, ‘we would rather be learned, and thanks to learning no fools, than to be proud of our stupid nobility’.66 Informed of Pace’s identity, the garrulous hornblower retreated to his cups and to conversation with a fool. Here Pace exploits the metaphorical density of cornu, the horn of either empty loquacity or copious speech in Renaissance usage; the term orator denotes both diplomat and rhetorician.67 The prefatory letter to Colet goes on to insist that the learning of Greek should be conducted alongside that of Latin, since knowledge of Greek literature is the crucial entry to learning. Their dear Erasmus had made this manifest with his edition and annotations of the New Testament: ‘He so satisfied you with it (as you say in one of your letters to him) that you seem to have been passionately inspired to study Greek yourself.’68 Thus Colet’s learning will be further distinguished, and he will realize that he knew little before. Such was the case with his fellow theologian and philosopher John Stokesley, proficient in Latin, Greek and knowing some Hebrew. Stokesley told Pace that his education in scholastic dialectic – an education which he notes was not permitted in More’s Utopia – was time wasted.69 Colet should also learn from the example of Erasmus, who would happily suppress those of his own writings which pre-date mastery of the language. Pace bids those who, like Colet, do not know Greek, to run a race with Erasmus and try to outstrip him. The letter is complemented towards the end of De fructu by another address to Colet. Pace assumes the voice of the pedagogue after the

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declamations of the various Liberal Arts in an extended discussion and praise of the study of Greek. Now that Pace has insinuated his subject into the minds of the boys with an amusing exposition, he will begin building on his foundations.70 What are the precepts that move one to learning? Erudition, which is the source of all learning, is wholly desirable in itself. Citing Pliny the Younger, Pace also declares that nothing is of more benefit to the state than for distinguished young men to seek name and reputation in the pursuit of learning. Pace notes that Pliny clearly stated that it is extremely useful for the state ‘to have not only young men of the lower classes seek fame and glory for themselves in learning, but also young men of distinction’.71 Pace here eschews aristocratic Venetian conceptions of strict hierarchy in public and social life, which his background might have suggested he would favour. Along with meritocratic tendencies, he does, however, maintain that a strong nobility is intrinsic to a healthy monarchical state.72 Colet’s pupils, like Pace and More themselves, were not aristocratic, and likely to become the magistrates, servants of the crown, clergy, ambassadors, learned professionals and merchants of the realm. Pace considered that one must begin with the education of pre-university and university boys if reform was to be effected in the civil and ecclesiastical realms.73 It is appropriate, therefore, that the low-born Wolsey is praised in the peroration of De fructu as the most learned among learned men. Wolsey emphasized the need for the universities to provide well-trained diplomats and state administrators, and proposed (unsuccessfully) the reform of the Oxford statutes relating to the arts faculty; his patronage in establishing Cardinal College in Oxford was another expression of his hopes.74 The emphasis on the ars eloquentiae in De fructu is entirely explicable in this context. Humanists saw the power of eloquence as assisting Christianity on the most general level by promoting the art of good and holy living. The Roman categories of honestas and utilitas were recast in the image of Christian virtues. Furthermore, such a fusion of pagan and Christian ideals into an ethic of civic service argued that one could serve God not only in the life of contemplation, but just as admirably in the public arena. This art of persuasion could also be employed in the reform of the clergy and Church; in persuading kings to peace; on diplomatic missions to the Holy See and courts of Europe; and in evangelizing.75 Although the practice of oratory under Renaissance monarchs and popes was largely restricted to the epideictic genus – that of praise and blame – there remained scope for the practice of the forensic genus in the law courts and of the deliberative genus in parliamentary assemblies and

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councils. Conversely, the best preparation for the civic life was an education which was Christian and humanist, instilling a sense of public concern and providing a training in eloquence. It should encourage a flexibility and readiness of mind, expressed in the capacity to adapt the spoken and written word to the needs of the moment – yet always directed to the good of the secular and ecclesiastical polity. For Pace, standing in the Italian tradition drawn from Isocrates, Demosthenes and Cicero, education in the ars eloquentiae was directed to fostering liberty of speech and the provision of good counsel, and so to the ideals of justice and equity in political and ecclesiastical life.76 Paraphrasing Isocrates and Cicero in her declamation, in De fructu ‘Rhetoric’ describes eloquentia as both the civilizing force in human life, transforming beast into rational man, and the liberal scientia, which is indispensable to all others because it communicates knowledge. Savage men left their rustic ways and became civilized through the agency of eloquence and a trained voice alone. ‘They came together in groups called civitates only when led by strong and forceful persuasion. They agreed upon just laws and obeyed them only when they were moved to it by strong and valid arguments.’77 Eloquence not only established cities and laws, but also allowed for the invention of the arts, ‘for just as the ancients taught that wisdom (sapientia) is the most important part of happiness (felicitas), I think that learning is the most important part of wisdom’. Hence learning, like prudence and eloquence, is a necessary part of the wider sapientia. It is the way not only to all other knowledge, but to salvation.78 In order, then, to make law, to teach, preach, counsel and govern effectively, one must know how to articulate, pronounce and persuade.79 As a diplomat, cleric and orator who also had first-hand experience of the oratory and statecraft of the papal courts of Julius II and Leo X, Pace was well qualified to insist on precisely these values; and indeed is highly critical of attempts to stifle counsel offered by the college of cardinals under these popes.80 The prefatory epigram of Bombace reinforces this emphasis, arguing that England in particular should rely on the eloquence and good counsel of men such as Pace, as much as on its wealth and capacity to wage war.81 Pace then attempts to expose students to the circle of humanist learning, encompassing both the quadrivium and trivium, but is eager to impress upon his young readers that his brief compendium concentrates on the imperfect language arts of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, which form the basis upon which to gain knowledge of the higher sciences.82 Many learned men have already laid down rules for the

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study of theology and philosophy, to which they should turn for advice. He confines his institutes to beginners, and hopes that he has explained that those who become talented in rhetoric and grammar will have easy access to other sciences.83 The students are instructed that whatever learning seems to have originated from the Romans has been borrowed from the Greeks.84 Cicero was created by Demosthenes and Isocrates in oratory (as Quintilian admitted), and Plato and Aristotle in philosophy. Thucydides exceeded all the Roman historians, and Demosthenes, font of all eloquence, copied out his writings repeatedly. Furthermore, the New Testament is in Greek, and its most famous commentators were Greek, while Jerome and Augustine plucked their flowers of learning from them. To master the Greek and Latin languages, students must begin with the foundational ars, recommended as suitable for all ages. Pace’s attitude to medieval grammars is unambiguous. The figure of ‘Grammar’, clearly having scholastic sympathies, recommends the obscure Apollonius Dyscolus, while the figure of ‘Rhetoric’ prefers Plato’s Timaeus and the grammar of Theodore Gaza, and denigrates the medieval grammars of Papias, Isidore of Seville and the Catholicon.85 ‘Grammar’ praises Theodore Gaza as the most learned grammarian, to whom she compares the efforts of Linacre.86 ‘Rhetoric’ commends Linacre for deigning to descend to argue about small points of the vocative case with Tryphon and the other grammarians. ‘Rhetoric’ is also scathing as regards grammarians who know nothing beyond their field. Quintilian is cited to the effect that one should either begin with Greek grammar from which Latin was derived, or study the two together.87 Reflecting Italian practice, Pace also recommends double translation in Greek and Latin in De fructu, as preferred by Quintilian, Pliny the Younger and all the other Roman teachers above other methods, because it teaches ‘propriety and magnificence of language, a store of figures, and, finally, strength of exposition’.88 The other exercises of Pliny – in argumentum, and the composition of letters and carmina – are also prescribed. The Aldine Greek texts with Latin translations were intended to assist this much used method of instruction. This approach is entirely characteristic of contemporary Italian and Erasmian pedagogy, but not English.89 It surely reflects Pace’s experiences as a student under Leonico Tomeo, Bombace and Leoniceno. In a letter to Beatus Rhenanus of 30 April 1518, Martin Bucer forwarded a catalogue of his books which included the latest publications from Basel and Venice deemed important to an aspiring humanist. These included the translations of Lucian and the Epigrammata by More and Erasmus, More’s Utopia, and De fructu.90 Rhenanus also

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admired De fructu and Pace boasted of this to Erasmus some time before 6 December 1517.91 Guillaume Budé added his warm approval, and announced the recent appearance of De fructu in a letter to Pace of 29 April 1518.92 Budé had learnt from De fructu that Linacre, More, Tunstall and Latimer were their mutual friends.93 Remarking on Pace’s popularity and influence with his king, and the value he himself sets by intimacy with foreign scholars, Budé turns to consider his own De asse and his reputation in Greek studies. Budé, then, promoted De fructu and its author to European humanists in the context of praising the English humanists of Henry’s court. This initial enthusiasm of Bucer, Rhenanus and Budé for De fructu highlights the silences in the account of its publication given by Pace and Bombace. Printed by Johann Froben, the text was in all likelihood edited by Beatus Rhenanus with the assistance of Bruno Amerbach, Wilhelm Nesen and/or Gerardus Listrius, the chief castigatores at the press at the time and Erasmus’ most trusted editors.94 Rhenanus had produced a commentary on Seneca’s Ludus de morte Claudii in 1515, which included Erasmus’ Senecan Lucubrationes; he also edited the first Froben edition of the Praise of Folly and Synesius’ Praise of Baldness. In the same year as the publication of De fructu at the press, Rhenanus edited a volume comprising two of Erasmus’ anti-war adages, the Sileni Alcibiadis and Scarabeus, and two letters in the exchange between Erasmus and Martin van Dorp. He also saw the third edition of Utopia (the first by Froben) through the press and had been entrusted by Erasmus to make editorial decisions about the composition of its parerga.95 By this time, Erasmus had instructed that Rhenanus make editorial decisions in his absence. Wilhelm Nesen assisted Rhenanus with the Lucubrationes and saw the new edition of De copia through the press in 1517 before leaving for Paris before the end of the year. Erasmus wrote to Nesen in April that Pace was triumphantly successful at court, but made no reference to De fructu.96 Listrius supplied the commentary for the 1515 Praise of Folly and was the castigator for the 1515 edition of the Chiliades adagiorum. Bruno Amerbach was castigator for Erasmus’ Jerome edition and spent his short adult life with the press. Given Erasmus’ centrality in the production of texts from the Froben press in these years, it is inconceivable that he was not originally behind the edition of De fructu. It is known that Erasmus put forward the works of friends to Froben to print, occasionally leaving the actual negotiations to the printing staff.97 There is evidence that Pace and Erasmus exchanged much correspondence in the years 1517 and 1518, but many of the letters do not survive – there is a gap from early

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August to December 1517 – and few were published. In December 1517, Erasmus referred to five letters recently received from Pace, but he was forced to give short answers to such long treatises.98 Bombace, who revised the manuscript of De fructu, took it to Basel for printing and staked his reputation on its merit; he was also in communication with Erasmus from Zurich in December (of which more will be said shortly).99 He referred to his enjoyment of Pace’s companionship in Constance.100 But again no mention is found of De fructu in extant correspondence with Erasmus. It is curious indeed that at the time when Rhenanus was editing the Froben Utopia and his correspondence was filled with references to the orchestration of its publication, especially the soliciting of the letters for the parerga, no comment can be found at all regarding Pace’s book. Erasmus wrote in his prefatory letter to Utopia, dated August 1517, that he had sent the work to Froben because ‘if it is known that a book has come from the house of Froben, that is enough to have it please the learned world’.101 Presumably Erasmus wished to distance himself from De fructu after its publication and suppressed evidence that he had supported its printing.102 In March 1518, as we have seen, Erasmus sent a letter to Bombace saying that he wished that Pace’s book had not been published under his name, but making no reference to Bombace’s role as editor and patron. Erasmus had treated Pace with respect in his Adagia and he had hoped for similar treatment – if it was meant to be a serious work, how could one take it seriously? And if meant humorously, where was the humour? (‘Si serio scripsit, quid illic serium? Sin ioco, quid ibi festiuum?’)103 Erasmus here denies Pace and Bombace the defence he himself had employed for the Praise of Folly, the deliberate paradox of the spoudogelion.104 As for Pace’s aforementioned Letter to Dorp, suppressed by Erasmus, I would suggest that it was composed with the assistance of More, with whom he was staying in Bruges at the home of Mark Lauwerijns in December 1517 on his journey home from Constance.105 In a letter from Louvain on 16 December, Erasmus congratulated Pace on his leisure and called him a second Hercules if he has slain such a monster (Dorp), especially if one can believe it was single-handed, with no assistance from his crony Theseus (More).106 Erasmus continued to mention the suppression of the Dorp letter to Peter Gillis, Johannes de Molendino and More in the period December 1517 to March 1518.107 Pace’s letter, like the two ‘final’ unpublished letters – Dorp’s reply to Erasmus, and More’s letter to Dorp, both of 1515 – can be presumed to have circulated in manuscript for at least some months.108 This was not

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the only occasion on which More and Pace collaborated to defend humanist studies and the scriptural methods of Erasmus, against the background of the Reuchlin dispute in Germany. Letters of More and Pace to Edward Lee in support of Erasmus were published in the Epistolae aliquot eruditorum virorum of 1520. In March 1518 More and Pace were both attending the court at Abingdon. With the apparent approval of Henry VIII and Wolsey, they attacked the Trojans at Oxford for preaching against the propaedeutic value of the liberal arts, Greek studies and Erasmian exegesis.109 More composed his Letter to a Monk as part of the campaign.110

Menippean satire and the humanist encyclopaedia In order to appreciate the encyclopaedic and Menippean form of De fructu, which latter-day critics have so misunderstood, it is helpful first to consider the pedagogical strategies used by Erasmus in his texts written for St Paul’s. De ratione studii and De copia, like De fructu, placed grammar and rhetoric at the heart of a civic education. The student must first master grammar and the parts of rhetoric and its composition as laid down in the most important rhetorical handbooks by classical authors before moving on to write their own compositions. De copia instructs teachers to set exercises in each of the three genera of oratory, that is, the judicial, demonstrative and deliberative. Pupils are then to compose in a range of genres, in which these genera are applied. The boys were to indicate the nature of the argument in each genre – knowing at the same time the essential nature of, for example, epic poetry, history, the dialogue, the fable, satire and the ode; and then exercise their powers of judgement with respect to an author’s success. In dealing with each text, the teacher was directed to explain the underlying literary theory of each genre; when considering the epigram, for example, one would note what the form entailed, how effects were achieved, and how it dealt with representation of time, place and action.111 The fundamental rhetorical categories of the good and the expedient, and of vice and virtue, were likewise to be thoroughly explored by the student. Erasmus recommended the reading and imitation of the best models. The careful selection of any unusual word, archaism, innovation, adage, exemplum or sententia worthy to be committed to memory was encouraged. Developing the memory as a storehouse of reading was a priority. For the teacher, wide reading in diverse areas was advocated as well, especially in the encyclopaedic forms of authors

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such as Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, Ptolemy, Strabo and Athenaeus.112 Without a drilling in encyclopaedic knowledge the teacher would be considered unable to adapt to the particular educational needs of the student. For example, in order to teach poetry effectively, one should be well versed in history, mythology, geography and cosmography. The key virtue was to be found in varietas (variety), that quality which nature delights in above all else and which contributes to skill in argumentation and in speaking or writing extempore.113 The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives also provides us with a humanist understanding of the history of miscellanies and their pedagogic value. He explained that Aulus Gellius, wishing to amuse himself and help his children and others, united the fruits of all the sciences into one work. Macrobius had imitated him and expounded questions on all the disciplines, while Pietro Crinito, Francesco Filelfo and Poliziano borrowed this style.114 Furthermore, the use of commonplaces in the amplification of some topic of argument was to be studied. The topics of argumentation, in turn, traditionally included ‘such diverse matter as rare words, examples, philosophy, religion, phrases, the practical and liberal arts, witty sayings, daily conversations, letters, orations, diaries and epithets’.115 This method yielded ready material for extemporization, the most abundant copia dicendi being provided by the figurae sententiarum. The Adagia, particularly in its greatly enlarged 1508 and subsequent editions, exemplified Erasmus’ own miscellaneous and commonplacing habits. The adage form allowed for extended essays on a wide range of topics based on a storehouse of ancient proverbs, with explanations invaluable to those wanting to improve their knowledge of the classics or enhance their literary style and argumentation. It was also enormously popular as a Latin and Greek dictionary and grammar. This pedagogical approach rejected any systematizing and dogmatic tendencies in both teaching and learning, appropriately enough given the centrality of the practice of argument in utramque partem (presenting both sides of an argument) in the language arts.116 This imitation of the classical miscellany was not original to Erasmus. Pace’s own teacher Leonico Tomeo wrote an anecdotal miscellany, De varia historia, which he had worked on for a number of years before its publication in 1531 and which he had probably discussed with Pace. Budé and Pace exchanged comments regarding the encyclopaedic De asse.117 De fructu frequently plunders classical and Renaissance authors such as Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Ptolemy and Aulus Gellius, Fulgentius, Martianus Capella, Macrobius and Poliziano.118

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Sharing the Italian humanist and Erasmian fashion for the miscellany as productive of varietas, Pace chose to cast his textbook in a literary form related to those works of Capella and Fulgentius which fuse the didascalic saturae or miscellany with the satire of the Menippean type.119 Menippean satire, a hybrid serio-comic form, inevitably presents some problems of definition since it was a loosely structured genre which parodied many forms of intellectual and religious discourse. Eugene Kirk has argued that there are shared features in examples of the form, though not all are present in any single work: The chief mark of Menippean satire was unconventional diction. Neologisms, portmanteau words, macronics, preciosity, coarse vulgarity, catalogues, bombast, mixed languages, and protracted sentences were typical of the genre, sometimes appearing all together in the same work. In outward structure, Menippean satire was a medley – usually a medley of alternating prose and verse, sometimes a jumble of flagrantly digressive narrative, or again a potpourri of tales, songs, dialogues, orations, letters, lists, and other outlandish fictions (i.e., fantastic voyages, dreams, visions, talking beasts) and extreme distortions of argument (often, ‘paradoxes’). In theme, Menippean satire was essentially concerned with right learning of belief. That theme often called for ridicule or caricature of some sham-intellectual or theological fraud. Yet sometimes the theme demanded exhortation to learning, when books and studies had fallen into disuse and neglect.120 Pace was familiar with Menippean satire, in particular that found in Lucian’s centaur comic dialogues and Seneca’s Ludus de morte Claudii.121 More considered that Menippus, a character in one of the Lucianic dialogues which he had translated, represented a satiric form which exemplified philosophical eclecticism.122 In 1605 Isaac Casaubon provided his perception of the transmission of Menippean satire. According to him, Menippus was imitated by the Greeks Lucian and Julian the Apostate, and the Romans Seneca, Petronius and Varro. Boethius’ Consolatione philosophiae and Capella’s Satira, in which the order of the liberal arts is set forth, were other examples.123 The permissive structure of Menippean satire allows for the possibility of rhetorical play in a multitude of generic forms, which on one level serves to lay bare the techniques of composition to the reader. Such rhetorical virtuosity is executed within a framework oriented to the attack on any type of excess or incompetence in authority, for example in leaders of religious sects, teachers in the schools of rhetoric,

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or Cynic preachers. In some authors, such as Seneca and Varro, there is the simultaneous celebration of certain intellectual or religious attitudes as manifested by particular historians, philosophers, poets and patrons. Additionally, Menippean satire affords the protection of the trivial and jesting demeanour of a shifting authorial persona in order to make serious political and social commentary.124 Seneca gave counsel to the new emperor Nero by castigating the corruption of the dead Claudius. Martianus Capella and Fulgentius revived the Varronian norms of Menippean satire and in their texts there is the inversion of, and anxiety concerning, the benefits of a liberal education and the pedagogue’s ability to convey it.125 Capella, the model for Fulgentius, provided one of the most widely used textbooks of the Middle Ages and beyond in his De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii.126 This ironic compendium of the liberal arts is surrounded by a comic frame. Mercury, the god of eloquence, has decided to take Philology, the hope and glory of the Muses, for his wife. Before they can marry, she must be made fit for heaven by an apotheosis in which she is transformed into Philosophy by vomiting up all the books she has previously consumed and digested.127 Capella represents himself as a silly old man, apologetic about introducing banter and cheap fiction into a serious discourse on learned subjects. The narrator’s fiction is directed by the figure of Satura, who tries to teach Greek disciplines, but mixes together learned material with the trite, making the liberal arts chatter in a rude concoction.128 In De fructu Pace himself assumes the mask of the satirist-pedagogue, making the Liberal Arts declaim, argue with one another, and swap anecdotes and jests in the attempt to convey some feeling for the Greek language and heritage, and for the utility of the liberal arts and sciences. The modern editors remark on the characteristic fluidity of address in De fructu and the sometimes childish tone of the authorial persona who claims to forget his sources or recalls them imperfectly, and plays the clown.129 The satirist’s mask, however, gives protection from calumny. As in Utopia and Erasmus’ Colloquies, it is the opponents of the humanists who are depicted in internal dialogues as engaging in angry, slanderous attacks, but who are publicly reduced to laughingstocks before their enemies. The humanist interlocutor cunningly allows the ignorant friar, lawyer or theologian to damn himself. The satirist’s mask is also the dramatic embodiment of those human limitations in acquiring knowledge without divine aid. And even if Pace were without access to his extensive library, his lapses in memory are

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usually minor and actually serve to encourage students to search for sources themselves. The juxtaposition of many different genres composed in the three genera of rhetoric are characteristic of Menippean satire, as well as constituting a creative pedagogical strategy. Students are invited to imitate Pace’s exercises in the progymnasmata compositions which traditionally gave preparation for the composition of an oration; and which included, for example, the description, fable, characterization and chreia. From these simpler literary exercises, students progressed to the encomiastic epigram, colloquy, declamation and humanist letter, likewise represented in De fructu. Some examples will illustrate these principles. De fructu as a whole is an expansive exercise on the anecdote or chreia. It replies to a Chaucerian paradox – ‘the more learned you are, the less wise you become’130 – with a sententia from Isocrates: all virtues originate in learning.131 The fundamental rhetorical categories are then applied as Pace sets out to survey the various sciences useful and pertinent to the organization of human life. Men cannot attain the three things on which all action is based – justice, honesty and utility – without learning.132 In the course of De fructu, as in these opening remarks, Pace repeatedly connects the fruits of learning to the qualities of the beautiful (pulcher), the right (rectum), the laudable (laudabile), the honourable (honestum) and the expedient (utile).133 Pace also applied the anecdotal framework based on the chreia as found in Lucian’s Demonax (which he had translated) to his characterisation of More, whom he presents as a second Demonax/Democritus in his confrontation with two Scotist theologians.134 An exemplary exercise in contentio demonstrativa, in which a contrast is constructed which praises or blames someone by opposing him to another, is found in the discussion of the pagan Cynic Diogenes (a familiar Menippean figure), who sowed good rules and clear examples with his customary freedom of speech, and the false Christian who engenders hatred, deception, enmity, discord and war.135 It is also found in the exchanges of the figures of ‘Grammar’ and ‘Rhetoric’, which move from a general consideration of the art of speaking well to specific examples of contemporary Roman preaching. Giles of Viterbo’s Lateran address calling for reform of the Church at the highest levels is contrasted with the debased Ciceronian eloquence of Tommaso Inghirami’s funeral oration for Pope Julius II, which sought to justify the pope’s policy of territorial expansion.136 Colet’s students are then encouraged to read first the classical authorities (Cicero, Quintilian, Hermogenes), then consider the ethical dimensions of oratory and finally analyse topical examples in terms of style and argument.

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Pace’s jests and verbal play, manifest in syllabic jokes and puns, could be studied with book II of Cicero’s De oratore and book VI of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, while adages and related forms (epigrams, maxims and apopthegms) are repeatedly deployed as proofs in argument, and they are shown to have more persuasive value than the syllogisms of scholastics so removed from the vox populi. This is particularly evident in the inner dialogue, a fine example of Renaissance ironia, in which the interlocutors Pace and Bombace defend Erasmus’ Novem instrumentum against the ignorant criticisms of a certain Italian archbishop who would have him called before a General Council. In fact, it may well be that Pace’s proposed collection of sayings, phrases and metaphors from years earlier developed into De fructu; rather than presenting a catalogue, Pace now demonstrated the principles of their usage in argumentation and composition. A glance at the marginal glosses – collatio, metaphor, similitudo, sententia, fibula – confirms this view. The prefatory letters of diplomats Pace and Bombace have particular value as rhetorical exemplars for the next generation of servants of the state. The text closest perhaps to De fructu in time which similarly draws inspiration from the satura and satire combination is Juan Luis Vives’ Somnium of 1519, composed in Louvain.137 It is classed by its most recent editor, Edward George, as in the vein of Menippean satire, drawing specifically on Seneca’s Ludus and Lucian.138 Aimed at a number of audiences – Vives’ own students to whom he was lecturing on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, and to those concerned with civic life – the authorial persona claims that he has playfully turned out a dream or trifle to serve for the preface to his commentary on the Dream of Scipio, a work whereby the prince is tutored and formed to complete perfection in affairs of state. In the Praefatio to the work, the discursive introduction written in Vives’ real persona, he praises the copia which Cicero in his Dream of Scipio had gathered from the flowers of all learning, including history, astronomy, moral and natural philosophy, and geography.139 The structure of Vives’ Somnium is fractured, with a number of distinct scenes including a fantastic journey to the Realm of Sleep; a debate on dreams in the Senate disrupted by the arrival of Parisian logicians; the Banquet Chamber of Insomnium in which the notables of scholastic logic (Duns Scotus, Ockham, and Paul of Venice) outdo one another in obfuscation and Vives addresses Cicero; and the quarrel of the Fates. Vives finally interviews Cicero on the composition of his Dream of Scipio and Cicero explains the argumentum of his work. The parodic dream of Vives merges into that of Cicero’s dream. The

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fiction of the dream, like that of travelling to Utopia, allows a freedom of expression not possible in an ordinary treatise.140 And it is in this literary and pedagogical context that the hybrid form of More’s Utopia – a mélange of familiar letter, epidiectic verse, colloquy, cena, fantastic travelogue, oration, disputation and paradoxical encomium – should also be placed.141 On one level, Utopia is a school text, providing students with models for composition exercises and commentary in the various genres represented. The interest of the Utopians in Greek studies and the liberal arts is designed to arouse the desire to emulate. More did not use Greek in the text as did Pace (although some of the prefatory letters contain Greek), but rather transliterated Greek terms. Vives included Utopia in his plan of studies drawn up for Princess Mary in his De ratione studii puerilis (1523) and recommended that the student of political philosophy should read it with Plato’s Laws and Republic.142

The English reception of De fructu The extent to which De fructu actually furthered the study of Greek in the Tudor period is not clear, although some student readers left rudimentary annotations in Greek on their copies.143 Erasmus’ criticisms of the text prevented any wide popularizing of De fructu and its reprinting. The schools and universities of England were not, perhaps, entirely prepared for Italian pedagogy as presented by Pace in 1517. Scholars have remarked on the wide gap between the knowledge of Latin and that of Greek in England, in contrast to many continental countries.144 George Day’s letter of thanks to Tunstall for his gift of the first Greek books to Cambridge University Library in 1529 refers to the slow introduction of Greek studies into England – Tunstall had established a Greek colony in a Latin town.145 In the period 1540–1640, instruction in Greek was not as intensive and thorough as in Latin. Greek was taught in grammar schools, but only to the ablest in the higher forms, and then through the medium of Latin grammars. Greek authors were still largely disseminated via Latin translations.146 As far as encouraging Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics, Pace’s libellus probably did little to alter teaching in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Nevertheless, there is evidence that De fructu was a popular pedagogical text in this period. Indeed, the schoolboys and university students who annotated their copies of De fructu left traces of readings which would have delighted the author-pedagogue Pace.147 The text did serve

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as a rhetorical handbook for the aspiring civic man and as a diverting introduction to humanist studies then being developed in Italy and northern Europe. The copy of the theology student Robert Joseph of Evesham does not survive, but he remarks on De fructu in a letter of 1530 to John Dornall, who was studying civil law at Oxford. The letter itself, like others in Joseph’s collection, represents the literary and intellectual culture around Oxford between 1528 and 1531, and is much imbued with Erasmian Latinity and pedagogy.148 His reading of De fructu may be presumed to have arisen from his interests in Greek, theology, Aristotle and humanist fashions generally. His Greek was rudimentary but he sent to Oxford for a Greek lexicon and other books for learners, together with the Adagia of Erasmus. In the aforementioned letter, Joseph replied to Dornall that when he had criticized the ravings of the jurist Accursius, he was only following Pace, the Dean of St Paul’s, in De fructu.149 There follows a long criticism of the Roman law glossator, in which he says that Erasmus and Budé had written to the same effect. The copy of De fructu signed by Stephan Rodwey, MA of Trinity College, Oxford, is dated 1582 and carries annotations in three hands.150 One annotator pays closest attention to the sections on the arts and sciences, especially law – apparently culling sententiae for digestion in a commonplace book and sometimes jotting in Greek. Number theory also received attention. Another hand marked the section on Simplicius and the various encomia on Wolsey and humanists. The cropped copy in Exeter College, Oxford, reveals another reading focusing on rhetorical theory as well as the text’s theological and moral aspects, especially the meditations on war. Corrections were made to the ungrammatical speech of the unlettered friars who appear in the colloquies. The clean St John’s College, Oxford, copy dated 1602 was owned by Sir William Paddy, physician to James I and president of the college, who was no doubt drawn to the material relating to Italian medical humanism and the recovery of Galen and Pliny.151 As these examples suggest, De fructu seems to have been more popular in Oxford than in Cambridge, but altogether the bibliographical evidence suggests that Pace enjoyed a productive afterlife as humanist pedagogue.152 * Pace can clearly be identified as a ‘Christian humanist’ as described by Brendan Bradshaw and James McConica, and as an Erasmian, in that many similarities are found in their respective approachs to pedagogy,

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the ars eloquentiae, and the practice of scriptural interpretation. Pace explicitly acknowledges the importance of Erasmus’ friendship and writings for his own education and continuing study, and, as I have argued, was involved with the Erasmus–Froben campaign to promote humanist methods of education in Europe in general and in England in particular. But the characterization of Pace as simply another of those English Erasmians – and a lesser one at that – denies the fact that much of his formation in grammar, languages, oratory and theology was acquired in Italy under the guidance of mentors and friends such as Leoniceno, Bombace and Leonico Tomeo, and it represents a response to Italian practice.153 Pace placed far more importance on the role of Aristotelian studies, and the mathematical and allied practical disciplines, than did Erasmus; and his encyclopaedic humanism can be seen to extend well beyond the conventionally conceived ‘studia humanitatis’. I would hope that this introduction to the context of the composition and printing of De fructu, and to the textual conventions upon which it rests, will encourage more Tudor scholars to revisit its pages.

Notes 1 Research for this chapter was undertaken while I was a Junior Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. I would like to thank Quentin Skinner for his reading of an earlier version of this material and for helpful comments and encouragement. I am also indebted to Conal Condren for his guidance on the topic of rhetoric, and to Jonathan Woolfson for pertinent criticisms and suggestions. Any remaining errors are mine. 2 Pace’s surname is pronounced with two syllables. Jervis Wegg’s Richard Pace: A Tudor Diplomatist (New York and London, 1932) is the only biography of Pace and remains useful. 3 LP, ii, no. 1067. CWE, iii, no. 388. 4 The date usually given by scholars for publication, September 1517, is based on the date of Paolo Bombace’s prefatory letter. Pace was still awaiting the appearance of the text on 6 December, however, as Budé indicates in a letter to Pace in May 1518: Epistolae Gulielmi Budei Regii Secretarii (Paris 1520; repr. Basel 1521), sig. 3. The earliest reference to the printed book is that of Michael Hummelberg to Bernard Adelmann in January 1518: Documenta literaria, ed. J Heumann (Altdorf, 1758), pp. 15, 168. Erasmus does not mention the book in extant correspondence until 22 February 1518, and then sent More a copy in March. More had been with Pace in Bruges in December 1517, and surely would have been given a copy if it was then available. Beatus Rhenanus had commented favourably on De fructu before 6 December 1517, but as he was probably one of the editors this may refer to the manuscript: CWE, v, nos 732, 740, 776, 785.

66 Cathy Curtis 5 E. F. Rogers, ed., St Thomas More: Selected Letters (New Haven and London, 1967), no. 67, pp. 132–3. 6 CWE, v, no. 787, pp. 332–3. See also A. Stewart, ‘Humanity at a Price: Erasmus, Budé, and the Poverty of Philology’, in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. E. Fudge, R. Gilbert and S. Wiseman (London, 1999), pp. 9–25. 7 Adagia, I. ix. 30. 8 CWE, v, no. 776, p. 301. Erasmus was rebuked by Linacre and Colet for his constant begging, a theme of several letters. See C. H. Clough, ‘Erasmus and the Pursuit of English Patronage in 1517 and 1518’, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, I (1981) 126–40; J. K. Sowards, ‘The Two Lost Years of Erasmus’, Studies in the Renaissance, IX (1962) 161–86, at pp. 170–3; CWE, ii, nos 227, 230. 9 CWE, v, no. 800, pp. 349–50; and no. 783, p. 322. 10 Ibid., vi, no. 887. Dated 22 October 1518, this is one of the few letters from Erasmus to Pace which was published by Erasmus. It appears in the Farrago nova epistolarum (1519), p. 323. 11 CWE, vii, no. 1103, p. 284. The letter was originally published in the Epistolae ad diversos of 1521, but the date added in the Opus epistolarum of Erasmus was 1518; the letter was revised before publication. The Apologia, therefore, may have been circulating as early as May 1518. It is not extant and was probably not printed, and the identity of the authors is not known. It is possible that the humanist circle at Constance of John Botzheim, Thomas and Ambrose Blaurer, Michael Hummelberg and Urbanus Rhegius was responsible for it, given their hostility to Pace’s book. Complaints against De fructu are found in letters of Hummelberg to Adelmann in January 1518: Heumann, Documenta literaria, p. 168; and to Thomas Blaurer in June 1520: Analecten zur Geschichte der Reformation und des Humanismus in Schwaben, 1512–18, ed. A. Horawitz (Vienna 1878), pp. 45–6; and from Thomas Blaurer to Bruno Amerbach in May 1519: Briefwechsel Ambrosius und Thomas Blaurer, 1509–48, ed. Traugott Schiess (Freiburg 1908–12), i, no. 26, p. 23. Pace’s relations with Johannes Fabri, whom he spent time with in Constance, remained very warm: CWE, vi, no. 953. 12 De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. F. Manley and R. S. Sylvester (New York, 1967), p. xv. I make use of their Latin edition with facing English translation. The translation, which draws on that of J. D. Ogden in his ‘Richard Pace: De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1951), is for the most part literal and faithful, although in attempting to convey a sense of the colloquialism of many sections, especially the colloquies, it can be quite free. The commentary provides much information as to Pace’s many sources, and I am greatly indebted to it. See J. B. Trapp’s review in Renaissance Quarterly, XXI (1968) 69 for some criticisms of the translation in a generally positive discussion. Trapp also regards De fructu as a lesser work than Utopia or the Praise of Folly, ‘lacking their wit and moral force’. 13 De fructu, p. xxv. 14 ‘English Humanism and the Body Politic’, in A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford 1986), pp. 42–3. Fox declares that if ‘More showed signs of scepticism, the same

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scepticism was displayed, albeit unintentionally, by Richard Pace … [he] appears to have been a scatterbrain (he died insane), and De fructu is an embarrassing display of bad taste and intellectual feebleness’. Ibid., p. 41. E. Surtz, ‘Richard Pace’s Sketch of Thomas More’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LVII (1958) 36–50, at p. 39. G. B. Parks, The English Traveler to Italy, i: The Middle Ages (to 1525) (Rome 1954), p. 473. Wegg, Pace, p. 120. C. M. Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1996). On these English abbreviations of classical rhetorics, see B. Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford 1988; repr. 1990); O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962); Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Part I. See J. B. Gleason, John Colet (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 220–1 for this date. On Colet and St Paul’s, see also J. B. Trapp, ‘From Guarino of Verona to John Colet’, in Italy and the English Renaissance, ed. S. Rossi and D. Savoia (Milan, 1989), pp. 45–53. The definitive study on the Tudor humanist curriculum, and especially the ars rhetorica as linked to the ideal of the vir civilis, is Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric, Part I. J. H. Lupton, Life of Colet (London, 1909), pp. 291–2. Lily provided a more advanced syntax in Latin entitled De constructione. See Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. P. Bietenholz (Toronto, 1985–7), i, pp. 326–7. Erasmus revised the last mentioned, and neither he nor Lily could fully claim authorship. It was first printed anonymously in 1513. Gleason, John Colet, pp. 225–7. S. Jayne, John Colet and Marsilio Ficino (London, 1975); J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London, 1991), p. 137. CWE, viii, no. 1211, p. 233. De fructu, pp. 20, 21. The early curriculum is not known in detail, although enough information survives to indicate that Wolsey’s curriculum for Ipswich in 1528 derived from it. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek (Urbana, 1944), i, p. 118. See also Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, p. 257. L. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, 1993), pp. 178–9. Possibly Colet disapproved of the publication of Utopia: see CWE, iv, no. 467. Rogers, St Thomas More: Selected Letters, p. 6. For Erasmus’ support from the University of Cambridge against the Thomists and Scotists who attacked St Paul’s in 1511–12, see CWE, ii, nos 230, 237, 258, 260. Also J. K. Sowards, ‘On Education: More’s Debt to Erasmus’, Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour (Angers, 1989), pp. 103–24, at p. 105. A praelectio consists of two parts: a laus is given in appreciation of the author to be lectured on and often the liberal arts generally (with a classification of the branches of knowledge) in order to win over the audience, and this is followed by a cohortatio to indicate the pleasure to be derived from study

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and offering the diversity of its applications. On a similar use of praelectio by Poliziano see his Les silves, ed. P. Galand (Paris, 1987). Wegg, Pace, p. 10; M. Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1979), pp. 260–1. BL, Shelfmark 835. g. 1. Catero’s Oratio was delivered in January 1504 and first published ‘Ex Aldi Neacademia’ in Venice. Lowry, Aldus Manutius, p. 273. See also D. S. Shaw, ‘Erasmus of Rotterdam and His Printer Johannn Froben’, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, VI (1986) 31–124. As Professor of Greek, Richard Croke continued the tradition by giving an oration at Cambridge in July 1519 which likewise emphasized the utility of Greek for an understanding of the trivium and quadrivium, as the Latin authorities based their works on Greek sources. See his Orationes duae (Paris, 1520), partially translated in J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge from the Earliest Times to the Royal Injunctions of 1535 (Cambridge, 1884), i, p. 534. Langton, who had acquired his interest in Renaissance learning during his Italian embassies, is praised by Pace for his model patronage and pedagogical methods based on individual psychology and the use of praise and rewards. De fructu, pp. 38–9; R. P. Brown, ‘Thomas Langton and His Tradition of Teaching’, Transactions of the Antiquarian and Archaeological Society of Cumberland and Westmorland, XXVI (1926) 150–246. Wegg, Pace, pp. 4–9. CWE, x, no. 1490, pp. 370–1. When both were at Ferrara, Pace spoke highly to Erasmus of De Bere’s generosity towards good literature and to himself in particular. This suggests that he supported Pace from around 1508. The main authority on the thought of Leonico Tomeo is Daniela De Bellis. See her articles: ‘La vita e l’ambiente di Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’, Quaderni per la storia dell’Università di Padova, XVIII (1980) 36–75; ‘Niccolò Leonico Tomeo interprete di Aristotele naturalista’, Physis, XVII (1975) 71–93; ‘Autokineton e entelechia: Niccolò Leonico Tomeo: l’anima nei dialoghi intitolati al Bembo’, Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia, Università di Firenze, I (1979) 47–68; ‘I veicoli dell’anima nell’analisi di Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’, Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia, Università di Firenze, III (1981) 1–21. See also D. J. Geanokoplos, ‘The Career of the Little-Known Renaissance Scholar Nicholas Leonicus Tomaeus’, Byzantina, XIII (1985) 355–72. J. Woolfson’s Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge, 1998), chapter 4, details Leonico Tomeo’s relationship with English humanists at the university. In 1523 Pace obtained permission from the Venetian Senate for the publication of Leonico Tomeo’s translation of and commentaries on the Parva naturalia. The text is dedicated to him as First Secretary to Henry VIII – a considerable honour, given that the dedicatees of the individual books included Janus Lascaris, Reginald Pole and Pietro Bembo. Pace’s learning and dedication to the liberal arts from his earliest days receive fulsome praise. See Leonico Tomeo, Aristotelis Stagiritae Parva quae vocant Naturalia (Paris, 1530), sig. AA3v. On Bombace, see Bietenholz, Contemporaries of Erasmus, i, p. 163; P. de Nolhac, La Bibliothèque de Fulvio Orsini (Paris, 1887), pp. 247, 395; Erasmus, Adagia, I. vi. 2 and Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford,

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46 47 48 49

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1906–58), x, no. 2874; xi, no. 3032. Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome 1960– ), sub nomine. For Leoniceno, see D. Mugnai Carrara, ‘Profilo di Nicolò Leoniceno’, Interpres, II (1979) 169–212, and her La biblioteca di Nicolò Leoniceno: tra Arisotele e Galeno: cultura e libri di un medico umanista (Florence, 1991); and also W. F. Edwards, ‘Niccolò Leoniceno and the Origins of Humanist Discussion of Method’, in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. E. P. Mahoney (Leiden, 1976), pp. 283–305. Curtis, ‘Pace’, chapter 1. It is not possible to construct a precise narrative of Pace’s movements between universities; Langton’s will describes him as a scholar of Bologna. He was definitely in Ferrara sometime before the end of 1508, when Erasmus was the guest of Pace. Wegg, Pace, p. 9. The first published edition of 1514 or 1515 is dedicated to Cardinal Bainbridge; it is only the third book by an Englishmen ever to be printed at Rome (by Jacopo Mazzochi); it consists of Plutarch’s Quomodo poterit quis ab inimicis aliquid commodi reportare and De modo audiendi, Lucian’s Demonax and Apollonius of Tyrana’s Epistola consolatio. The translations were reprinted in editions of 1522 in Venice, with additional translations of Plutarch’s De avaritia and De garrulitate. See De Bellis, ‘La vita’, p. 53. De fructu, pp. 132–3. Ibid., pp. 36–7, 88–9. Theology is the highest scientia, and connected with sacred law. Philosophy comes next, and encompasses both ethics and metaphysics. The companions of philosophy are the branches of mathematics. It is medicine, however, that is the most beautiful and useful science. Dialectic is the third part of philosophy, although modern dialectic is given short shrift. The three philosophies employ the training of the quadrivium and trivium. L. Jardine, ‘The Place of Dialectic Teaching in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge’, Studies in the Renaissance, XXI (1974) 31–62. CWE, iii, no. 399; iv, no. 502. A comparison with the elaborate parerga of Utopia should be kept in mind, which also provides compositional models for student imitation, and constitute an extended joke which creates the Morean persona. De fructu, pp. 10–11. This has been interpreted literally as a sign of Pace’s instability and hence the disorganization of the text. De fructu, pp. xviii–xxiii. Ibid., pp. 10–11. See Terence Cave on humanist ‘digestion’ of material which is regenerated to create a new text and authorial identity: Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford, 1979), passim. Pace’s insistence on his lack of books is not merely a literary topos, however, and the errors in quotation and conflation of some sources have been identified by the editors. See, for example, De fructu, pp. 23, 59, 75. On the partes or res of rhetoric, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 45–7. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, X. vii. 1. Bombace became secretary to Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci in Rome in 1513, and was despatched as assistant to his patron’s nephew, Antonio Pucci, sent as papal nuncio to Switzerland in the autumn of 1517. De fructu, pp. 12–13. Ibid., pp. 24–5. Cf. Erasmus’ notion of teaching through game-playing in the Antibarbari and De utilitate colloquiarium. In the latter Erasmus says that

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if someone protests that it is undignified for an old man to play in such a childish manner, his answer is ‘I don’t care if it is childish, if only it’s useful’. Craig R. Thompson, The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago, 1965), p. 625. De fructu, pp. 12–13. Pace complained to Erasmus that he had been leading a dreadful life, engaged in war and neglecting the Muses; princes fail to listen to counsel and obstruct negotiations, and Erasmus should have understood these machinations clearly from reading More’s Utopia; by this was presumably meant the hypothetical secret meeting of the French king and his councillors, and the depiction of the mercenary Zapoletans in Utopia. The marginal note comparing them to the Swiss was omitted in the 1518 editions of Utopia issued in Swiss Basel. CWE, v, no. 619, p. 58; Utopia, ed. E. Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven and London, 1965), pp. 86–8, 87–9, 207–9 (all further references to Utopia are to this edition). To judge from their correspondence, Pace and Bombace were a major source of intelligence and political interpretation for Erasmus (and More) at this time, although this is rarely recognized, even by J. D. Tracy in his The Politics of Erasmus (Geneva, 1972). Erasmus wrote of the Swiss mercenaries in the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis. The French had tried to poison Pace, the Swiss held him in prison twice as security for the emperor’s debts to Swiss soldiers, and the disastrous expedition to take Milan brought the three leaders, Pace, Galeazzo Visconti and Cardinal Syon to feuding until Wolsey enjoined their reconciliation. The mutual antagonism between Pace and Maximilian I was profound. Pace was frequently ill with fever, before he returned to London around Christmas 1517. LP, ii, nos 1817, 1877, 1896, 1982, 2516–17, 2070, 2076, 2077, 2095, 2157, 2178, 2496, 2517. See J. S. Brewer, ed., England in the Reign of King Henry VIII (London, 1878), i, pp. 105–47 for discussion and transcripts of some of these letters. 189 letters survive from Pace’s two years among the Swiss, 149 from him and 40 to him. The relationship between the letter and the dialogue is acknowledged by more than one classical author. According to Demetrius, Artemon, the editor of Aristotle’s Letters, instructed that a letter ought to be written in the same manner as a dialogue and should abound in glimpses of character, as does the dialogue. Demetrius, On Style, ed. and trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe and W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, MA, 1991), iv, pp. 224, 227. De fructu, pp. 4–5. After the Treaty of Noyon had put a temporary cease to hostilities in August 1516, Pace was left with time on his hands. Wegg, Pace, pp. 65–114. Compare to More’s letter to Peter Gillis prefacing Utopia, explaining how the work was composed during a lull in the embassy. De fructu, pp. 4–6, 5–7. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Ibid., pp. 20–1. LP, iii, pt 2, no. 1540. De fructu, pp. 22–3. Ibid. Perhaps in the spring of 1514 or after Bainbridge’s death in October 1515. Pace says that he was unknown to the guests. This is one of the few episodes in the text which is widely known and quoted by commentators.

Richard Pace’s De fructu and Early Tudor Pedagogy 71 65 Erasmus’ letter referring to his wife Lady Poverty dates from June 1516. CWE, ii, no. 255. 66 De fructu, pp. 22–5. 67 Cave, Cornucopian Text, pp. 171–82. 68 De fructu, pp. 126–7. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., pp. 112–13. Pliny, Epistles, vi, no. 11. 72 Contrast with Thomas Starkey’s preference for aristocratic leadership in his A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London, 1989), pp. xiii, 52–6, 75, 124–9, 142–3. For Pace’s devotion to the republic of Venice and its regard for his learning and diplomatic skills, see Calendar of State Papers Relating to England in the Libraries of Venice and Northern Italy, ed. R. L. Brown (London, 1864–97), ii, no. 890; Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. and trans. R. L. Brown (London 1854), i, p. 142. 73 Gleason, John Colet, p. 224. 74 J. K. McConica, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University (Oxford 1986), pp. 120–1. 75 Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, pp. 86–7; D. K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1988). 76 H. H. Gray, ‘Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence’, in Renaissance Essays, ed. P. O. Kristeller and P. P. Weiner (New York, 1968), pp. 199–216. 77 De fructu, pp. 90–1; Cicero, De inventione, I. ii. 2–3; De oratore, I. xliii; De legibus, XXIII. 61. 78 De fructu, pp. 28–9. Cf. St Augustine, Confessions, I. xviii. 28. 79 De fructu, pp. 26–9, 90–1. 80 Ibid., pp. 44–5, 69–72. 81 Ibid., pp. 8–9. For a detailed study of Pace’s conception of the unity of theology and rhetoric, which has much in common with that of Erasmus (and pre-dates that expressed in Erasmus’ Ratio verae theologiae and Ecclesiastes), together with an account Pace’s own rhetorical practice as revealed in his Oratio Richardi Pacei in pace nuperrime composita … inter … Angliae regum et Francorum regem … in aede divi Pauli Londini habita (London, 1518), see Curtis, ‘Pace’, Chapters 3 and 4; for D. A. Russell’s English translation of the Oratio in pace see Appendix A, ‘Richard Pace’s Oration’, in J. G. Russell, Peacemaking in the Renaissance (London, 1986), pp. 234–41. Brian Vickers argues that English rhetorics usually sever rhetoric from political and social life, and serve merely as digests for educational purposes. See his ‘Some Reflections on the Rhetorical Textbook’, in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (New York, 1994), pp. 81–102. However, Quentin Skinner’s discussion of the vir civilis as conceived by Tudor rhetoricians argues otherwise. See his Reason and Rhetoric, chapter 2. De fructu is highly unusual in that its literary form allows for the concrete contextualization of the performance of the ars eloquentiae in teaching, courtly oratory and letter writing. 82 De fructu, pp. 38–9. 83 Ibid.

72 Cathy Curtis 84 Ibid., pp. 128–9. Vives’ De initiis, sectis et laudibus philosophiae of 1518 shares Pace’s Platonic conception of the sciences as comprising a unity and of Greek literature, especially peripatetic, as possessing all the knowledge of the universe, the art of speaking and living well, and of ruling others and making laws. J. L. Vives, Early Writings, ed. C. Matheeussen et al. (Leiden, 1987), pp. 23, 35, 47–9. 85 De fructu, pp. 94–5. Pace refers to the Aldine 1495 volume of Apollonius and Theodore Gaza. Erasmus lectured on Gaza in Cambridge and produced a translation in 1516. 86 De fructu, pp. 107–8. Pace was attempting to avoid the problems of Linacre’s grammars which were considered by Vives and Melanchthon to be beyond the reach of the student, assuming a degree of familiarity with Greek unusual at the time and having a philosophical, classificatory and antiquarian presentation lacking pedagogical imagination. See D. F. S Thompson, ‘Linacre’s Latin Grammars’, in Linacre Studies: Essays on the Life and Works of Thomas Linacre, c. 1460–1524, ed. F. Maddison, M. Pelling and C. Webster (Oxford, 1977), pp. 26–33. 87 Quintilian, Istititutio oratoria, I. iv. 2; I. iv. 5; I. i. 12–14. 88 De fructu, pp. 36–7. Cf. Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster, in which double translation is recommended and for the same purposes. Ascham also relies on Quintilian and Pliny the Younger as authorities. 89 More also attempted to introduce such methods into England. Hythloday of Utopia prefers the Greek to the Latin authors, taking many new Aldine editions to Utopia and introducing the receptive Utopians to the Greek language. Hythloday’s books included most of Plato, several of Aristotle, Theophrastus on plants, Lascaris on grammar (he did not take Gaza with him), Thucydides and Herodotus, some treatises of Hippocrates and the Ars medica of Galen. The Utopians were particularly fond of the works of Plutarch and Lucian, and the poets Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles. Utopia, pp. 182–3. For a parallel list of authors by Erasmus, see CWE, xxv, pp. xiv–xv. In the same year as the first publication of De fructu and Utopia, Bishop Fox founded Corpus Christi College at Oxford. The statutes provided for a lecturer in Greek to lecture on grammar and rhetoric, and the major Greek writers such as Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Aristotle and Plutarch, all authors discussed by Pace. Lectures were also to be given on Cicero’s Orator and De partitione oratoria, and Quintilian’s Declamations and Institutio oratoria. See J. W. Binns, ‘Latin Translations from Greek in the English Renaissance’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, XXVII (1978) 128–59, and Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, p. 266. 90 Correspondance de Martin Bucer, ed. J. Rott (Leiden, 1979), i, pp. 46–7. 91 CWE, v, no. 732. This letter answers that of Rhenanus written on behalf of the press and received 5 December. The catalogue of Rhenanus’ library, which represents part of the fine Sélestat collection, lists Pace’s Oratio in pace. See Catalogue général de la Bibliothèque Municipale, ed. J. Walter (Alsace, 1929), part 3, no. 1175. 92 This letter, and three others to Pace, were printed in the French humanist’s popular Epistolae of 1520 and open the collection addressed to illustrious humanists across Europe. The first letter reveals that Pace had sent two

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letters from Bruges to Budé, and communicated that he was expecting the appearance of De fructu any day. Budé, Epistolae (1521), sigs. A2r–A4r. Budé contributed a glowing testimonial of Utopia addressed to Thomas Lupset for the 1517 Paris edition of Utopia which was retained in the Froben editions. Jardine, Erasmus, pp. 180–7. This section draws on her excellent study. Ibid., p. 156. CWE, v, no. 816, p. 389. Shaw, ‘Erasmus of Rotterdam’. CWE, v, no. 741, p. 241. De fructu, pp. 4–5. CWE, v, no. 729, pp. 222–3. Utopia, pp. 2, 3. See Curtis, ‘Pace’, chapter 6 for a detailed discussion of the suppression of De fructu in the context of a number of Erasmian controversies, including that surrounding his philological approach as articulated in the Ratio verae theologiae and as executed in his edition of the Greek New Testament; the publication of the Praise of Folly; Erasmus’ support for Johannes Reuchlin; and his active promotion of Jerome Busleyden’s Collegium Trilingue at Louvain. When Reuchlin’s case became connected with Luther’s, the cause of humanism was seen to be identical in the minds of many on either side of the religious divide with the cause of Protestant reform. Erasmus’ alarm increased as support for Luther strengthened and the demand for Protestant literature and anonymously authored pamphlets attacking the Roman Church and its priesthood brought good earnings to printers, especially those in the German territories. Erasmus became preoccupied with the difficulty of controlling the spread of slander and libel; humanists, however, held diverse views on the proper limits to freedom of speech exercised through satire and to the ethics of printing. Extremely helpful on these subjects are E. Rummel, Erasmus and his Catholic Critics (Nieuwkoop, 1989), i and ii, and P. Bietenholz, ‘Ethics and Early Printing: Erasmus’ Rules for the Proper Conduct of Authors’, Humanities Association Review, XXVI (Summer 1975) 180–95. See also Alan Stewart’s contribution to this volume, chapter 4. CWE, v, no. 800. Ibid., ii, no. 222, pp. 161–3. Ibid., v, nos 740 and 741. More and Pace travelled back to England together around Christmas. CWE, v, no. 741, p. 241. Ibid., v, nos 736, 755, 776. The two ‘final’ letters (excluding that of Pace) in the Dorp dispute survive bound up together at the end of Erasmus’ Farrago amongst Rhenanus’ books at Sélestat. Jardine, Erasmus, p. 187. See also Curtis, ‘Pace’, pp. 285–6 and 303–4. The Complete Works of St Thomas More (New Haven, 1963–), xv: In Defence of Humanism, pp. xxxvi, xli–lv, 130–49, 198–303; Wegg, Richard Pace, pp. 161–2; CWE, vi, no. 948, pp. 316–17. Jardine, Erasmus, pp. 112, 121. One point to raise here, however, concerns Jardine’s discussion of the Erasmus/Dorp/More exchange which she argues

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is unintelligible reference to Agricola’s De inventione dialectica. Among Pace’s wide-ranging references to classical and modern authors of rhetorics and dialectics in De fructu, Agricola does not feature. The content of Pace’s contribution to the Dorp exchange, which may be inferred from De fructu and his letters, may suggest further difficulties for Jardine’s thesis. She argues that De inventione dialectica, was ‘reconstructed by Erasmus’ circle to offer a technical grounding for bonae literae to substitute for traditional theology’s Aristotelian corpus of logical works’. Pace is also extremely interested in topical argument and the reform of scholastic dialectic, but it is the methodology of his Italian masters which he wishes to substitute – based on the classical ars eloquentiae and Aristotelian sources. C. Schmitt’s John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston and Montreal, 1983) provides a context for appreciating Pace’s early attempts to encourage such study in England. CWE, xxiv: De copia, pp. 687–9. See P. Mack, ‘Humanist Rhetoric and Dialectic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. J. Kraye (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 82–99. CWE, xxiv: De ratione studii, p. 672. Ibid., p. 302. Praelectio in convivia Francisci Philelphi, in Vives, Early Writings, pp. 145–7. J. M. Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York, 1962), p. 168. Erasmus told Ulrich von Hutten how More acquired a more supple style by practising in every genre of writing, delighting in declamations – especially on paradoxical themes – and had even worked on a dialogue supporting Plato’s doctrine of communalism. CWE, vii, no. 999. Vives recalled how More studied the first declamation of Quintilian with his children, and asked Vives to compose a rejoinder. J. L. Vives, Opera omnia (London, 1964), ii, pp. 484–5. Budé, Epistolae, sig. A3r; D. O. McNeil, Guillaume Budé and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I (Geneva, 1975). Budé, like Erasmus, acknowledged Poliziano as a source and model for his own encyclopaedic stores of information on the philology, philosophy and political economy of antiquity, and current political events. In De fructu, pp. 102–3, Budé is introduced as a guardian of correct grammar. Pace cites Fulgentius’ Mithologiae as edited and translated by Baptista Pius of Bologna (Milan, 1498): De fructu, pp. 99, 100 and 170. Pace praises Pliny’s Natural History as learned in all kinds of knowledge, even if he considers that Pliny lacks rhetorical ornamentation; he criticizes the errors in the Aldine edition. De fructu, pp. 134–5. Pace cites a distich from Poliziano’s In leges extemporale and presents him as a model of humanist philological antiquarianism, correcting the spelling of the name Vergil after five hundred years in the Miscellanea, by reference to an ancient inscription. De fructu, pp. 32, 68, 150, 162, 180. Menippean satire was not, however, an ancient generic term and was not applied as such until Justus Lipsius entitled his Satyra Menippea. Somnium in 1581. The anonymously French authored and multilingual La Satyre Menippée, ou La Vertu du Catholicon, selon l’edition princeps de 1594, ed. M.C. Read (Paris, 1926) followed Lipsius’ usage. See J. C. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore and London, 1993), chapter 2. Classicists and

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students of Renaissance satire still find the term useful, however, and there are classical descriptions of its aspects. The character Varro in Cicero’s Academica explains his rationale for employing satire and in particular, his adaptations of Menippean satire: to render the philosophical schools comprehensible to those of no great education. Academica, 1. 8. See also W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (London, 1995), and I. De Smet, Neo-Latin Satire in the Low Countries and France, 1581–1655 (Cambridge, 1993). E. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York and London, 1980), p. xi. See Curtis, ‘Pace’, chapter 5. The fragments of other Menippean satires were only gradually collected in the course of the century, such as Petronius’ Satyricon. A catalogue of 150 of the Varronian titles was preserved by St Jerome while the fragments were transmitted by Nonius Marcellus, Aulus Gellius and Macrobius. Erasmus drew on the proverbial nature of Varro’s Menippeae over thirty times in the Adagia. See Kirk, Menippean Satire, p. xxii. The Complete Works of St Thomas More, ii: Epigrammata, ‘Progymnasmata’, nos 3, 80, 81. More was translating from Anthologia Palatina, ix, 74. Cf. Lucian’s Nigrinus, 26. Kirk, Menippean Satire, pp. 231–3 on the De satyrica Graecorum poesi et Romanorum satira libri duo of Casaubon. Some of the most useful studies are Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire; B. P. McCarthy, ‘Lucian and Menippus’, Yale Classical Studies, IV (1934) 3–55; U. Knoche, Roman Satire, trans. E. S. Ramage (Bloomington and London, 1975). Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire, pp. 137–63. W. H. Stahl, R. Johnson and E. L. Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts (New York, 1971 and 1977). Both Martianus Capella and Fulgentius introduce a character ‘Satura’ who is identified with the genre of the work and is concerned with its reception. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire, pp. 13–17. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire, p. 16. De fructu, pp. xiv, and 173: ‘Perhaps it is not so much a breakdown of the persona or the dramatic vehicle as an intentional and meaningful part of the overall effect, allowing Pace to address the work to Colet in his own person throughout and at the same time maintain the imaginative drama of the address to boys of Colet’s school by a series of personified abstractions.’ De fructu, pp. 14–15. Ibid. See R. F. Hock, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, i: The Progymnasmata (Georgia, 1986), no. 43, pp. 227–8: ‘Isocrates said that education’s root / is bitter, its fruit sweet’. Cato’s formulation is usually cited as ‘Litterarum radices amaras esse, fructus iucundiores’. As George Kennedy explains, students were assigned a chreia to work out under the headings of ‘praise of the chreia; paraphrase; statement of the cause; example of the meaning; contrast and comparison; testimony of others; epilogue’. See his Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (Princeton, NJ, 1983), p. 61. De fructu, pp. 26–7. Cicero later mitigated this strict Stoic formula. Cf. Rhetorica ad Herennium, II. xi. 16; De inventione, II. li. 155–68. See also Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, II. iv. 37; III. viii. 26. De fructu, pp. 27–6; cf. pp. 30–5.

76 Cathy Curtis 134 Pace compares the Scotists to those who attacked Colet for his statement in a sermon that an unjust peace was preferable to the most just of wars. Richard Fitzjames, Edmund Birkhead and Henry Standish are the targets. 135 De fructu, pp. 16–17. 136 Under the heading of comparisons in epideictic oratory: CWE, xxiv: De copia, pp. 624–5. Pace foreshadows aspects of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus of 1528, in its concerns with the ends of rhetoric and Italian oratory. 137 De fructu shares much subject matter with a number of the works of Vives, such as the De tradendis disciplinis (1531), De causis corruptarum artium (1523) and De initiis, sectis et laudibus philosophiae (1518). 138 Juan Luis Vives, Somnium et vigilia in Somnium Scipionis, ed. E. V. George (Greenwood, 1989), p. xlix. 139 For More’s reception of the work, see CWE, vii, no. 1106. 140 More dreams of being prince of Utopia: CWE, iv, no. 499. 141 Hexter has argued More wrote a book in the Netherlands in the summer of 1515 while on his embassy for Henry VIII, the Utopia of his first intention, and then added the sections which made up the work that Erasmus saw through the press in late 1516. More ‘opened a seam’ in his text to graft on a new section and peroration addressing the ‘crisis of conscience’ he was now facing, regarding entering the service of Henry. This ‘unpremeditated addition’ produced ‘a literary patchwork’. I intend elsewhere to address this reconstruction of the composition of Utopia which has had such profound implications for the interpretation of the dialogue of counsel in book 1, and the status of the ideal Utopia of book 2. I believe that Utopia had a long gestation, and that these references are to be read within the rhetorical mode of extempore speech, and the framework of Menippean satire. J. H. Hexter, ‘Introduction’, Utopia, pp. xx–xxii; J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (New York, 1952), pp. 11–30. 142 J. L. Vives, On Education: A Translation of the De tradendis disciplinis, intro. and trans. Foster Watson (Cambridge, 1913), p. 260. Just as copies of De fructu are commonplaced, so too are those of Utopia: see, for example, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Shelfmark F151.d.3.4; BL, Shelfmarks 522.b.2 and C.38.a.11. See E. McCutcheon, ‘More’s Utopia as Commonplaced in Edward Pudsey’s ‘Booke’ (circa 1600)’, Moreana, XXVII (1990) 33–40. McCutcheon finds that the language and phrasing of marginalia closely follow Robinson’s translation; I have found that the same applies to the largely Latin marginalia added to De fructu. 143 BL, Shelfmark G.6177, copy of Thomas Grenville, and BL, Shelfmark 73.d.19, copy of Stephen Rodwey. 144 Binns, ‘Latin Translations from Greek’, p. 129. 145 D. R. Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, i (Cambridge, 1988), p. 300. 146 Binns, ‘Latin Translations from Greek’, pp. 158–9. 147 At least 21 copies of De fructu survive. There are three in the British Library, including the two mentioned in note 143 above. A third was owned by Thomas Cranmer and Lord Lumley and is bound in with Scipio Catero’s Oratio de laudibus literarum Graecarum, which carries both men’s signatures: Shelfmark 835.g.1. See Catalogue of the Library of John Lord Lumley, ed. S. Jayne and F. R. Johnson (London, 1956), no. 2205a. A copy is in the

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148

149 150 151

152

153

Cambridge University Library, Shelfmark O*.4.51.(D), and another in Trinity College, Cambridge, which bears the stamp of Philippe Des Portes, Shelfmark III.ii.6. There are five copies in the Bodleian Library and copies in Exeter and St John’s Colleges in Oxford. The Bodleian copy (Shelfmark Byw.L7.12(4)) is bound in with Erasmus’ Ciceronis quaestiones Tusculanae and Francesco Pico della Mirandola’s Physici libri duo. Another Bodleian copy (Shelfmark 40.P.44.(1) Art. Seld.) is bound in with Vives’ Opuscula. A third Bodleian copy (Shelfmark 40.B.16.(5) Th.) was owned by Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, and carries the signature ‘Sum Joanni Bouli et amicorum’ and that of another owner which is crossed out. It is no. 5 of nine titles bound in 1620, six of which are signed by Burton, and other titles include Pace’s Oratio in pace, Tunstall’s In laudem matrimonii oratio and Pace’s translation of Fisher’s sermon against Luther of 1521. A fourth Bodleian copy (Shelfmark Allen e.45) belonged to Richard Harvey (brother of Gabriel), is dated 1580 and contains many manuscript notes in his hand (unusually in the vernacular) in addition to the notes of two other hands in Latin. The fifth Bodleian copy is Shelfmark Byw. Q8.2. The Exeter College, Oxford, copy is cropped and is annotated by two hands. Most of the surviving copies of De fructu are heavily annotated, with as many as three different hands throughout the entire text, and are in a fragile condition indicative of much use. Books in the Renaissance were often common property to be shared with friends in study (this itself a topic of Pace’s text) and so it appears that many shared ownership of De fructu. There are also two copies in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The Manley and Sylvester edition of 1967 is based on the Yale Library copy. One copy is privately owned by Ogden, who reported of two further copies in Basel and one in the Vatican Library. Joseph graduated as bachelor of divinity in 1535 and claimed to have spent nine years in the study of logic, philosophy and theology. Entering the monastery at Evesham in 1517–18, he was at Gloucester College, Oxford from c. 1523 to 1529 studying arts. The letters are examples of the use of adages and classical sententiae in the best imitation of Pace and Erasmus. The Letter Book of Robert Joseph, ed. H. Aveling and W. A. Pantin (Oxford, 1967), pp. 19–25. S. Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Foxburg Meadows repr., 1983), p. 136. St John’s College, Oxford, Shelfmark E.4.41 is signed, and is bound in with other medical texts. Sir William Paddy graduated BA from St John’s in 1573, and acquired an MD from Leiden in 1589, becoming a fellow of the College of Physicians in 1591. He gave many volumes to the library of St John’s. See Dictionary of National Biography, xv, pp. 35–6. The only copy listed in E. S. Leedham-Green’s Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart periods, i (Cambridge, 1986) was owned by John Bateman, in his inventory dated 1559. J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965); B. Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 96–131. See also G. R. Elton’s review of McConica in The Historical Journal, X (1967) 137–8.

4 The Trouble with English Humanism: Tyndale, More and Darling Erasmus Alan Stewart

The print controversy between William Tyndale and Sir Thomas More is one of the great set-piece debates of the early English Reformation.1 In More’s attack on Tyndale we have the most developed and intelligent account of the Roman Church in England’s fears and anger about the new vernacular Bible. On Tyndale’s side, we find the first articulation of a set of ideas that has become so commonplace as to be almost invisible to English readers: the demonization of Latin as the language of a foreign, colonizing Church and the accompanying assumption that access to, and use of, the vernacular English Bible provides a way forward for the true faith and a new Protestant Englishness. In this chapter, however, I shall suggest that there is another agenda in Tyndale’s words beyond the obvious anti-Rome polemic, which deals with Tyndale’s problematic relationship to humanism. James McConica has influentially argued how writers of the Henrician Reformation were inspired by Erasmian humanism; and John King shows how Tyndale took as a model for his intellectual endeavours Erasmus’ Paraclesis, which invoked St Jerome to support translation of the Bible into the vernacular, making the ‘philosophia Christi’ accessible even to the illiterate farmer, weaver or traveller.2 So when Tyndale invokes Jerome in his The Obedience of a Christian Man – ‘Saynt hierom also translated the bible in to his mother tonge. Why maye not we also?’3 – he is tacitly calling on Erasmus’ sanction. But the sustained attack on Tyndale by Thomas More, Erasmus’ very public friend, made it quite clear that Tyndale, as an English vernacular writer, might not do as Jerome did or as Erasmus recommended. In his response to More, Tyndale took the opportunity to attack the milieu to which men such as More and Erasmus signalled their allegiance, the deliberately transnational Latinate humanist culture witnessed by, or perhaps 78

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confected by, the canny use of Latin print. Through this assault, Tyndale moved beyond a purely doctrinal antagonism to undermine the foundations of the Erasmian familia of letters. * In January 1521, Cuthbert Tunstall accompanied the Emperor Charles V as he attended the imperial diet at Worms. From his days at Oxford thirty years earlier, Tunstall was a close friend of More, John Colet and Thomas Linacre; at Padua in 1499 he met Richard Pace, William Latimer, Jerome Busleyden and Aldo Manuzio; in 1505–6, he had met Erasmus who was travelling in England. Tunstall was therefore well established as a member of Erasmus’ and More’s extended, panEuropean intellectual circle.4 Now in Worms, however, his main interest was in the methods of the troublesome Martin Luther, which he reported in detail to Cardinal Wolsey. Luther had put a public declaration ‘in printe in the duch [i.e. German] tonge and sent [the same] a bout the contrey,’ he reported. Providing Wolsey with a Latin translation, Tunstall urges that ‘yor grace may cal befor you the printers and booksellers and gyff them a strayte charge that they bringe noon off his bokes into englond, nor that they translate noon off them into english, lest therby myght ensue grete troble to the realme and church off englond, as is now her. Al his bokes be in the doch tonge and in euery mans hand that can rede, and as I vndirstond be also in the hungarion tonge.’5 Identifying the double threat of importation and vernacular translation, Tunstall calls on the ecclesiastical authorities to use their powers over the agents of importation and translation, ‘printers and booksellers’. As copies of William Tyndale’s English New Testament started to spread across England in 1525 and 1526, Tunstall, now Bishop of London, put his analysis of what he had observed in Worms into action. On 24 October 1526, he issued a monition to archdeacons against the New Testaments, and directed the City of London authorities to find and confiscate these and various other books – a command the City delegated to its aldermen the following day. The monition reads (here in John Foxe’s translation): [M]any children of iniquitie mainteiners of Luthers sect, blinded through extreame wickednes, wandring from the way of truth and the catholike faith, craftly haue translated the new testament into our English tongue, entermedling there with many hereticall articles

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and erronious opinions, pernicious and offensiue, seducing ye simple people, attempting by their wicked and and [sic] peruerse interpretations, to prophanate ye maiestie of the scripture, whiche hetherto hath remayned vndefiled, and craftely to abuse the moste holy word of God, and the true sence of the same, of the whiche translation there are many bokes imprinted, some with gloses and some without, conteining in the english tongue that pestiferous and moste pernicious poyson dispersed throughout all our dioces of London in great nomber, whiche truely without it be spedely forsene without doubt will contaminate and infect the flocke committed vnto vs, with moste deadly poyson and heresy.6 At Paul’s Cross the same day, Tunstall preached against the Testaments; the draper Humphrey Monmouth, who was later accused of possessing and distributing heretical books, testified that the first evil he knew of Tyndale was when ‘I hard my lord of London preache at Pawles crosse that Sir William Tindall had translated the New Testament in Englishe and was noughtelie translated’.7 Tunstall alleged that Tyndale’s translation was full of errors, but some auditors were not convinced that this argument was valid. John Lambert, who was burned in 1538, recalled: ‘I was at Paules crosse, when ye new Testament imprinted of late beyond the sea: was fyrst forfended: and truelye my harte lamented greatly to heare a greate man preaching against it, which shewed forthe certaine thinges that he noted for hideous errors to be in it, that I, ye and not I [only?], but likewise did many other thincke verelye to be none.’8 New Testaments had to be turned in within thirty days, and some were publicly burned at the site of Tunstall’s sermon, Paul’s Cross. The book burning, with its inevitable overtones of heretic burning, quickly became a focal point for Protestant complaint both in England and abroad. In the 1529 A proper dyaloge betwene a gentillman and an husbandma[n] the Gentlemen refers to how the church has commanded straytely That none vnder great payne be so hardye To haue in englishe the testament. Which as thou knowest at London The bisshop makinge ther a sermon With shamefull blasphemy was brent.9 The scandalized servants in Jerome Barlowe and William Roye’s 1528 dialogue Rede me and be nott wrothe, printed in Strasbourg, personify the gospel as a Protestant martyr, lamenting the ‘villany / | They did

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vnto the gospell’, by ‘sett[ing] hym a fyre | Openly in London cite’. Jeffraye describes how ‘the Bisshoppe of London / | With the Cardinalles authorite. | … at Paulis crosse ernestly / | Denounced it to be heresy / | That the gospell shuld come to lyght’, and called those who ‘caused the gospell venerable / | To come vnto laye mens syght’ ‘heretikes execrable’. He declared there in his furiousnes / That he fownde erroures more and les / Above thre thousande in the translacion. Howe be it when all came to pas / I dare saye vnable he was / Of one erroure to make probacion.10 In these texts, the book burning is seen to be ordered at the highest level of a monolithic Church: it is deplored by characters who lack such social power – a husbandman, servants. This opposition would come to be familiar in anti-Roman texts. In time, the remit of Tunstall’s monition (and Archbishop William Warham’s almost identical monition dated 3 November 1526)11 was expanded to include other heretical works, including Latin works by Henricus Bomelius, Martin Luther, Huldrich Zwingli, John Hus and Wolfgang Capito. But the focus was clearly the new vernacular texts: the original list12 is headed by Simon Fish’s A supplicacyon for the beggers (1529?); the translation by ‘Richard Brightwell’ (i.e. John Frith) of Luther’s A pistle to the Christen reader The revelation of Antichrist. Antithesis (1529); Tyndale’s New Testament (1526); The parable of the wicked mammon (1528); The obedie[n]ce of a Christen man (1528); and A compendious introduccion, prologe or preface vn to the pistle off Paul to the Romayns (1526). The final English title, ‘A dialogue betwixt the father and the son’, is presumably William Roye’s translation of Wolfgang Capito’s De pueris instituendis ecclesiae Argentinensis isagoge of 1527 (also itself placed on the list), published as A Lytle treatous or dialoge very necessary for all christen men to learne and to knowe:13 in The supplyacyon of soulys, More refers to this text as ‘the dyaloge … betwene the father and the sonne agaynst the sacrament of the aulter’ (although he misidentifies its authors as ‘frere Roy and frere Hyerome’).14 Indeed, as Foxe tells the story much later, ‘English’ is the denominator by which these books were detected: ‘[T]he Cardinall together with the bishoppes consulted, how they might prouide a spedy remedy for this mischiefe, and therupon determined to giue out a commission to forbid the redinge of all English bookes

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the which was done out of hande by Cuthbert Tonstall bishop of London’ [my emphasis].15 As part of this campaign, on 7 March 1527/8 Tunstall called on Thomas More to respond directly to the new vernacular works. The rationale for the campaign is detailed in the licence that Tunstall had to issue to More, in order to permit him to possess the heretical books, which of course had now been called in and suppressed. The licence – in Latin – echoes the language of the prohibition: Since now of late the Church of God throughout Germany has been infested with heretics there have been found certain children of iniquity who are endeavouring to bring over into our land the old and accursed Wycliffian heresy, and along with it the Lutheran heresy, foster-daughter of Wycliffe’s. By translating into our mother tongue some of the vilest of their booklets and printing them in great numbers, they are forsooth striving with all their might to stain and infect this country with these most pestilent doctrines – doctrines opposed to the truth of the Catholic Faith. It is therefore greatly to be feared that catholic truth may be wholly imperilled if good and learned men do not equally stoutly withstand the malice of the wicked persons aforesaid. This can in no way be better and more fitly done than if the truth contained in the universal language (catholica lingua) – truth utterly confuting these outrageous teachings – be in like fashion printed and set forth. For thereby it will come to pass that men unskilled in sacred letters, having in their hands these new heretical books, and along with them catholic books confuting the same, will be able either to discern the truth for themselves or to be rightly advised and instructed by others whose judgement is more acute.16 Tunstall wants to involve More in his campaign to combat these treatises because of his recognized prowess as an orator: And since you, dearest brother, can play the Demosthenes in our native tongue just as well as in Latin, and are wont in every fight to be a most keen champion of catholic truth, you could in no wise better occupy your leisure hours – if you can steal any from your duties – than in putting forth some writings in English which will reveal to the simple and uneducated the crafty malice of the heretics, and render such folk better equipped against such impious supplanters of the Church.17

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If flattery were not enough, Tunstall sweetens his offer by pointing out that there were prestigious precedents for such a campaign: In so doing you have a very distinguished example to follow – that of our most illustrious lord King Henry VIII, who stood forth to defend the Sacraments of the Church against Luther when he was undermining the same with all his strength, and so won for ever the immortal name of Defender of the Church.18 Tunstall moves smoothly from Henry VIII’s response to Luther to More’s proposed response to these other Lutheran texts, and there may well be a private joke here, since More was said to have had a hand in Henry’s 1521 Assertio septem sacramentorum aduersus M. Lutheru[m].19 What the rhetorical move elides is the substantive difference between Henry VIII standing forth to defend the Sacraments of the Church against Luther in Latin and what Tunstall was now asking More to do. The point that Tunstall is making here is that the vile treatises are being translated ‘into the English vernacular’ and that More is a skilled orator ‘in our vernacular as well as in Latin’: here he is being called on specifically to ‘publish in English’ against English works.20 More spent most of his final years playing the Demosthenes in English, as Tunstall requested. His first intervention came with The supplycacyon of soulys (1529), written against Simon Fish’s A supplicacyon for the beggers. Shortly afterwards he published A dyaloge of syr Thomas More, which was answered in 1531 by William Tyndale’s An answere vnto sir Thomas Mores dialoge; in the same year, a second edition of More’s Dyaloge included a rebuttal of John Ryckes’ 1525 The Ymage of Love. 1532 witnessed More’s response to Tyndale’s Answere in The confutacyon of Tyndales answere, adding The second parte of the confutacyon of Tyndales answere in 1533 – a work which also responded to Robert Barnes’ 1531 A supplicayton … vnto henrye the eyght. 1533 also saw the publication of More’s The apologye of syr T. More knyght, which answered Christopher St German’s anonymously published A treatise concernynge the diuision betwene the spirytualtie and temporaltie (1532); St German then replied with Salem and Byzance (1533), provoking More’s The debellacyon of Salem and Bizance. If Fish, Tyndale, Ryckes, Barnes and St German were not enough, More took on John Frith, with A letter of syr Tho. More knyght impugynge the erronyouse wrytyng of J. Fryth (1533), which Frith answered with A boke made by John Frith … answeringe vnto M. mores lettur, and Tyndale answered anonymously with The souper of the Lorde … wheryn incidently M. Moris letter agenst

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J. Frythe is confuted. In 1534, More answered this last with The answere to the fyrste parte of the poysened booke, whych a namelesse heretyke hath named the souper of the lorde, which George Joye responded to with The subuersion of Moris false foundation.21 Only with More’s execution did the controversy end. There had, of course, been what we might now call ‘print controversies’ before in England. Reformist ideas from the continent had been challenged in print:22 John Fisher had opposed Luther and Oecolampadius; the king himself had taken on Luther with his Assertio; and More had been used to combat both Luther (under the pseudonym ‘William Ross’ in his Responsio ad Lutherum [1523]), and Johann Bugenhagen.23 Within England, from 1519 to 1521 the so-called ‘Grammarians’ War’ pitted the Vice-Provost of Eton, William Horman, with his allies Robert Aldrich (Headmaster of Eton) and William Lily (Headmaster of the St Paul’s School), against Robert Whittinton, author of influential Latin textbooks and the former royal tutor, poet John Skelton.24 But the Grammarians’ War and the early anti-Lutheran battles were waged in Latin, their attacks only readable by an educated élite; now, as William Clebsch puts it, ‘Protestantism posed a radically different problem from that met by the early books … when, after 1525, it went native, as it were’.25 As David Carlson has convincingly argued, these battles were not necessarily about their ostensible content: the Grammarians’ War, which ‘soon came to be represented as an important turning point in the history of the advent to England of the new learning and all the other benefits of humanism’, was not concerned primarily with scholarly or pedagogical issues. It arose rather ‘out of the need of those who participated in it to make a living by a career in letters and the perception among them that they could profit their careers by exploiting Horman’s publication’, the 1519 Vulgaria.26 Carlson’s argument cannot be applied directly to the More–Tyndale battle (although Tyndale accused More of mercenary motivation, as we shall see), but it serves as a helpful reminder that form needs to be considered alongside content. As an English vernacular dispute, the More–Tyndale debate was fought on a totally new terrain, which was by no means neutral. As More explained the rationale of his actions in a letter to Erasmus of 14 June 1532, his doctrinal objections to his opponents are inextricably bound up with questions of translation into the vernacular: One or two of our fellow countrymen, with a steady stream of books written in our vernacular and containing mistranslations, and

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worse, misinterpretations of Scripture, have been sending into our land every brand of heresy from Belgium, where they have sought refuge. I have written replies to several of these books, not however out of any great worry for one who would examine the works of both men [i.e. of him and of me] thoroughly, but because some people like to give an approving eye to novel ideas, out of superficial curiosity, and to dangerous ideas, out of devilry; and in so doing, they assent to what they read, not because they believe it is true, but because they want it to be true.27 Revealingly, More admits that he has no ‘great worry’ that anyone is really going to compare his response with his opponent’s work and draw balanced, informed conclusions. Rather, it is the form in which these ideas reach England, the vernacular text, that is dangerous because it is novel, and therefore has to be answered on its own terms. In other words, the invading Lutheran texts cannot be allowed to monopolize vernacular literature, and vernacular literature cannot be allowed to become synonymous with Reformation propaganda. Like Tunstall at St Paul’s, More charges Tyndale with mistranslation, and therefore with radical misinterpretation of key words. Most notorious is Tyndale’s englishing of the Greek word ecclesia, by rendering it as ‘congregation’ rather than ‘church’, and thereby transferring authority from the institution (church) to the faithful gathered (congregation). Tyndale responds in his An Answer vnto sir Thomas Mores dialoge with a pertinent retort: ‘But how happeth it that .M. More hathe not contended inlykewise agaynst hys derelynge Erasmus all this longe while? Doeth not he chaunge this worde ecclesia into congregacyon and yt not silden in ye new testament?’28 Tyndale, of course, has a valid point here: Erasmus does indeed translate ‘ecclesia’ as ‘congregatio’ seven times in his New Testament. But Tyndale is teasing More, taking the situation out of context: Erasmus did not, and could not, ‘chaunge this worde ecclesia into congregacyon’, since he was translating into Latin, not into English. Tyndale thus pushes More into a corner, forced to admit that there is something qualitatively different about the politics of translation into the vernacular. More retorts that Erasmus’ ‘dede is nothynge lyke Tyndals’, because Latin has no word of its own ‘vsed for the chyrche’ (only the borrowed ecclesia) and ‘therfore Erasmus in hys new translacyon gaue it a laten worde. But we had in englysshe a proper englysshe worde’, and so Tyndale did not need ‘to chaunge it in to a worse’. Moreover, Tyndale is a heretic, while Erasmus was writing against heretics, ‘And therfore was there in this mater no cause for me

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to contende wyth Erasmus, as there was to contende wyth Tyndale wyth whom I contende for puttynge in congregacyon in stede of chyrch’ – and here More’s tongue slips firmly into cheek – ‘excepte yt Tyndale peraduenture meaneth that I sholde haue ben angry wyth Erasmus bycause that in stede of congregacyon in hys laten translacyon, he hadde not put in our englysshe worde chyrche.’29 While this might appear a good counter-argument, Tyndale has by now pushed the debate elsewhere. He answers his own question as to why More does not attack Erasmus: ‘peraduenture he owithe him fauoure because he made Moria in his housse’.30 This charge seems to rattle More: Then he asketh me why I haue not contended with Erasmus whom he calleth my derlynge, of all thys longe whyle for translatynge of thys worde ecclesia in to thys worde congregatio. And then he cometh forth wyth hys fete proper taunte, that I fauour hym of lykelyhed for makynge of hys boke of Moria in my howse.31 By 1532, when he wrote these lines, More had long been friends with Erasmus of Rotterdam, their amicitia witnessed in a large, some of it printed, correspondence, and in a complex exchange of portraits surrounding the publication of More’s Utopia.32 The ‘Moria’, Erasmus’ Moriae encomium or Praise of Folly, was perhaps the most public sign of that friendship: a book asserted in print to have been written in More’s house, and containing in its punning title Erasmus’ own ‘praise of More’.33 In that tetchy mention of ‘Erasmus whom he calleth my derlynge’, and the reference to the domestic situation which allegedly produced The Praise of Folly, More reveals that Tyndale has in some way hit home. Tyndale accuses More of giving preferential treatment to Erasmus because he is his intimate, familiar, household friend; the fact that he is tacitly citing Erasmus to make his point intensifies the self-referentiality of More’s circle. More refuses to engage with this accusation, and returns the argument to a more abstract level: There had he hyt me lo saue for lakke of a lytell salte. I haue not contended wyth Erasmus my derlynge, bycause I found no suche malycyouse entent wyth Erasmus my derlynge, as I fynde wyth Tyndale. For had I fownde wyth Erasmus my derlyng the shrewde entent and purpose that I fynde in Tindale: Erasmus my derlynge sholde be no more my derlynge. But I fynde in Erasmus my

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derlynge that he detesteth and abhorreth the errours and heresyes that Tyndale playnely techeth and abydeth by / and therfore Erasmus my derlynge shall be my dere derlyng styll. And surely yf Tyndale had eyther neuer taughte them, or yet had the grace to reuoke them: then sholde Tyndale be my dere derlynge to. But whyle he holdeth such heresies stylle / I can not take for my derlyng hym that the deuyll taketh for hys derlynge.34 It is a devastating riposte: More happily claims Erasmus as his ‘derlynge’, as a fellow abhorrer of ‘errours and heresyes’. But by his excessive, obsessive iteration, More concedes Tyndale’s taunt. Tyndale is not merely claiming that Erasmus and More are friends, and that More is giving Erasmus unfair preferential treatment; more importantly, he is pointing out that their friendship, usually conveyed as an idealized amicitia, is in fact a ‘derlynge’ friendship. ‘Darling’, or ‘dearling’, as More’s spelling betrays its derivation, is by no means necessarily a sexualized or eroticized term, but it does suggest ‘a favourite’ or ‘a minion’, and most sixteenth-century uses are vaguely derogatory, or at least belittling. Here it conveys a domestic understanding between More and Erasmus that is an inappropriate basis for their printed and public literary production, in this case Moriae encomium. Tyndale continues his attack on Moriae encomium: ‘Which boke if were in englishe / then shulde euery man se / how that he then was ferre other wise minded than he nowe writeth.’35 More replies: Tyndale sayth that yf it [Moriae encomium] were in englysshe, euery man sholde then well se that I was then ferre otherwyse mynded then I now wryte … I saye therfore in these dayes in whyche men by theyr own defaute mysseconstre and take harme of the very scrypture of god, vntyll menne better amende, yf any man wolde now translate Moria in to Englyshe, or some workes eyther that I haue my selfe wrytten ere this, all be yt there be none harme therin / folke yet beynge (as they be) geuen to take harme of that that is good / I wolde not onely my derlynges bokes but myne owne also, helpe to burne them both wyth myne owne handes, rather then folke sholde (though thorow theyr own faute) take any harme of them, seynge that I se them lykely in these dayes so to do. The reference to book burning inevitably returns us to Tunstall’s sermon in October 1526, and to Tyndale’s New Testaments, but here crucially the issue is not heretical writing. More is not talking about

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the Moriae encomium nor his own early Latin works: he is talking about the hypothetical English translations of those works, which he classes alongside Tyndale’s New Testaments, as potentially full of mistranslation leading to misinterpretation. He is no more condemning Moriae encomium than he would Erasmus’ New Testament: what concerns him, and concerns him hugely, is what it means for texts previously confined to an educated Latinate class to become available to the rest of England. Thus, he gives the lie to his earlier attempts to separate Tyndale from Erasmus on grounds of heresy: the true danger lies here not in the content of works, but in the fact of the vernacular text and its new, and newly uncontrollable, readership. * Tyndale’s attack had its roots in a personal dilemma: he understood his own writings as both derived from, and comprehensively rejecting, the Erasmian scene of literary production, this ‘derlinge’ circle. In the first preface to his Pentateuch, published in 1529, Tyndale recalls how in 1523, he had himself tried to win a position in the household of Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London. He travelled to London, and there thorow the accoyntaunce of my master came to sir harry gilford the kinges graces countroller / and brought hym an oration of Isocrates which I had translated out of greke in to English / and desyred hym to speake vnto my lorde of London [Tunstall] for me / which hee also did as he shewed me / and willed me to write a pistle to my lorde / and to goo to him my silf which I also did / and delivered my pistle to a servant of his owne / one wyllyam hebilthwayte / a man of myne old accoyntaunce. But god which kneweth what is within hypocrites / sawe that I was begyled / and that that councell was not the nexte way vnto my purpose. And therfore he gate me no fauoure in my lordes sight. Whereuppon my lorde answered me / his house was full / he had mo then he could well finde / and advised me to seke in london / wher he sayd I coude not lacke a seruice. After almost a year in London, exposed to the boasts of ‘our pratars’ (preachers), ‘the pompe of our prelates’, and (ironically) ‘how besyed they were as they yet are / to set peace and vnite in the world’, Tyndale finally comes to understand ‘not only that there was no rowme in my lorde of londons palace to translate the new testament / but also that there was no place to do it in all englonde / as experience doth now openly

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declare’.36 This is, on the one hand, a personal epiphany, but on the other, it is the story of the emergence of the English vernacular Bible. As with Tyndale’s taunting of More’s ‘derylynge Erasmus’, it is at heart a tale (based on fact) of Tyndale’s vexed encounter with the Erasmus circle.37 Why does Tyndale choose Tunstall? Because, he writes, Erasmus had puffed Tunstall, praising him ‘excedyngly among other in his annotatyons on the new testament for his great learninge’.38 As John King notes in his contribution to this volume, while working in Gloucestershire, Tyndale had been known to praise Erasmus openly, and already had translated Erasmus’ Enchiridion (which was not published until 1533);39 the Erasmus connection meant that Tyndale ‘thought … if I might come to this mannes service / I were happye’.40 By choosing a translation from Greek to English as his threshold-crossing gift, Tyndale plays on the particular interests of Tunstall, a noted Greekist. Tyndale presumably knew that Tunstall aided Erasmus from late 1516 to mid-1517 with the second edition of the Greek New Testament in Brussels, Ghent and Bruges – Tunstall lent Erasmus a manuscript of the Greek New Testament, undertook research work on Greek codices and suggested emendations. Tunstall was thus already invested in the project of translating the New Testament, the project Tyndale wishes to forward.41 Which oration does Tyndale present? David Daniell has made a strong case, based on appropriate content, that the oration in question is Isocrates’ Panegyricus or ‘festival oration’ (c. 380 BC).42 I suggest that another possibility is the Ad Nicoclem Cypri regem, the oration Isocrates made to his pupil Nicocles on his accession to the throne of Salamis; the other guests brought material goods, but Isocrates’ gift to Nicocles was a programme of study to rule well.43 Ad Nicoclem appears to have been used popularly as an exercise: fourteen translations are known to survive from the fifteenth century. Rodolphus Agricola translated it (although the text was not published until 1539);44 in 1516 Erasmus included his own Latin version in the first and several subsequent editions of his Institutio principis Christiani.45 Erasmus’ use of Ad Nicoclem points to what Dominic Baker-Smith has noted as Isocrates’ orations’ ‘particular relevance to counsel. Where Cicero’s writings address a peer group, Isocrates’ Nicocles and Ad Nicoclem offer advice and exhortation to one in authority’.46 This function was noted by Sir Thomas Elyot who recommended the orations in his Boke named the Gouernour (1531): Isocrates concerning the lesson of oratours is euery where wonderfull profitable / hauynge almost as many wyse sentences as he hath wordes: and with that is so swete & delectable to rede / that after

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him almost all other seme vnsauery and tedious: and in persuadynge / as well a prince as a priuate persone to vertue / in two very litle and compendious warkes / wherof he made the one to kynge Nicocles / the other to his frende Demonicus / wolde be perfectly kanned [known] and had in continuall memorie.47 But when Elyot himself translated and published Ad Nicoclem into English, he did not use it to persuade either a prince or a private person (the book’s only dedicatory epistle is ‘to the reader’). Instead, he stressed the importance of Isocrates to the English vernacular: This little booke (whiche in mine opinion) is to be compared in counsaile and short sentence with any booke, holy scripture excepted, I haue translated out of greeke, not presumyng to contende with them, whiche haue doone the same in latine: but to thintent onely that I wolde assaie, if our Englisshe tunge mought receiue the quicke and propre sentences pronounced by the greekes. And in this experience I haue founde (if I be not muche deceiued) the forme of speakyng, vsed by the Greekes, called in greeke, and also in latine, Phrasis, muche nere approcheth to that, whiche at this daie we vse: than the order of the latine tunge: I meane in the sentences, and not in the wordes: whiche I doubte not shall be affirmed by them, who sufficiently instructed in all the saide three tunges, shall with a good iudgement read this worke.48 Elyot denies that he is ‘contend[ing]’ with those who have turned Ad Nicoclem into Latin, but the very denial raises the possibility of a competition, and, therefore, a difference between translation into Latin and translation into English. He then builds on that with his notion of Phrasis, which elsewhere he glosses as: ‘The propre fourme, or maner of speache, which in one countraye is oftentymes dyuerse: as Southerne, Northerne, Deuenysshe, Kentyshe, Frenche, Picard, Gascoyne, Walon: some do set the negatife before the affirmatife, some contrary, some speache is quicke, some graue, some flouryshynge, some temperate.’49 The ‘Englisshe tunge’ (which becomes unified for his purposes here) is cognate to the Greeks’ ‘forme of speakynge’, rendering Latin an unfortunate digression from a purer classical source.50 So in Isocrates’ Ad Nicoclem, we have a text associated with translation exercises, circulating meaningfully in the Erasmus circle, which might be expected to appeal to the Erasmian Tunstall. But Erasmus’ version of Isocrates is Latin, and Tyndale’s is English, and Tyndale’s

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project is therefore scholarship that Tunstall refuses to countenance under his own roof. The rejection of Tyndale’s vernacular Isocrates by Tunstall prefigures the rejection of Tyndale’s vernacular New Testament by Tunstall; the rejection of Tyndale from Tunstall’s household prefigures the rejection of Tyndale from Tunstall’s virtual household, the amicitia circle of Tunstall, More and Erasmus. The supportive structure linking Erasmus and Tunstall which initially so allures Tyndale, turns out to be a domestic house within which there is ‘no rowme’ for either Tyndale or his vernacular New Testament. (See also John King’s reading of this episode in his contribution to this volume.) Unsurprisingly, as a result of this setback, Tyndale was no longer inclined to believe what Erasmus had to say: Erasmus, he now claims, was a man ‘whose tonge maketh of litle gnattes great elephantes and lifteth vpp aboue the starres whosoeuer geveth him a litle exhibition [financial support, usually given to a student]’.51 The taunt of mercenary writing is also levelled at More: verelie I thinke that as Iudas betraid not christ for any loue that he had vnto the hie prestes / scribes and phareses / but only to come by that wherfore he thristed: euen so M. More (as there are tokens evident) wrote not these bokes for any affeccyon that he bare vnto the spiritualtie or vnto the opinions which he so barelie defendeth / but to obtayne only that which he was an hongred fore.52 In Tyndale’s portrayal, the seductive, erudite and supposedly progressive scholarly community conjured by Erasmus’ printed works is exposed. Their rejection of vernacular works, be it Isocrates or the New Testament, is revealed as having no philosophical agenda. Instead, blindly following the lure of financial gain (a charge Erasmus was neurotically insistent to deny),53 that community has retrenched itself as an élitist, corrupt and back-scratching familia, a self-serving household whose doors are now firmly shut. In his doomed negotiations with Erasmus, Tunstall and More, Tyndale reveals the breaking point in what he (and a future critical tradition) want to present as a neat line of progressive thought: he shows that in espousing Reformation politics, Englishmen forfeit the right to be Erasmian humanists.

Notes 1 I am immensely grateful to Warren Boutcher, Patricia Brewerton, Andrew Gordon, Lisa Jardine and Jonathan Woolfson for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

92 Alan Stewart 2 J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965); J. N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), pp. 44–6; see also his contribution to this volume. 3 William Tyndale, The obedie[n]ce of a Christen man, and how Christen rulers ought to gouerne (Marlborow in the lande of Hesse [i.e. Antwerp], 1528; STC, 24,446), sig. B7. 4 On Tunstall, see Charles Sturge, Cuthbert Tunstal: Churchman, Scholar, Statesman, Administrator (London, 1938); Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. P. Bietenholz (Toronto, 1985–7), iii, pp. 349–54. 5 ‘The said Luther affter [he perceyued that he shold] not be admitted to come to the dyet hedyr, [for which he had auctorite] accordyd and saffconduit therfor grauntyd vnto [hym, though afterwards] at the instaunce of the popis orator was re[uoked …,] desparynge to be herd in his defence, dyd openly [in the towne] off wittenbergh in saxony gadyr the pepyl and [the vniuersity] ther beinge to gedyr and byrn the decretallys and [… clementynes] as bokes erroneous as he declaryd, [and the sayd] declaration he put in printe in the duch tonge and sent [the same] a bout the contrey. Which said declaration by some yd[le person] hath ben translate in to latyn, which I send yor grace [a copy] inclosyd to the intente ye may se it and byrn it when [ye] haue doon, and also to the intent that yor grace may cal befor you the printers and bokesellers and gyff them a strayte charge that they bringe noon off his bokes into englond, nor that they translate noon off them into english, lest therby myght ensue grete troble to the realme and church off englond, as is now her. Al his bokes be in the doch tonge and in euery manys hand that can rede, and as I vndirstond be also in the hungarion tonge.’ Tunstall’s report on Luther, 29 January 1521, Worms: BL, Cotton MS Vitellius B. xx, fols 218–20; as edited by Sturge, Cuthbert Tunstal, Appendix X, pp. 360–2, at p. 361. 6 ‘A prohibition sent out by Cuthberth Tunstall Byshop of London, to the Archedeacons of his dioces, for the calling in of the newe Testamentes translated into Englyshe’, 24 October 1526. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (London, 1563; STC, 11,222), sig. Ss.iiir–v, pp. 449–50, translating: ‘quod nonnulli iniquitatis filij ac Lutheriane factionis mininstri quos summa excecauit malicia a via veritatis & orthodoxe fidei declinantes sanctum dei euangelium in vulgare nostrum Anglicanum subdola versutia transferentes ac nonnullos hereticæ prauitatis articulos & opiniones erroneas perniciosas pestiferas, scandalosas & simplicium mentium seductiuas intermiscentes, illibatam hactenus sacrescripture maiestatem, suis nepharijs & tortuosis interpretationibus prophanare, & verbo domini sacrosancto & recto sensu eiusdem callide et peruerse abuti ten tarint [sic]. Cuius quidem translationis nonnulli libri impressi quidam cum glosis, quidam sine glosis vt accepimus dictum pestiferum et perniciosum virus in vulgari idiomate in se continentes in promiscuam nostrarum dioc. et iurisdictionis Lond. multitudine sunt dispersi …’ See also A. W. Pollard, ed., Records of the English Bible: The Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English, 1525-1611 (London, 1911), pp. 131–3 (Latin), pp. 133–5 (English).

The Trouble with English Humanism 93 7 Petition of Humphrey Monmouth to the Privy Council, 19 May 1528: LP, iv, part 2, no. 4282, pp. 1883–4. 8 Foxe, Actes and Monuments, sig. EE.iiir (p. 539). 9 A proper dyaloge, betwene a gentillman and an husbandma[n], eche complaynenge the ambicion of the clergye (Antwerp, 1529; STC, 1,462.3). 10 [Jerome Barlowe and William Roye], [incipit:] Rede me and be nott wrothe (Strasbourg, 1528; STC, 1,462.7), sig. c.ijr–v. See the recent edition by Douglas H. Parker (Toronto, 1992). 11 Printed in D. Wilkins, ed., Concilia magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (London, 1737), iii, pp. 706–7. 12 The full list reads: ‘The supplication of beggers. The reuelation of Antichrist of Luthers. The new testament of Tindall. The wicked mammon. The obedience of a Christen man. An introduction to Paules epistle to the Romaines. A dialogue betwixt the father and ye sonne. Oeconomicæ christianæ. Vnio dissidentium. Piæ precationes. Captiuitas Babilonica. Ioannis Hussi in Oseam. In Capabaptistas zwinglii. De pueris instituendis. Brentius de administranda Republica. Luther de Galathas. De libertate Christiana. De vera obedientia. Luthers exposition vpon the Pater noster.’ Foxe, Actes and Monuments, sig. Ss.iiiv (p. 450); Wilkins, Concilia, iii, pp. 706–7, at p. 707. Foxe claims that these books ‘wer forbidden at this time together with the new testament’ but several of these books were not printed until as late as 1529. It would appear likely, therefore, that these books were subsequently added to the list – as were those in Foxe’s next, more lengthy and entirely Latin list (sigs Ss.iiiv–Ss.iiijv). 13 This text has recently been edited: see William Roye, A Brefe Dialoge bitwene a Christen Father and his stobborne Sonne: The First Protestant Catechism Published in English, ed. D. H. Parker and B. Krajewski (Toronto, 1999). 14 More, The supplyacyon of soulys: … Against the supplycacyon of beggars (London, 1529; STC, 18,092), sig. E3v; The Complete Works of St Thomas More (New Haven, 1963–), vii, p. 161. 15 Foxe, Actes and Monuments, sig. Ss.iiir. 16 ‘Quia nuper postquam ecclesia Dei per Germaniam ab haereticis infestata est, inventi sunt nonnulli iniquitatis filii, qui veterem et damnatam haeresim Wycliffianam, et Lutherianam etiam haeresim, Wycliffanae alumnam, transferendis in nostratem vernaculam linguam corruptissimis quibusque eorum opusculis, atque illis ipsis magna copia impressis, in hanc nostram regionem inducere conantur, quam sane pestilentissimis dogmatibus, catholicae fidei veritati repugnantibus, maculare atque inficere magnis conatibus moliuntur; magnopere igitur verendum est, ne catholica veritas in totum periclitetur, nisi boni et eruditi viri malignitati tam praedictorum hominum strenue occurrant; id quod nulla ratione melius et aptius fieri potest, quam si in lingua catholica veritas in totum expugnans, haec insana dogmata simul etiam impressa prodeat in lucem. Quo fiet ut sacrarum literarum imperiti homines in manus sumentes novos istos haereticos libros, atque una etiam catholicos ipsos refellentes, vel ipsi per se verum discernere, vel ab illis, quorum perspicacius est judicium, recte admoneri et doceri possint.’ William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, licence to Tunstall, 7 March 1527/8. Wilkins, Concilia, iii, p. 711; trans. Sturge, Cuthbert Tunstal, pp. 362–3.

94 Alan Stewart 17 ‘Et quia tu, frater clarissime, in lingua nostra vernacula, sicut etiam in Latina Demosthenem quendam praestare potes, et catholicae veritatis assertor acerrimus in omni congressu esse soles, melius subcisivas horas, si quas tuis occupationibus suffurari potes, collocare nunquam poteris, quam in nostrate lingua aliqua edas, quae simplicibus et idiotis hominibus subdolam haereticorum malignitatem aperiant, ac contra tam impios ecclesiae supplantatores reddant eos instructiores.’ Wilkins, Concilia, iii, pp. 711–12; trans. Sturge, Cuthbert Tunstal, p. 363. 18 ‘Habes ad id exemplum quod imiteris praeclarissimum illustrissimi domini nostri regis Henrici octavi, qui sacramenta ecclesiae contra Lutherum totis viribus ea subruentem asserere aggressus, immortale nomen defensoris ecclesiae in omne aevum promeruit.’ Wilkins, Concilia, iii, p. 712; trans. Sturge, Cuthbert Tunstal, p. 363. 19 Henry VIII, Assertio septem sacramentorum aduersus M. Lutheru[m] (London, 1521; STC, 13,078). 20 Note, coincidentally, it was also at this moment that another publication by Henry, Literarum, quibus inuictissimus princeps, Henricus octauus, respondit, ad quandam epistolam M. Lutheri, et ipsius Lutheran[æ] quoq[ue epistol[æ] exemplum (London, 1526; STC, 13,084), and other editions (1526, STC, 13,084.5; 1527, STC, 13,085) was translated into English as A copy of the letters, wherin kyng Henry the eight, made answer vnto a certayne letter of M. Luther, and also Luthers letter (London, 1527? STC, 13,086), and other editions (1528? STC, 13,086.5 and 13,087). 21 In chronological order: [John Ryckes], The ymage of Loue (London, 1525; STC, 21,473); Simon Fish, A supplicacyon for the beggers ([Antwerp?], 1529; STC, 10,883); More, The supplyacyon of soulys: … Against the supplycacyon of beggars (London, 1529; STC, 18,092); More, A dyaloge of Syr Thomas More … wherin be treatyd dyuers maters, as of the veneration & worshyp of ymagys (London, 1529; STC, 18,084); idem., A dyaloge of Syr Thomas More … Newly ouersene (London, 1530/1; STC, 18,085); Tyndale, An answer vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge made by Willyam Tindale (Antwerp, 1531; STC, 24,437); More, The co[n]futacyon of Tyndals answere (London, 1532; STC, 18,079); Robert Barnes, A supplicatyon made by Robert Barnes vnto henrye the eyght ([Antwerp, 1531?] STC, 1,470); More, The second parte of the co[n]futacion of Tyndals answere (London, 1533; STC, 18,080); [Christopher St German], A treatise concernynge the diuision betwene the spiritualtie and temporaltie (London [1532?]; STC, 21,586); More, The apologye of syr T. More knyght (London, 1533; STC, 18,078); St German, Salem and Bizance (London, 1533; STC, 21,584); More, The debellacyon of Salem and Bizance (London, 1533; STC, 18,081); More, A letter of syr Tho. More knyght impugynyge the erronyouse wrytyng of J. Fryth (London, 1533; STC, 18,090); John Frith, A boke made by John Frith … answeringe vnto M mores lettur (Monster [i.e. Antwerp], 1533; STC, 11,381); [Tyndale], The souper of the Lorde … wheryn incidently M. Moris letter agenst J. Frythe is confuted (Nornburg [i.e. Antwerp?] 1533; STC, 24,468, but see STC entry for debate on this volume); More, The answere to the fyrst parte of the poysened booke, whych a namelesse heretke hath named the souper of the lorde (London, 1534; STC, 18,077); George Joye, The subuersio[n] of Moris false foundacion (Emdon [i.e. Antwerp], 1534; STC, 14,829).

The Trouble with English Humanism 95 22 See W. A. Clebsch, ‘The Battle against Books’, in his England’s Earliest Protestants 1520–1535 (New Haven, 1964), pp. 258–70. 23 John Fisher, Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio (Cologne, 1523); Sacri sacerdotii defensio co[n]tra Lutheru[m] (Cologne, 1525); Defensio Regie assertionis co[n]tra Babylonica[m] captiuitate[m] … ad maledicentissimum Martini Lutheri libellu[m] (Cologne, 1525); De veritate corporis et sanguinis Christi in Eucharistia … Aduersus Iohannem Oecolampadium (Cologne, 1527); Henry VIII, Assertio septem sacramentorum aduersus M. Lutheru[m] (London, 1521; STC, 10,378); William Ross [pseud. Thomas More], Ervditissimi viri … opus elegans (London, 1523; STC, 18,089). 24 On the Grammarians’ War, see D. R. Carlson, ‘The “Grammarians’ War”, 1519–1521: Humanist Careerism in Early Tudor England, and Printing’, Medievalia et Humanistica, XVIII (1992) 157–81. 25 Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, p. 259. 26 Carlson, ‘The “Grammarians’ War”’, 157. 27 ‘[N]eque cessant vnus et alter e nostris, male vertendo scripturas et deterius interpretando, omne genus haereseos e Belgica (quo se velut in portum aliquem receperunt) in hoc regnum libris nostro sermone conscriptis mittere. Quorum ipsi sic plerisque respondimus, vt non valde cuiquam metuam, qui vtrunque perlegerit: nisi quod quidam et noua per leuitatem, et perniciosa per malitiam ita libenter et cum fauore perlegunt, vt non ideo assentiant quia vera credant esse quae legunt, sed quia cupiant.’ More to Erasmus, 14 June 1532, Chelsea. Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1906–58), x, no. 2659, pp. 31–4, at pp. 33–4. 28 Tyndale, An answer vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge, sig. A7v; An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, ed. A. M. O’Donnell and J. Wicks, The Independent Works of William Tyndale, iii (Washington, DC, 2000), p. 14. 29 More, Co[n]futacyon, sig. q iiiiv; Complete Works of St Thomas More, viii, pp. 177–8. 30 Tyndale, Answer, sig. A7v; The Independent Works of William Tyndale, iii, p. 14. 31 More, Co[n]futacyon, sig. q iiiir; Complete Works of St Thomas More, viii, p. 177. 32 On the print construction of the More–Erasmus friendship, see L. Jardine, Erasmus Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, 1993); D. Wootton, ‘Friendship Portrayed: A New Account of Utopia’, History Workshop Journal, VL (1998) 29–47. 33 In a letter to More prefacing the first edition of the Moriae encomium, Erasmus in fact claims that he wrote the book on horseback; but in a later letter to Martin van Dorp, appended to later editions, he does indeed claim to have written Moriae encomium in More’s house: ‘I was staying at the time with More on returning from Italy, and was detained indoors for several days by pain in the kidneys. My books had not yet arrived, and if they had, my illness prevented anything more ambitious in the way of serious study. I began to amuse my idle moments with an encomium on Folly, with no thought of publishing it, but to take my mind off my physical discomfort …’ ‘Diuersabar id temporis apud Morum meum ex Italia reuersus, ac renum dolor complusculos dies domi continebat. Et mea bibliotheca nondum fuerat aduecta. Tum si maxime fuisset, non sinebat morbus quicquam in grauioribus studiis acrius agitare. Coepi per ocium Morias encomium ludere, nec in hoc sane vt aederem, sed vt morbi molestiam hoc velut

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34 35 36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43

auocamento leuarem.’ Erasmus to Martin van Dorp, [end of May] 1515, Antwerp. Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ii, no. 337, pp. 90–114 at p. 94; CWE, iii, pp. 111–39, at p. 116. The apologia to Dorp was first printed in August 1515 in Jani Damiani Senensis ad Leonem X pont. max. De expeditione in Turcas elegeia (Basel, 1515), and from 1516 included in all editions of Moriae encomium. CWE, iii, p. 111. More, Co[n]futacyon, sig. q iiiir–v; Complete Works of St Thomas More, viii, p. 177. Tyndale, Answere vnto Mores dialoge, sig. A7v; The Independent Works of William Tyndale, iii, p. 14. Tyndale, ‘W.T. To the Reader’, in his trans., The fyrst boke of Moses called Genesis (Malborow [i.e. Antwerp], 1530/1; STC, 2,350). Tyndale biographers use Tyndale’s own story, and Foxe’s later redaction; the outline of this episode is, however, vouched for by Humphrey Monmouth, in a petition to the Privy Council, dated 19 May 1528. ‘Four years and a half ago, [he] heard Tyndal preach two or three sermons at St Dunstan’s in the West. Chanced to meet him, and was told by him that he had no living, but hoped to get into the bishop of London’s service; for which reason Monmouth “had the better fantasy to him.” Afterward he came and asked for help, as the Bishop wanted no more chaplains.’ Humphrey Monmouth to Wolsey and the Council, 19 May 1528: LP, iv, part 2, nos 1883–4. In fact, Erasmus does not praise Tunstall in the Annotations, but he does elsewhere, in a letter to Peter Gillis in 1515, and in the first Apology against Lee in March 1520. D. Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, 1994), pp. 83 and 397 n. 2; Bietenholz, Contemporaries of Eramus, iii, pp. 352–3. Tyndale trans., A booke called in latyn Enchiridion militis christiani, and in englysshe the manuell of the christen knyght, [with] a newe and profytable preface (London, 1533; STC, 10,479). Tyndale, ‘W.T. To the Reader’, in his trans., The fyrst boke of Moses called Genesis. Sturge, Tunstal, p. 55. ‘We do not know which oration Tyndale took with him, but this has a claim to special attention, and there would be some appropriateness. Its message is that all Greeks should unite against the barbarians – of interest to Tyndale, perhaps, from inside the camp of the somewhat beleaguered English “Grecians”. Moreover, the leadership, says Isocrates here, belongs to Athens. His declaration that only Athens herself united all the widespread Greek traditions and cultures might be thought to warm the heart of a bishop of London entangled with interference from Wolsey in the north and from Rome. Isocrates in this oration makes resonant claims for the greatness of Athenian speech, which would be appropriate for Tyndale’s declared hope of uniting the whole nation, clerical and lay alike, through knowledge of the Scriptures in English, the language of London, and not Latin, the language of Rome.’ Daniell, William Tyndale, pp. 87–90, at p. 88. See also King, ‘John Foxe and Tudor Humanism’, below. The following discussion of Isocrates is indebted to several discussions with Lisa Jardine.

The Trouble with English Humanism 97 44 J. Ijsewijn, ‘Agricola as a Greek Scholar’, in Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius 1444–1485: Proceedings of the International Conference at the University of Groningen 28–30 October 1985, ed. F. Akkerman and A.J. Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1988), pp. 21–37, at p. 25. 45 Lisa Jardine describes the first edition published by Froben in Basel, May 1516: ‘The volume opens with a translation by Erasmus from Greek into Latin of Isocrates’ “Precepts concerning the administration of the kingdom, addressed to King Nicocles”; and the Education of a Christian Prince and Panegyric [for Archduke Philip of Austria] are followed by Erasmus’ Latin translation of Plutarch’s “How to distinguish between flatterers and friends”, described on the volume’s title-page as “addressed to his Serene Highness, Henry the Eighth, King of England”. This is followed by two further short works by Plutarch: “Learning is necessary to the prince” (In principe requiri doctrinam) and “With princes ought especially to discuss philosophically” (Cum principibus maxime philosophum debere disputare). This little group of didactic texts, all offering practical advice to a Prince, carries a prefatory letter to Henry VIII, exhorting him to choose his friends with care; and there is also a short letter to Cardinal Wolsey, urging him to advise the English king well [all these letters had appeared for the first time with the first printed edition of the latinized Plutarch texts (Froben, 1514)]. The entire collection of texts concerns the crucial role of men of learning in advising princes. Each dedication emphasizes the direct relevance of the texts introduced to the practical business of government in the territories of the particular princes to whom they are addressed… The work is not, in other words, presented as an idealistic, theoretical one, but as a manual for princes.’ Jardine, ‘Introduction’, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. N. M. Cheshire and M. J. Heath, with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria, trans. L. Jardine, ed. L. Jardine (Cambridge, 1997), pp. vi–xxiv, at pp. xviii–xix and xix n. 23. Erasmus retitles Isocrates’ text to stress its affinity to his own work: ‘Isocrates ad Nicoclem regem de institutione principis, Erasmo Roterodamo interprete’. 46 D. Baker-Smith, More’s ‘Utopia’ (London, 1991), p. 124. 47 Thomas Elyot, The boke named the Gouernour (London, 1531), sig. E.iiij. On Elyot and Isocrates see H.B. Lathrop, Translations from the Classics into English (Madison, 1933); J. Wortham, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot and the Translation of Prose’, Huntington Library Quarterly, XI (1947–48) 219–40; S. E. Lehmberg, Sir Thomas Elyot Tudor Humanist (Austin, 1960), pp. 125–7; J. M. Major, Sir Thomas Elyot and Renaissance Humanism (Lincoln, 1964), pp. 166–9; P. Hogrefe, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Elyot Englishman (Ames, 1967), pp. 224–5, 232–7. 48 Elyot, The Doctrinal of Princes made by the noble oratour Isocrates, & translated out of Greke in to Englishe (London, ‘1548’), sig. A ii; this epistle is not printed in the first edition of 1533. J. B. Trapp places Elyot’s assertion in the context of a wider European exploration of the conformity of vernacular tongues to Greek: see his ‘The Conformity of Greek with the Vernacular: The History of a Renaissance Theory of Languages’, in his Essays on the Renaissance and the Classical Tradition (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 8–21. 49 Elyot, The Dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght (London, 1538), sig. R.v. 50 This critical move is analagous to that made by English Reformation historians such as John Bale, who discover an early, primitive, apostolic English church unpolluted by Roman incursions.

98 Alan Stewart 51 Tyndale, ‘W.T. To the Reader’, in The fyrst boke. 52 Tyndale, Answere, sig. A7v; The Independent Works of William Tyndale, iii, pp. 14–15. 53 See Stewart, ‘Humanity at a Price: Erasmus, Budé, and the Poverty of Philology’, in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. E. Fudge, R. Gilbert and S. Wiseman (London, 1999), pp. 9–25.

5 Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors: Gian Matteo Giberti as a Case Study1 James P. Carley

From the time of Henry VIII’s first childhood encounter with Erasmus, scholars were uniform in their praise of his learning. In 1517, for example, the diplomat and royal secretary Richard Pace wrote that ‘we have a most noble King who far surpasses all other Christian princes in learning as well as in power. He’s so disposed to all learned men that he hears nothing more willingly than conversations about learned men and books.’2 In a letter dated 15 May 1519 Erasmus himself waxed hyperbolic: ‘Time was when from a sort of passion for literature and the delights of learned ease I felt some repugnance to the courts of kings. But now, when I contemplate what a prince and governor rules the English court, its queen, its nobles, counselors, officials, I am eager in spirit to betake myself to a court like that.’3 Henry VIII was consistently held up by humanists as the model of a Renaissance prince: well educated in the most fashionable mode by learned tutors, receptive to new ideas and (most importantly perhaps) a generous patron. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that Henry’s palace libraries were well stocked with up-to-date humanist books, including (often in multiple copies) editions of the fathers, most deriving from the Basel press of Johann Froben, as well as a variety of presentation manuscripts and printed books (sometimes printed on vellum with tipped-in manuscript dedications) by hopeful eruditi. In this chapter I shall look at a pair of books given to Henry by an Italian humanist whose relationship to Henry’s Great Matter has not hitherto been explored, and then relate these to book-giving at Henry’s court in general. * Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1542) was one of Pope Clement VII’s chief advisers, deeply involved in political matters such as the anti-imperial 99

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League of Cognac formed in 1526. Described as a ‘scholar and stylist, patron of men of letters, ambassador, confidential adviser of a pope during a critical period in the history of the papacy and of Italy, bishop and reformer’, he was a member of the Oratory of Divine Love and showed himself greatly concerned about clerical abuses and the need for pastoral reform.4 In 1528, after the Sack of Rome, for which many held him responsible, Giberti prudently removed himself from the papal curia to Verona where he had been appointed bishop in 1524. Once back in Verona, he set about a conscious programme of ecclesiastical reform based on humanist ideals.5 An important component of his proposed programme was the dissemination of writings of the Greek and Latin fathers, and he brought the Venetian printers Niccolini da Sabbio et fratelli to Verona where he established their press in the bishop’s palace.6 Over the next few years Niccolini da Sabbio issued on Giberti’s behalf three works in Greek edited by the Veronese scholar Bernardino Donato:7 John Chrysostom, In omnes epistolas Pauli (1529), De fide orthodoxa et de iis qui fide dormierunt attributed to John of Damascus (1531), and ps. Oecumenius, Expositiones antiquae ac ualde utiles (1532). Two other Greek works were printed in Latin translation: Eutimio Zigabeno, Commentationes in omnes Psalmos (1530), translated by Filippo Sauli, and John of Damascus, Libellus de iis qui fide dormierunt (1532), translated by Ludovico Nogarola.8 Giberti’s association with England and Henry VIII began before his appointment to the bishopric of Verona. After Adrian VI became pope in 1522, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (elected Pope Clement VII in 1523) dispatched Giberti to France, England and Spain to drum up international support in anticipation of the next papal election. Giberti arrived in England in 1522 and made the acquaintance of Thomas Wolsey, to whom he had been recommended by Richard Pace and with whom he quickly formed a close working relationship.9 Over the years favours were exchanged by both parties. On 4 January 1524 Giberti wrote to Wolsey concerning his efforts in regard to Wolsey’s papal legateship and on 9 January John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells, confirmed that Wolsey was much beholden to Giberti in this matter.10 In somewhat prolonged negotiations Giberti helped Wolsey obtain bulls for the foundation of Cardinal College, Oxford.11 He also attempted to find somebody to teach Latin and Greek at the new foundation and offered to send a catalogue of the papal library so that Wolsey could choose books to be transcribed.12 Wolsey, in return, watched out for Giberti’s interests. In a letter dated 22 January 1524 Giberti expressed himself grateful to Wolsey for preserving his fortunes

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under Adrian VI, adding his wish that Wolsey would also be of assistance in the obtaining of his pension of 2,000 ducats from the bishopric of Worcester.13 On 6 November 1525 Giberti observed that those who would have estranged Wolsey from him had only caused the cardinal to show greater kindness to him, and on 25 February 1526 he wrote expressing his obligations to the king himself, a point he made again in a letter to Wolsey dated 10 February 1527.14 Based on this mutually satisfactory relationship, Wolsey counted on Giberti as a strong ally in the campaign to persuade Clement to dissolve Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon – a campaign which began in good earnest in 1527. On 5 December 1527, Wolsey wrote to Gregorio Casale, Henry’s agent in Rome, expressing the king’s confidence in Giberti and also observing that ‘if [Giberti] will employ his interest in this matter the King will not forget to be grateful’.15 On 19 December 1527, Wolsey wrote to Casale, Sir Francis Bryan (who would be an influential figure in gathering materials on the divorce) and Pietro Vanni (Wolsey’s own agent), saying that if Giberti had returned to the papal court they should behave in such a way as to show that the king had more confidence in him than in anybody else there. If he were still away, then they must persuade him to return and further the king’s cause. Wolsey and the king enclosed loving letters for Giberti.16 Not surprisingly, both Henry and Wolsey were taken aback when they heard about Giberti’s plan to leave the papal curia permanently for Verona, a decision about which Giberti informed Wolsey in a letter dated 18 January 1528.17 Henry himself wrote back, pleading with Giberti to reconsider, explaining that he had no one else on whom he could so fully rely.18 The following year Giberti presented Henry with the first text produced by his press, the editio princeps of John Chrysostom’s commentary on the Pauline Epistles, an edition on which he and Bernardino Donato had been working for several years.19 John Chrysostom was highly regarded by progressive theologians20 and this commentary was envisaged as the first part of an omnia opera set which was, in fact, never completed.21 Henry’s copy was printed on vellum and survives as British Library C. 24. f. 1–4. Because of the thickness of the vellum it has been bound into four volumes (rather than three, as was normal with this text) in a standard British Museum binding, which no doubt replaced an earlier velvet or blind-stamped binding. Each volume contains an inventory number of a sort characteristic of books transferred to Westminster from Henry’s other palaces, primarily Greenwich and Hampton Court, in the years immediately after Henry’s death.22 The

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first three volumes have the number 1157 entered on the title-page and the fourth volume, 1024. The numbers relate to a rough alphabetical sequence found in the Westminster books; volume 4, no. 1024, was listed under C for Chrysostom and volumes 1–3, no. 1024, under I for Johannes. The separation of the fourth volume from the other three is not unique in the Westminster numbering system and is one of its peculiarities. What is unique to this copy, however, is that as well as the standard dedicatory epistle to Clement VII, Donato included a second epistle to Henry VIII himself, and this letter, like the one to Clement, was a printed one.23 Although it was quite common for handwritten dedications to be tipped in at the front of presentation copies of printed books, the practice of adding a typeset dedication in a single copy is extremely rare.24 Presumably Henry was pleased to see his name linked with that of Clement – ‘Duobus enim in primis Christianae Reipublicae propugnatoribus, clarissimisque huius aetatis luminibus’ (‘The two most outstanding defenders of the Christian commonwealth and the brightest lights of the age’)25 – and took the gift as a sign of tacit support on Giberti’s part in his marital troubles, and perhaps a harbinger of future cooperation from his Italian co-luminary as well. Whatever else, the presentation indicates Giberti’s own desire to maintain a close relationship with Henry and to continue as a recipient of the English king’s goodwill. Henry’s strenuous efforts notwithstanding, a speedy settlement to the Great Matter was not to be had and in the month following the publication of the Chrysostom commentary, on 28 June 1529, the legatine court was adjourned, no annulment granted. After this failure and the subsequent downfall of Wolsey, Henry pinned his hopes increasingly on academic opinions gathered on the continent and on the testimony of ancient authorities, manuscripts of whose works were being examined at home and abroad. As part of this campaign Richard Croke, Henry’s former tutor in Greek, was sent to Italy late in 1529 to search out manuscripts of the Greek fathers.26 On 18 January 1530, Croke wrote to John Stokesley, Bishop of London, expressing his desire for Giberti’s backing in persuading Gian Pietro Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti, to show him his library, which was said to contain the works of Nazianzen, Maximus Planudes, Chrysostom and the Rhapsodies.27 Slightly later, Croke sent a letter to Girolamo Ghinucci, Bishop of Worcester, demanding to know whether or not Ghinucci would write to Giberti concerning the Epistles of Nazianzen and Basil, Chrysostom on St Paul’s Epistles, and Maximus on the Old Testament.28 On 11 February

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1530 Ghinucci sent a rather sly response, explaining that he had not contacted Giberti because he knew that the latter would not lend books or do anything else. In any case, as he noted, virtually all the books which Croke wished to obtain from Giberti had already been granted to him from the public library of Venice.29 On 19 April, Giberti wrote to Caraffa from Verona asking him not to refuse Croke out of hand, but advising him to be very careful about taking the Englishman into his confidence.30 By 23 April 1530, nevertheless, Croke was confident that Giberti had been won over and he assured Henry that Giberti had ordered his vicar not only to favour the king’s cause, but in his absence to assemble theologians and urge them to write favourably as well. According to Croke, Giberti did not write himself because he wanted to be able to tell the pope, if asked, that he was subscribing in consequence of the justness of the cause, and not from any expectation of favours from the king.31 On 17 May 1530, Rodrigo Niño, imperial ambassador at Venice, reported to the imperial ambassador at Rome, Miguel Mai, that the English were trying to gain over Caraffa and that their ambassadors had called on him with letters from Giberti.32 On 26 May, Mai wrote to the emperor that the pope was concerned about the rumours circulating at Venice concerning Giberti and the English, although he was attempting to discredit them as ‘pure invention’ on the part of Giberti’s enemies.33 On 11 August 1530, Croke informed Stokesley that he had delivered the king’s letters to Giberti and that Giberti, who enquired whether or not the pope knew anything about them, was extremely discountenanced, pointing out that this sort of thing would do more than harm than good to the king’s cause if the pope saw them.34 As Henry came to question papal authority more and more fundamentally during the early 1530s, so too did Clement’s own position become more entrenched. By the end of 1530 there was a threat of excommunication and, on 5 January 1531, Clement issued a brief forbidding Henry to remarry until the matter of his marriage to Catherine had been properly settled.35 In January 1532, the pope reprimanded Henry for cohabiting with Anne Boleyn and in November he threatened to excommunicate Henry if he did not return to Catherine.36 During this diplomatically tense period Giberti does not appear to have made direct contact with Henry and he did not send him copies of either the Greek edition of De fide orthodoxa et de iis qui fide dormierunt or Zigabeno’s Commentationes in omnes Psalmos. After the publication in February 1532 of Donato’s edition of the Expositiones antiquae, however, a vellum copy was despatched to Henry.37 This copy is now bound in

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three volumes; the first volume is found in Cambridge (as Corpus Christi College, EP W 2), the second and third in Oxford (as Bodleian Library, O 2. 6,7 Th).38 As in the case of the Chrysostom edition, this work was dedicated to Clement VII, but a printed epistle to Henry by Donato, which mentions the gift of the Chrysostom, has been added on the back of the title page of Henry’s copy.39 Given the timing and the obsequious nature of Donato’s prefatory epistle, this presentation would seem to have come as an indication of Giberti’s continued allegiance to Henry in spite of inevitable papal displeasure. Slightly before the Expositiones antiquae were published, however, another book appeared under the imprint of Niccolini da Sabbio from Giberti’s palace in Verona – Ludovico Nogarola, Count of Verona’s Disputatio super reginae Britannorum diuortio, dedicated to Catherine’s nephew Charles V and supporting her position. By publishing the divorce tract by Nogarola (who also prepared the Latin translation of John of Damascus) Giberti in some sense gave his imprimatur to it and his own loyalties were thus made public. 40 The book does not bear a date of publication, but Guy Bedouelle and Patrick Le Gal have argued that it appeared in print in late 1531 or early 1532.41 Word of its publication does not appear to have reached England in 1532, but on 7 April 1533 Wolsey’s bastard son, Thomas Winter, who had recently stayed with Giberti, wrote to Sir John Russell telling him that a copy would soon be sent to England if it were not there already.42 Possibly, then, the Nogarola tract first arrived in England at roughly the same time as Clement declared the marriage to Anne Boleyn to be null and void (11 July 1533), a declaration which was rapidly followed by Henry’s excommunication on 7 September 1533. These developments, not surprisingly, undid any good that the placatory gesture of the presentation of the Expositiones antiquae might have achieved, and Giberti’s pension was discontinued by 1534.43 Nor, in spite of Giberti’s best efforts, was it ever reinstated and, by 20 April 1537, full of selfpity, Giberti was lamenting that: ‘I had always had the greatest love for the king, as the king knew, both when Pope Clement was his friend and when he was the contrary, and his Majesty had written to me with his own hand to go thither.’44 Even if the presentation of the Expositiones antiquae did not restore the donor to the recipient’s good graces – or at least keep all his options open – there is some evidence that Henry or his advisers valued the text itself as a model of progressive biblical scholarship. Amongst the benefactions to Trinity College, Oxford from its founding

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master, Sir Thomas Pope, are fifteen printed books deriving from Henry’s library at Hampton Court and almost thirty from Greenwich: these all have ex libris in them, indicating their earlier provenance.45 One of the Greenwich books (now Old Library, K. 7. 9) is a copy on paper of the Expositiones antiquae, beautifully bound by the King Edward and Queen Mary Binder.46 Although Howard Nixon and Mirjam Foot associate the work of this binder primarily with the reigns of Edward and Mary, at least twenty-three bindings, of which this is one, can be shown to date from Henry VIII’s reign.47 Unusually for this binder, both covers of this volume have inscriptions on them: ‘Lex per Moysem data est, gratia et ueritas per Ihesum Christum facta est’ (John 1. 17: ‘For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ’) and ‘Quecunque enim scripta sunt ad nostram doctrinam scripta sunt’ (Romans 15.4: ‘For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning’). In the British Library there is a copy of the Bible in the French translation of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples which was owned by Henry and Anne Boleyn (now British Library C. 18. c. 9; published Antwerp, 1534). Carrying the Westminster inventory number 1368 it has been bound in two volumes by King Henry’s Binder and each volume has the initials H and A flanking the crowned Tudor rose.48 The covers of both volumes are inscribed with what E. W. Ives describes as ‘a decidedly evangelical choice of texts’.49 The text on the front cover of the first volume reads ‘Ainsi que tous meurent par Adam’, the back ‘Aussy tous seront vivifies par Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15. 22: ‘As all die by Adam, so shall all be made alive by Christ’). The front cover of the second volume has ‘La loy a este donnee par Moysse’; the back ‘La grace et la verite est faicte par Iesu Christ’. The second inscription is, in other words, a French translation of the same text as that used by the King Edward and Queen Mary Binder on one of the covers of the Trinity Expositiones antiquae. It seems impossible that this particular biblical text would have been chosen independently in differing portions of Henry’s reign, especially since its evangelical message ties in closely with the religious orientation indicated by Anne’s other known books.50 Presumably, therefore, the Expositiones antiquae must have been bound very soon after it arrived in England, that is, at the same period as the French Bible, whose binding can be securely dated to 1533–6. In this case this represents one of the very early examples of work by the King Edward and Queen Mary Binder.51 It also indicates that the Expositiones antiquae was a favoured text during the reformist years of Anne Boleyn’s ascendancy, a book Henry owned in duplicate,

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one copy of which was expensively and ostentatiously bound soon after it arrived in the royal collection. The three volumes making up the vellum set of the Expositiones antiquae presented by Giberti to Henry have gauffered fore-edges and goldtooled bindings – in this case undertaken by the individual known as the Medallion Binder.52 According to Nixon and Foot, however, none of the Medallion Binder’s work can be dated much earlier than 1544 and the latest may have been produced at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign.53 If Nixon and Foot are right in their dating parameters, the presentation copy of the Expositiones antiquae cannot have got its present binding when Henry was first given it in around 1532. Probably the volumes would originally have received standard velvet bindings, and a decade or more must have passed before they were handed over to the Medallion Binder to be rebound. The occasion of the rebinding may connect them with a group of other books with bindings by the Medallion Binder which carry Edward VI’s initials and/or have the royal arms. Of these several are in Greek.54 Although the volumes of the Expositiones antiquae do not have Edward’s initials they may well have been part of the same group and thus another example of the hellenizing of Edward’s library under the influence of his humanist tutor, Sir John Cheke. At some point in the third quarter of the sixteenth century the set was dispersed and a reference to the first volume occurs in the Parker Register of books intended for Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (c. 1574): ‘Oecumenius in Acta et Epistolas Pauli Graece in pargameno: 1 vol. fo. lig. 1532’.55 In 1604 Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham (1536–1624), presented the second and third volumes to Sir Thomas Bodley and they appear in the Benefactors’ Register as the 22nd and 23rd items in his benefaction of 52 titles: ‘[22] Expositiones Epistolarum Pauli Graecè. excusus in pergamena. 2 vol. fo. / [23] Arethae collectio expositionum in Apocalypsim Graecè. excusus in pergamena. fo.’56 The majority of the books given by Nottingham came from his father Sir William Howard, first Baron Howard of Effingham. Most of the manuscripts as well as the folio sets of printed works of the fathers derived from Henry VIII’s libraries, although not from Westminster Palace. Several other books among the Nottingham collection, including one that had been owned by Thomas Cranmer, contain the signature of Sir Thomas Copley of Gatton, Surrey (1532–84). Copley, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth and godson of Thomas Boleyn, openly espoused Roman Catholicism in the late 1560s and was forced to flee to the continent. According to his granddaughters, he left

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a great library behind which was confiscated by his neighbour and sworn enemy, Sir William Howard. Writing at a period after the Nottingham benefaction was made, the granddaughters observed concerning Copley’s library that Howard had ‘pleasured therewith the universities of England’.57 It seems, therefore, that it was Copley who was the first recipient of a group of Henrician books, amongst which the Expositiones antiquae figure, and that these went to Howard at the time of Copley’s disgrace. When discussing books bound by the Medallion Binder for Edward, Nixon observed: These do not appear to be presentation copies and their scholarly importance suggests that these are books bound in a more or less standard style for the library in one of the young king’s palaces. This library may have been scattered when his Catholic sister, Queen Mary, succeeded to the throne in 1553, for no bindings in this style came to the British Museum with the remains of the Old Royal Library in 1757, and the Henry Davis Gift book was in private hands in 1593.58 Edward’s principal and grandest lodgings were, in fact, at Hampton Court, of which Copley’s friend Thomas Cawarden was Keeper.59 If this is the library where the three volumes of the presentation copy (to Henry not Edward) of the Expositiones antiquae were stored, as seems most probable, then it is almost certain that it was through the agency of Cawarden that Copley obtained the second and third volumes.60 * The Giberti books represent a particularly complex example of the widespread phenomenon of formal gift-giving, the politics of which have been the focus a great deal of recent scholarship.61 Humanist culture was obviously a bookish one and it was also one where patronage flourished: on the one hand there was the scholar – poor, intelligent, the fruit of his learning forming his chief viable commodity; on the other the prince – rich, prone to flattery and desirous of fame as a Maecenas. In this situation books become an obvious medium of exchange, and Henry’s collection can be seen as a microcosm of how the process worked.62 At the lowest end of the spectrum Henry regularly received ‘off-therack’ printed books which were chosen simply because of appropriateness

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of topic or occasion and which had not been personalized in any way for the recipient. In the New Year’s gift roll for 1534, for example, it is recorded that the antiquary John Leland gave the king two books of stories.63 As far as can be ascertained, these books do not survive and they were probably printed books. Presumably they came with some sort of identifying mark, and may have had – as was typical of Leland – a handwritten poem in praise of the king and his generosity on a fly-leaf.64 Leland’s major expense would have been the purchase of the books and the time invested in preparing verses to accompany them. Although Leland had recently received some sort of commission to examine monastic libraries and the books therefore would seem an especially appropriate gift, it is more pertinent that Leland was at this time a royal chaplain. He was expected to give something suitable and was rewarded according to his rank, receiving in return on this occasion ‘a gilte cruse with a cover’ produced by the king’s Flemish goldsmith, Cornelius Hayes. The gift itself, in other words, was not a play for patronage but was part of an annual ritual. 65 Likewise Thomas Berthelet gave books to the king at New Year, as was suitable to his position as King’s Printer, and so too did the royal schoolmaster Richard Fetherstone. Henry acquired other books which were useful in particular political contexts. During the period when Henry was preparing his Assertio septem sacramentorum aduersus Martinum Lutherum, Pace described coming into the king’s presence as he was reading a new book by Luther sent by Wolsey, the latter acting in his role as senior research assistant.66 During the late 1520s and early 1530s, when Henry was deeply concerned with the examination of ‘old authentic histories and chronicles’ and what they might be made to reveal, various individuals presented him with medieval manuscripts containing politically useful materials. British Library, MS Royal 13 E. IV (Westminster no. 1000) is a fourteenth-century copy of William of Nangis’ chronicle acquired by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (1524–54) and then presented to Henry. Clearly Henry was pleased to receive it and consulted it carefully; the manuscript has a number of marginal notes in his hand (at fols 90v, 271r, 288v, 290v, 296v, 313v, 334v, 350v, 396r), many relating to the authority of the pope and questions of consanguinity.67 On 12 February 1537, during Henry’s prolonged confrontation with the papacy, Henry Parker, Lord Morley (c. 1481–1556) sent Cromwell a copy of Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine and Il Principe which he suggested be shown to Henry.68 Morley also provided useful editorial aids: ‘in suche places as the Auctor touches any thing consernyng the Bysschop of Rome, I have notyd it with a hand or with wordes in the

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marjant to the intent it schuld be in a redynes to youe at all tymes in the redyng’. Morley was particularly beholden to Cromwell at this time but he also had further favours to ask (from the king as well as Cromwell), and he ended the letter accompanying the books with an unspecified request that Cromwell ‘tender me in suche things as Maister Rycharde Croumwell schall sew to youre Lordschip for me’. On occasion a letter was bound into the book as a permanent reminder of the link between donor and gift. The copy of Paulus de Middelburgo’s Paulina de recta Paschae celebratione (Fossombrone, 1513; now Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, G fol. 273 Inv. 398 Res), which Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524) had bound by John Reynes for presentation to Henry, contains a prefacing letter in Linacre’s elegant script. When Morley presented the Lady Mary (as she was to be addressed at the period of this gift) with a medieval manuscript he had unearthed (British Library, MS Royal 2 D. XXVIII) and for which object he felt bound to apologize (‘suche an olde boke’), he had his letter of dedication prepared by the professional scribe he normally used when presenting handwritten books, usually of his own translation, to royal patrons. Recopying a printed book as a manuscript obviously increased its cachet and linked it more intimately with the giver.69 In 1519, Wynkyn de Worde published a volume of poetry by Robert Whittinton.70 Much of the poetry concerned Thomas Wolsey and Whittinton had a manuscript book made up of the pertinent sections prepared for Wolsey. This survives as Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 523 and was no doubt sequestered to Henry along with Wolsey’s other goods after Wolsey’s death in 1530. Not surprisingly, Catherine Parr ordered multiple printed copies of her own Prayers or Medytacions, Wherin the Mynde Is Styrred Paciently to Suffre all Afflictions Here (London, 1545) for distribution to her ladies, but she also particularly honoured the daughter of Sir Brian Tuke by presenting her with a manuscript copy of the text, written in girdle book format; this survives at Kendal, Cumbria, kept in the Mayor’s Parlour. No. 677 in the Westminster collection, British Library, MS Royal 16 E. XXXI, containing a French paraphrase of Psalms 1–40 with prefacing arguments, is made up of materials found in two printed books. The arguments correspond roughly to the translation from Martin Bucer printed in Le livre des Psalmes (Alençon, ?1532) and the paraphrase itself is very close to the French translation of Johannes Campensis’ Paraphrastica interpretatio in Psalmos omnes ([Paris], 1534), to which, however, it appears to be anterior. Another adaptation of printed texts

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(printed texts similar in evangelical flavour, moreover, to those used in Royal 16 E. XXXI) is found in a pair of manuscripts given by George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, to his sister Anne in the early 1530s and later sequestered into the royal collection – now British Library, MS Harley 6561 and Alnwick, MS Percy 465.71 These were copied from printed books owned by Boleyn (or perhaps his sister), both French translations of biblical texts accompanied by commentaries. Boleyn had the biblical material copied directly from the printed text to the manuscript; for the commentary he provided his own English translation. Boleyn was one of a number of Tudor translators who presented manuscripts of their work to royal patrons. For the king Morley translated Plutarchian Lives from Latin to English (British Library, MS Royal 17 D. XI, Westminster no. 1199; MS Royal 17 D. II, Westminster no. 1189; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 684) and Petrarch’s Triumphs from Italian to English (now lost, although a later printed version survives); John Harpsfield translated Simplicius’ commentary on the first book of Aristotle’s Physics from Greek to Latin (British Library, MS Royal 12 F. V; Westminster no. 995), and Sir John Cheke gave a Latin rendering of Maximus the Confessor’s Liber asceticus (British Library, MS Royal 16 C. IX; Westminster no. 1414); Georg Burckhardt translated Martin Luther’s Eyn Widerruff vom Fege feür into Latin (British Library, MS Royal 7 D. XI; Westminster no. 1124). Usually these translations were given at New Year and generally speaking they were meant for the eyes of Henry and his immediate circle only – they were never intended to be put into print.72 Sometimes, however, printed translations were offered. In 1534 Robert Whittington dedicated his translation of Cicero’s De officiis to Henry, and Henry later had multiple copies of the second edition (1540) bound up, one ‘gorgeously’ for himself. On occasion, a presentation copy on vellum of such a work still survives, as in the case of Linacre’s translation of Galen’s Methodus medendi (Paris 1519), now British Library, C. 19. e. 17 (Westminster no. 1201). Linacre had this bound for Henry by the so-called ‘Louis XII–François I’ binder. Another copy on vellum, with a second handwritten dedication to Wolsey, survives as British Library C. 19. e. 16 (Westminster no. 531). This too was bound by the ‘Louis XII–François I’ binder. Presumably, Linacre presented Henry with a specially prepared copy of his translation of Galen’s De sanitate tuenda (Paris, 1517), which was dedicated to the king, but the copy no longer survives. The presentation copy of the same work to Wolsey on vellum with an inserted manuscript dedication and binding by the ‘Louis XII–François I’ binder does, however, survive as British Library C. 19. e. 15 (Westminster no. 1115).73

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In some cases Henry commissioned translations. In the preface to his English translation of Froissart’s chronicles (London, 1523–5), Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners claimed that he undertook the project at the request of the king. The arguments of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor pacis for limiting papal authority appealed greatly to Henry and his advisers in the early 1530s and Cromwell financed the first English translation by William Marshall in 1535.74 Heinrich Bullinger sent Henry a copy of his De Scripturae Sanctae authoritate with a handwritten letter of dedication (Zurich 1538; now British Library 1010. c. 3; Westminster no. 967) and Henry was so taken with the text that he wished to have it translated into English. As it happens, this translation was never produced. Nor did Thomas Wyatt complete the translation of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae which Catherine of Aragon requested him to undertake. Instead, he presented her with a less politically volatile text, Plutarch’s De tranquillitate et securitate animi, translated as The Quyete of Mynde (London, 1528).75 A number of other sorts of scholarly works were dedicated to Henry and these often survive in vellum presentation copies: at Westminster, apart from the Giberti editions, were found John Leland’s Assertio inclytissimi Arturii regis Britanniae published in 1544 (British Library C. 20. b. 3; Westminster no. 929) and Simon Grynaeus’ 1538 edition of Ptolemy’s Almagesta (British Library C. 22. c. 16; Westminster no. 1050). The conservative German theologian John Cochlaeus dedicated several books to Henry including biblical commentaries by Rupert of Deutz; according to the 1542 inventory, copies of these were found in the Westminster library. However, the only Henrician copy of a work by Cochlaeus which survives is one on paper (now British Library 575. b. 19; Westminster no. 21) of Antiqua regum Italiae Gothicae gentis rescripta, ex .12. libris epistolarum Cassiodori ad Eutharicum … excerpta (Leipzig, 1529). Often Henry’s ministers acted as intermediary between donor and dedicatee. After Cranmer presented to Henry a copy of Wolfgang Fabricius Capito’s Responsio de missa, matrimonio, & iure agistratus in religionem (Strasbourg, 1537; now British Library 1018. c. 15; Westminster no. 1293) with a preface addressed to the king, Henry rewarded the author with 100 crowns, even though he did not agree wholeheartedly with all the theological details. An unusual case is Polydore Vergil’s revised Adagia of 1521 (British Library 634. m. 3; Westminster no. 3). Although the edition is not dedicated to Henry, a prefatory letter to Richard Pace is printed with the text, full of fulsome praise for Henry and Wolsey.

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As in the case of the translations, original works were sometimes commissioned by royal patrons. During Henry’s anti-Lutheran phase, for example, Catherine of Aragon suggested that her Spanish confessor Alphonso de Villa Sancta write against Luther, and he produced two books, Problema indulgentiarum aduersus Lutherum and De libero arbitrio aduersus Melanchtonem, both printed in 1523 by the King’s Printer Richard Pynson and both addressed to Catherine as Defendress of the Faith.76 The Westminster Palace copies of both survive and retain their original blind panel binding (Lambeth Palace 1523.01, Westminster no. 673; and British Library C. 47. g. 2, Westminster no. 240). Although Henry remained adversarial to Luther throughout his life, he ultimately revised his opinion of Melanchthon and graciously accepted the dedication of the 1535 revised version of the latter’s Loci communes rerum theologicarum, a copy of which was found as no. 482 at Westminster (C. 125. cc. 24; Antwerp 1536).77 * Part of the ceremony of Henry’s life included the presentation of materials composed for grand occasions (marriages, births, deaths, victories in battle) by professional members of his court, such as the blind French poet Bernard André, and these sorts of individuals received annual pensions of one sort or another. 78 Henry was genuinely fond of books and was anxious to enhance his collection. He was, moreover, a compulsive annotator and his copies of Erasmus’ works are deeply scored (usually positively) and so are his copies of Luther (negatively).79 Not surprisingly, Henry actively encouraged certain types of writing which furthered his own desires/whims at any given time; at the end of his life, for example, he considered, as he might not have done at the beginning, that the statement in verse 10 of Psalm LXII in his Psalter (now British Library, MS Royal 2 A. XVI; Westminster no. 1283) that we should ‘Truste not in ryches gotten wyth wronge and forse’ was ‘pulchra doctrina’ (‘a beautiful teaching’). Generally speaking, with the books he received it was a case not of ‘timeo Danaeos et dona ferentes’ (I fear Greeks bearing gifts) but rather, just as the binding of his copy, now at Trinity College, Oxford, of the Expositiones antiquae had it, ‘quecunque enim scripta sunt ad nostram doctrinam scripta sunt’ – or to put it another way, all was grist to whatever propaganda mill the king happened to be using.

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Appendix 1. Bernardino Donato’s dedicatory letter to Henry VIII, from British Library, C. 24. F. 1: John Chrysostom, In omnes epistolas Pauli (Verona, 1529). Serenissimo atque inuictissimo Angliae et Franciae &c. regi Henrico VIII fidei defensori Donatus Veronensis. Omnes propemodum, Serenissime Rex, quibus quidpiam scribere ad quempiam usu uenit istiusmodi et maiestatis et sapientiae in fastigio collocatum cuiusmodi es tu consueuere, occasionem initiumque scribendi ab illa Platonis sententia sumere, quae declarat, tunc et regna felicia et ciuitates fore quum aut sapientes homines regnare coeperint, aut ipsi reges fieri sapientes. Ita altius exorsi, omnem huc orationem postremo deducunt, ut illum ad quem scribunt, talis et suae et suorum felicitatis compotem euasisse demonstrent. Quod si illi quidem syncere et absque ulla adulationis suspicione aut fraude usurpare potuerunt, quos etiam mediocribus quibusdam id laudis tribuisse non ignoramus: quanto mihi nunc iustius idem facere liceat, qui quamuis nec ad hoc scribendi munus admodum idoneus, nec satis tuae maiestati notus, ad te ipsum tamen scribere iussus sum, cuius unius tanta est laus sapientiae, ut pronunciare nullo modo audeam, planéque me nescire profitear, utrum maius ornamentum ab altero accipiat, studium sapientiae à regia maiestate, an regia maiestas à studio sapientiae. Ita enim istic utrunque alteri amicum est, ita tu ex utroque temperatus, ut uere in te uno reddatur suauissimum illud perfectissimumque musicae genus, quod sollicite quaerens Plato, modo Aegyptum peragrabat, modo nostram Italiam Siciliamque uisebat. Quem quidem Philosophum non dubito, nostro hoc omni relicto orbe, in istum alterum, si modo te istic imperantem audiuisset, primo quoque tempore uolaturum fuisse. Sed nec in Platone Aristoteleue potentiam, nec in Dionysio, Philippo, aliisue sapientiam, uidere potuit illa aetas, quorum neutrum in te uno, nec id quidem absque singulari summi Dei beneficio, haec nostra desyderat ac felicissime potius utrunque coniunctum agnoscit. Hoc uere imperare, hoc uere regnare est: non una uidelicet nobilitate generis, non uno habitu cultuque corporis, non unis diuitiis unaue potentia, suis ciuibus antecellere, quod plerisque accidit, sed multo etiam magis animi claritate atque opibus, quod paucissimis contigit. Et eo iustius hoc te à me testimonium expectare decet, quod non uulgaris cuiuspiam sapientiae, sed illius quae una uere sapientia dicenda est, et quam uel illi ipsi, quos diximus, Plato Aristotelesque ignorauerint,

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studium et laudem tibi hoc tempore uendicaueris. Eam sanè dico sapientiam quam una christiana religio docere idonea est, quae quum humana omnia contemnat, ac pro nihilo ducat, diuina quae sunt non solum uestigat solliciteque inquirit, sed etiam suis sectatoribus se praebituram facillime pollicetur. Hanc tu sapientiam non ingenio tantum et cognitione et uerbis, sed multo etiam illustrius factis totaque uita colis atque amplexaris. Hoc uero postremum est, augustissime Rex, in quo uno oratio mea non deficere non potest. Nam quum alii multi et regnauerint, nec honestarum magnarumque artium scientia caruerint et stylo quoque atque eloquentia clari extiterint adeo ut sine ulla difficultate omnia quaecunque ipsi gessissent monumentis commendare idonei fuerint (quorum omnium bonorum hoc tempore singulari quadam Dei benignitate nullum planè in te uno desyderari uidemus) paucissimi tamen inuenti sunt, qui ad illa omnia, et innocentiam, et iustitiam, et animi moderationem, et pietatem, et reliquum uitae cultum addere sibi ipsi persuaserint. Quod ipsum equidem quale sit quantiue aestimandum, ne cognitatione quidem mihi depingere audeo, ne dum uerbis aut oratione describere. Certe quum in reliquis illis tu quidem unus aduersus alios omnes et reges et principes certamen facile sustineas, in hoc uno (quod superest) te cum ipse contendis, praeclaramque istam uictoriam iustissimumque triumphum reportas. Harum sanè uirtutum ornamentorumque omnium concentum istum singularem, quum in tali rege quum tali tempore animo intueor, facile adducor ut credam, uerum iam illud esse quod antehac incredibile mihi fabulosumque uidebatur. Fuisse olim tempus quum et reges et principes terrarum atque nationum pacem inter se agentes non armis aut exercitibus neque de imperio aut de uita, sed propositis inter se atque ultro citroque missis difficultatibus, de ingenii praestantia atque sollertia contenderent. Quas difficultates sibi ab altero exhibitas qui non dissoluisset, contraque a se alteri obiectas, uicissim dissolutas recepisset, ab altero se uictum fateretur, eidemque illi tributarius redderetur. Quae quidem consuetudo si nostris temporibus in lucem rediret, quid porrò ex ea re sequeretur, nemo est qui non illico animaduertat. Certe tu omnium primus, inuictissime rex, ab aliis cunctis regibus atque principibus tributa ex toto orbe terrarum exigeres. Quod utinam Deo optimo maximo in omne tempus uisum esset potius quàm quod hoc tempore, praesertim in hoc nostro orbe, assidue fieri uideo: tanto utique inter se odio et ciuitates et reges et principes digladiari atque certare, ut usque ad internicionem infelicium populorum crassari non pudeat. Caeterum hic fortasse querendi locus non est.

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Porrò his de rebus tantis tamque praeclaris, patronus hic meus Ioannes Matthaeus Gibertus Episcopus Veronensis unus ex omnibus qui te colunt atque obseruant, tuae maiestati addictissimus. Qui omnia haec quae commemoraui, aliaque his similia complura de te non ex aliorum sermone percepit sed ipse praesens intuensque cognouit. Eorum beneficiorum optime memor, quae non in regno tuo solum sed aliis quoque in locis à te et plurima et maxima accepit. Huiusce amoris erga te sui incredibilis summaeque in tuam maiestatem reuerentiae atque obseruantiae monumentum hoc et pignus deponere apud te hoc tempore decreuit: haec uidelicet Chrysostomi in Pauli epistolas commentaria. Siquidem, qui uobis regibus, ut ait Isocrates, aut argentum, aut aurum, aut uestimenta pretiosa, aut eiusmodi quampiam supellectilem, cuius ipsi inopiam patiuntur, uos in summa copia degitis, dono mittere consueuerunt. Hos planè mercaturam quandam meditari non munificentiam, ita perspicuum est, ut neminem latere possit: et multo quidem artificiosius callidiusque quàm illi ipsi solent, quos manu quaestum uersare ac palàm tractare conspicimus. Gibertus autem hoc, qualecunque est, tibi munus excogitauit, quod et maiestati ac sapientiae tuae ad accipiendum esset aptissimum, et huic suo religionis totiusque uitae instituto ad praebendum grauissimum. Nam quum ex antiquis illis Christianis scriptoribus religionem ac fidem nostram post Apostolos nemo constantius defenderit, nemo clarius praesertim apud Graecos illustrauerit hoc Ioanno Chrysostomo, huius ipsius monumenta cui tandem aptius donabuntur, quàm tibi, Serenissime Rex, cui nihil antiquius quàm eandem orthodoxam fidem non solum armis et eius generis facultatibus, sed etiam in lucem editis eruditissimis commentariis et scriptis, tutari, firmare, augere, exornare? Cuius quidem operis editionem quare in hunc usque diem post impressionem ipse distulerit, nos causas, sanctissimo patri nostro Clementi VII pontifici maximo eiusdem Giberti iussu nuper exposuimus in epistola, qua illi opus Gibertus ut patrono optimo dicandum curauit. Quod meum de utroque simplicissime prolatum testimonium non tuae maiestati minus, quàm illorum utrique et iustum et debitum uisum iri arbitror, ac propterea etiam et iucundum et gratum. Duobus enim in primis Christianae Reipublicae propugnatoribus, clarissimisque huius aetatis luminibus Gibertus, quicquid ipse est, acceptum refert. Horum unus ille est, quem dixi, Clemens Septimus Pontificus Maximus cui quidem in hoc genere primas defert, semperque detulit, cuiusque etiam alumnum se non solum ingenue confitetur, uerum etiam libenter gloriatur. Alter tu es, cuius maiestati, quum ab illo discessit, plurimum

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se debere non modo nunquam dissimulauerit, sed etiam libentissime praedicare consueuerit. Translation Donatus of Verona sends greetings to the most serene and invincible Henry, King of England and France etc., Defender of the Faith. Practically all of those who were accustomed to write anything to anybody established in such a high degree of majesty and wisdom as you are, Most Serene King, used to take the occasion to begin their text with that saying of Plato’s, which declares that kingdoms and states will be happy when philosophers start to govern them, or when kings themselves become philosophers. Having begun so loftily, they then spin out the entire oration to demonstrate that he to whom they write was able to attain such happiness for himself and his own people. If we take into account those who have bestowed this praise even on ordinary people – provided that they were able to do it sincerely and without the suspicion of adulation and fraud – how much more justly can I do the same. For, although I am neither entirely suitable for this task of writing, nor sufficiently known to your majesty, I was nevertheless ordered to write to you, whose wisdom deserves such great praise that I dare not proclaim it in any way. Let me frankly admit that I don’t know which might receive greater adornment from the other, philosophy from royal majesty, or royal majesty from philosophy. But in your case, they are friends to one another to such a degree – and you are governed by both of them to such a degree – that in you alone has been restored that most sweet and perfect kind of music which Plato searched for, restlessly wandering through Egypt and then visiting our Italy and Sicily. I have no doubt that, having left our country, this philosopher would have hastened into this other country at the first opportunity if he had heard that you were reigning over there. But that age was incapable of recognizing authority in Plato or Aristotle, or wisdom in Dionysios, Philip or others; whereas in our age neither authority nor wisdom is lacking in you alone and, moreover, by the singular grace of God Almighty, both are happily united in you. To rule and govern rightly means not only to exceed one’s subjects by the nobility of one’s birth, by the condition and training of one’s body, and by one’s wealth or power – qualities which many people possess – but rather by the brightness and riches of one’s mind, which accrue to very few. Therefore, it is more just and fitting that you should expect from me not the testimony of any ordinary kind of wisdom but of that which alone can truly be called wisdom, and of which even

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those whom we have just mentioned, Plato and Aristotle, were ignorant, and through which you have gained knowledge and fame for yourself in our time. I speak, of course, about that wisdom which only the Christian religion is able to teach us, which, condemning and discounting all that is merely human, diligently seeks and searches out divine things, and also unquestionably promises that it will prove itself through its followers. You cultivate and embrace this wisdom with your intellect, knowledge and words, but even more manifestly by your deeds and your whole life. But this is the final area, most august king, in which my oration cannot suffice on its own. For while there have been many other rulers who did not lack knowledge of the noble and great arts and who were so renowned for their writing and eloquence that they deserved commendation with monuments immortalizing their deeds – and by the singular benevolence of God we do not miss any of these good qualities in you either – yet only very few have been found who have been induced to add to all of this as well innocence, justice, moderation of spirit, piety and the subsequent veneration of life. But I dare not picture to myself, nor describe with words and orations, what such an individual might be like and how highly he should be esteemed. While in other things you alone can without doubt easily sustain the competition against all kings and princes, only in this area, which exceeds all others, do you strive with yourself alone, and attain a remarkable victory and a well deserved triumph. As I reflect upon this unique harmony of all the virtues and marks of honour in such a king at such a time, I can now easily be convinced that that which previously seemed incredible and fabulous is indeed true. Once there was a time when kings and princes of nations and the earth, working for peace with each other, did not contend for authority or for life with arms and armies, but rather they strove for preeminence of mind and ingenuity with difficult problems which they devised and sent to each other. If one of these could not solve the problems proposed by another, and if, moreover, the problems which he himself had set for the other were returned solved, he admitted that he was defeated and he had to pay tribute. If this custom were revived in our times, nobody would ignore the inevitable consequence of this: you, invincible king, would be the first to exact tributes from all the other kings and princes of all the world. If only God Almighty would make his presence felt in our time and in our world, more continuously than ever before; for I see nations, kings and princes contend and fight with each other with such hatred that they are not ashamed to

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rage until they destroy entirely the unfortunate people. But in other respects perhaps this is not the place for complaining. Henceforth, let me speak about great and remarkable things: my patron Gian Matteo Giberti, the bishop of Verona, one of those who honour and respect you, is most devoted to your majesty. He did not hear about all these things that I have just mentioned and many other similar things about you from other people’s accounts, but he himself witnessed them. He has never forgotten about all those many and great benefits which he received from you, not only in your kingdom but also in other places. He has resolved to commit to you this monument and pledge of his extraordinary love for you and of his utmost reverence and respect for your majesty: that is, John Chrysostom’s commentaries on the epistles of Paul. As Isocrates said, some are accustomed to send you kings gifts of gold, silver, or precious garments or valuable goods which they themselves need but you have in great abundance. It is so obvious that it cannot be hidden from anybody that kings do not consider merchandise to be munificence, and we certainly regard those who plan or produce a gift of their own creation as much more skilful and accomplished than they themselves did. Giberti has devised this gift for you as the most appropriate and acceptable for your dignity and wisdom, and the most important to offer as his design for religion and all life. Certainly after the apostles, nobody defended more perseveringly our religion and faith among the early Christian writers, and explained it more clearly, especially among the Greeks, than John Chrysostom. His writings cannot be more aptly presented to anyone than to you, Most Serene King, for whom nothing is more important than to protect, strengthen, increase and adorn our orthodox faith, both with weapons and other such means, and also with the publication of most erudite commentaries and writings. In a letter to our Holy Father, Pope Clement VII, dedicating the work to him as his greatest patron, we have recently, commanded by Giberti himself, given the reasons why he delayed the printing of this edition to this very day. Accordingly, I believe that my testimony concerning both of them, proferred most simply, will not seem less proper and appropriate to your majesty than to both of them, but on that account will even be delightful and pleasing. For Giberti credits whatever he is to the two most outstanding defenders of the Christian Commonwealth and the brightest lights of our age. One of them is Pope Clement VII, whom I have just mentioned, to whom Giberti ascribed as always the first place in this case, admitting frankly that he is his foster child and also boasting of it. The other is you, to whose majesty he owed the most, apart

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from Clement, a fact which he never concealed but used to proclaim with the greatest pleasure. 2. Bernardino Donato’s dedicatory letter to Henry VIII, from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, EP W 2: ps. Oecumenius, Expositiones antiquae ac ualde utiles (Verona, 1532). Serenissimo atque inuictissimo Angliae et Franciae &c. regi Henrico VIII fidei defensori Donatus Veronensis. Nisi tuum istum animum, serenissime Rex, Gibertus hic tuus talem expertus esset qualem esse eius qui uere Rex sit oportet, res uidelicet eas quas uulgus admiratur et suspicit despicientem, et contra, quae ab illo despiciuntur, ut uirtus omnisque sapientia, pluris quàm reliqua uniuersa aestimantem, profecto nec nuper Ioannis Chrysostomi in Pauli Epistolas commentaria quum primum ab ipso in lucem edita sunt ad te mittenda curasset, nec item nunc altera haec mitteret, quibus nihil planè aliud nisi praecepta uerae sapientiae ueraeque religionis continentur. Sed quum tuum omne institutum et excelsum et omnibus auri argentique metallis omnibusque etiam regnis sublimius planè nouerit, non putat se rem ingratam aut ineptam facere si apud te talia sui erga maiestatem tuam amoris atque obseruantiae pignora quamuis exigua deponat. Sic tu illum ab initio tuis praestantissimis uereque regiis laudibus ad te amandum et colendum allexisti, ut nihil antiquius iam habere uideatur, quam tibi quauis ratione gratificari. Hic sanè illius erga te amor, haec ipsa tuae maiestatis admiratio atque obseruantia radices egit, altiusque in solum penetrauit ut non facile timendum sit ne quo modo exarescat. Non te ille amare coepit, ni fallor, aut colere, quod Rex esses, quod potentissimus, quod ditissimus, quod fortunatissimus – quae quanquam ipsa quoque amoris atque obseruantiae incitamenta maxima sunt, tamen externa quodam modo alienaque sunt – sed quod liberalissimus, quod iustissimus, quod inuictissimus, quod unus omnes alios reges principesque et ingenii felicitate et animi sapientia superares. Haec igitur uniuersa quum eadem in te esse pergant, quae antehac semper fuerunt, atque augeantur potius (si modo augeri possunt) quàm minuantur, Gibertus quoque necesse est eandem erga eundem seruet semper ac pro uiribus augeat uoluntatem. Nec tu sanè unquam cessas regia ista ueraque et maiestate et gloria frui, nec ille tibi gratum hunc animum suum in diesque magis addictum ostendere. Tu illum isto splendore concentuque uirtutum in admirationem tuae maiestatis arreptum tenes: ille te admirabiliorem semper nactus, se ita arreptum teneri triumphat. Pergite uero ambo isto inter uos quasi igne charitatis accensi gloriari, mihique atque omnibus qui ista nouerint et

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praedicare et scriptis testari liceat, nec ullum esse regem te uno digniorem qui et colatur ab omnibus et ametur, nec illo esse quempiam qui erga maiestatem tuam magis gratum magisue propensum animum gerat. Translation Donatus of Verona sends greetings to the most serene and invincible Henry, King of England and France etc., Defender of the Faith. If your own Giberti did not know, most serene majesty, that your intellect is of a sort most appropriate to a man who is truly a king, assuredly he would neither have had John Chrysostom’s commentaries on the Epistles of Paul, which he was the first to publish, sent to you not long ago, nor would he have sent you these other commentaries, which contain only the precepts of true philosophy and true religion. For you look with contempt at those things which the crowd admires and supports and on the contrary esteem those things above all others such as virtue and wisdom, that are despised by the people. Since he has fully understood that your whole purpose is lofty and more distinguished than all gold and silver and even all kingdoms, he thinks that he does nothing ungrateful or inept if he commits to you such things, however paltry, as pledges of his love and respect towards your majesty. From the beginning your most excellent and truly regal achievements caused him to love and respect you so much that he seems now to have no greater desire than to please you as much as he can in any way. His love towards you and his admiration and respect for your majesty have indeed grown roots which penetrate so deep into the soil that there is no fear that they will in any way dry up. He did not begin to love and honour you, I assure you, because you are the most powerful, the richest and the most fortunate of kings – which qualities, although in themselves great incitements to love and respect, are nevertheless external and in a certain sense not one’s own – but because you are the most generous, the most just and the most invincible, alone surpassing all other kings and princes with the felicity of your character and the wisdom of your mind. Since all these qualities, which remain the same in you as they always were, and even grow (if indeed they can grow) rather than diminish, Giberti must retain the same affection towards your person and increase it with all his might. Assuredly, you will never cease to delight in your truly royal dignity and wisdom, nor he to show his ever-growing grateful affection towards you. You render him overcome with admiration for your majesty’s brilliance and concord of virtues: having found you more

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and more admirable, he exults thus to be overcome. May both of you, enflamed by this mutual fire of love, continue truly to glory in it and let me and everybody else who has come to know about it proclaim it and make it known in writings, since there is no other king who is more worthy than you to be honoured and loved by everybody, and there is not nobody more grateful or more favourably disposed towards your majesty than he.

Notes 1 I should like to thank Gill Cannell, Martin Davies, Timothy Graham, Ágnes Ormsby and Jonathan Woolfson for their generous help in the preparation of this article. For an overview of how humanism impacted on the book in Tudor England, see J. B. Trapp, ‘The Humanist Book’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1400–1557, ed. L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 285–315. See also M. Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London, 1986). 2 De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. and trans. F. Manley and R. S. Sylvester (New York, 1967), p. 139. 3 CWE, vi, no. 964, p. 360. 4 M. A. Tucker, ‘Gian Matteo Giberti, Papal Politician and Catholic Reformer’, English Historical Review, XVIII (1903) 24–51, 266–86, 439–69 (quotation at p. 24). For a more recent evaluation, see A. Prosperi, Tra evangelismo e controriforma. G. M. Giberti (1495–1543) (Rome, 1969); also Renaissance Humanism at the Court of Clement VII: Francesco Berni’s Dialogue Against Poets in Context, ed. A. Reynolds (New York and London, 1997), pp. 59–85. 5 See C. Peritore, ‘Influenza dell’Umanesimo nel programma di riforma ecclesiastica di Giovan Matteo Giberti’, in Civiltà dell’Umanesimo, ed. G. Tarugi (Florence, 1972), pp. 285–97. 6 Peritore observed that ‘L’originalità del programma di riforma di Giberti consiste proprio nel richiedere nel sacerdote non solo i “boni mores”, ma principalmente le “lettere”; il suo sacerdote ideale doveva avere conoscenza delle lettere greche e latine e delle lettere sacre e non disputative, cioè una cultura teologica ricavata direttamente dalla lettura dei testi biblici e patristici’ (ibid., pp. 293–4); see also Prosperi, Tra evangelismo, pp. 217–33. 7 On Donato see G. Biadego, Bernardino Donato (Verona, 1895). 8 On works issued after 1532 under Giberti’s patronage, see Peritore, ‘Influenza’, pp. 294–6. 9 On 23 January 1522 Pace wrote to Wolsey describing Giberti as ‘a very honest man and in singular trust and favour with his master’ (LP, iii, part 2, no. 1981). Although Giberti made several plans to return to England – on 22 January 1524 he informed Wolsey that he would like to see England again that spring (LP, iv, part 1, no. 49); in March 1527, just before the Sack, he intended to go to England and Spain to discuss the conditions of a general peace (LP, iv, part 2, no. 2998); and in 1537 he was sent with Reginald Pole on an unsuccessful mission – he never managed to do so.

122 James P. Carley 10 LP, iv, part 1, nos 6 and 15. On 12 December Giberti acknowledged Wolsey’s thanks (LP, iv, part 1, no. 922). 11 The first reference is found in a letter from Clerk and Thomas Hannibal of 28 May 1524 (LP, iv, part 1, no. 376); Giberti had stated that he would help with the bulls, but before proceeding he wished to see how well Wolsey had progressed in getting a promised pension for him from the king. See also LP, iv, part 1, nos 511, 652; iv, part 2, nos 2419, 2620. On 10 Febuary 1527 Giberti offered to have the bulls for the College corrected (LP, iv, part 2, no. 2868), and on 9 November he explained why they had not been expedited (LP, iv, part 2, no. 3562). 12 See his letter to Wolsey of 4 May 1526 (LP, iv, part 1, no. 2149, and also nos 2158, 2181, 2188). Writing to Romulo Amaseo in 1527 or later (LP, iv, part 3, no. 5224; redated by J. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Toronto, 1998), p. 95), Pole referred to Amaseo’s refusal of Giberti’s offer of a post at Cardinal College. 13 LP, iv, part 1, no. 49. See also above, n. 11. 14 LP, iv, part 1, nos 1745, 1991; part 2, no. 2868. 15 LP, iv, part 2, no. 3641. 16 LP, iv, part 2, no. 5050. 17 LP, iv, part 2, no. 3813. 18 LP, iv, part 2, no. 3903; see also nos 3904–6. 19 As early as 1526 Domenico Sauli referred to a manuscript copy of the text which he had bought on Giberti’s behalf: see Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism, p. 78, n. 52. In his dedicatory epistle to Clement VII, Donato pointed out that Giberti’s scrupulous philological care had slowed down the preparation of the edition. See also his comments in the added epistle to Henry (printed in the appendix to this chapter). 20 When Niccolò Leonico Tomeo wrote to Giberti on 1 June 1529 requesting a copy of his new edition of the commentary on the Pauline Epistles he ended his letter with the observation that ‘Pauli enim profunditatem mysteriorumque illius abstrusam excellentiam, Chrysostomi eruditione atque eloquentia explicatam mirum quantum degustare, et pro captu meo dispicere percupiam’ (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Rossiano 997, fol. 10v). I thank Jonathan Woolfson for this reference. 21 On 25 August 1531 Erasmus wrote to Reginald Pole complaining that: ‘Biennium est quod totus Chrysostomus Graecus promittitur nobis e Verona, idque autore Matthaeo Gibberto quondam Pontificis datario, nunc episcopo Veronensi, sed nihil adhuc prodire uideo’ (Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1906–58), ix, no. 2526, p. 328. See also nos 2340, 2379, 2648). In his Antiphilarchia presented to Henry VIII after 1541 John Leland mistakenly observed (fol. 21v) that ‘Veronae nuper Graece edita sunt omnia D. Chrysostomi opera, adiutore Iohanne Matthaeo: exemplaria tamen quod sciam, nondum ad nos traducta sunt: si essent longe alium loquentem, ut ex aliquot eius libellis alibi Graece impressis facile iudicare licet, audiuisses’. 22 On this topic, see my The Libraries of King Henry VIII (London, 2000), pp. 171–3. 23 Printed in the appendix to this chapter. 24 On this topic, see B. Richardson, Printing, Writing and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1999), p. 56. Richardson observes that ‘Another advan-

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25 26

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tage which printing offered over manuscripts was that it made it relatively easy to dedicate a work to more than one person simultaneously. One had only to have the type reset for the text of the dedication, including an alternative name. But dual dedication was a procedure which could irritate both of the dedicatees and thus backfire, and it was rarely used.’ Cardinal Bessarion provided differing printed or manuscript letters of dedication in various copies of his Epistolae et orationes (Paris, 1471): see M. Davies, ‘Juan de Carvajal and Early Printing: The 42-line Bible and the Sweynheym and Pannartz Aquinas’, The Library, 6th ser. XVIII (1996) 193–215, at p. 205. In the presentation copy of Antoine Vérard’s edition of Aesop there is an added printed dedication by Guillaume Tardif to Charles VIII. Vérard himself inserted a printed dedication to Louis XII in the presentation copy of Ogier le Danois, one to Charles VIII in the presentation copy of the Legende doree (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Velins 689). The presentation copy of Lancelot (Bibliothèque Nationale, Velins 614) has a poem based on an acrostic of Charles VIII’s name. There is a printed dedication to Charles VIII in two copies of Raoul Lefèvre’s Recueil des histoires troiennes. Both of these have presentation miniatures, one showing the king on horseback and one showing the king seated on the throne. (I thank Mary Beth Winn for these references.) For Italian instances, see Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers, p. 169, n. 31. More generally, see F. B. Williams, Jr, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books Before 1641 (London, 1962), pp. 254–6; also his ‘Special Presentation Epistles before 1641: A Preliminary Check-list’, The Library, 5th ser. VII (1952) 15–20. Williams attributed the rarity of the phenomenon to the costs involved; the earliest example he found among English books is dated to 1561. The motives he adduced (p. 16) are ‘mere compliment, gratitude for patronage, or propaganda appeals’. A copy of John Bale’s Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae … catalogus (Basel, 1557, 1559), now BL, G 6026, has an added dedication to Elizabeth in different type. See the appendix to this chapter. See G. Przychocki, ‘Richard Croke’s Search for Patristic MSS in Connexion with the Divorce of Catherine’, The Journal of Theological Studies, XIII (1912) 285–95; J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968), pp. 256–8; J. Woolfson, ‘A “Remote and ineffectual Don”? Richard Croke in the Biblioteca Marciana’, Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies, XVII, 2 (2000) 1–11. More generally, see J. J. Scarisbrick, ‘Henry VIII and the Vatican Library’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, XXIV (1962) 211–16. LP, iv, part 3, no. 6149. On Stokesley’s role see A. A. Chibi, Henry VIII’s Conservative Scholar. Bishop John Stokesley and the Divorce, Royal Supremacy and Doctrinal Reform (Bern and New York, 1997). LP, iv, part 3, no. 6193. One must assume that Croke was not aware that the Chrysostom was in print. LP, iv, part 3, no. 6209. See S. Ehses, Römische Dokumente zur Geschichte der Ehescheidung Heinrichs VIII von England 1527–1534 (Paderborn, 1893), pp. 268–9; also Prosperi, Tra evangelismo, pp. 297–8. LP, iv, part 3, no. 6354. Henry was apparently offering to pay heavily for support and in June 1531 Nogarola reported that ‘Annus iam agitur … ex

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33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

42 43

44

45 46

47

quo Regis Britanniae nuncius huc ad nos appulit qui omnes huiusce urbis jure consultos cum montes auri, tum Regis sui benivolentiam pollicere ambibat, ut divortium … laudarent probarentque’: quoted in Prosperi, Tra evangelismo, p. 295, n. 8. Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers Relating to the Negotiotiations between England and Spain Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere (London, 1862–1919), iv, part 1, no. 311. Ibid., no. 322. LP, iv, part 3, no. 6559. See The Divorce Tracts of Henry VIII, ed. E. Surtz and V. Murphy (Angers, 1988), p. xxxiii. See H. A. Kelly, The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII (Stanford, 1976), p. 149. For the text, including a Latin translation, see Patrologia Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, (Paris, 1857–66), cxviii–ix. This is a reprint of the Paris edition of 1631. The volumes do not possess inventory numbers and like many other presentation books would have been kept elsewhere than at Westminster, probably at Hampton Court or Greenwich. On the storage of Henry’s books in general see my ‘Marks in Books and the Libraries of Henry VIII’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XCI (1997) 583–606. Printed in the appendix to this chapter. Prosperi (Tra Evangelismo, p. 296) maintained that Giberti would never have supported the divorce, which would have certainly alienated him from his patron the pope, no matter how cagey he might have been about admitting this. G. Bedouelle and P. Le Gal, Le ‘Divorce’ du roi Henry VIII: Etudes et documents (Geneva, 1987), pp. 382–83; Prosperi dated it to 1532 (Tra evangelismo, p. 296). According to his letter book (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ashburnham 279, passim) Nogarola sent out a number of copies of this work, including one to Giberti, in mid-1531, which indicates that it was published slightly earlier than previous scholars have suggested. (I thank Jonathan Woolfson for references to the letter book.) LP, vi, no. 315; see also Bedouelle and Le Gal, Le ‘Divorce’, pp. 382–3. The information is related in a letter to Pietro Vanni of 23 September 1534: see LP, vii, no. 1181. There was a general policy of ousting Italian clerics during this period and on 21 March 1534, for example, Lorenzo Campeggio was deprived of the bishopric of Salisbury. LP, xii, part 1, no. 987. By this point Giberti was closely allied to Reginald Pole and in 1537 he was a member of the abortive delegation to England: see T. F. Mayer, ‘A Diet for Henry VIII: The Failure of Reginald Pole’s 1537 Legation’, Journal of British Studies, XXVI (1987) 305–31, at pp. 309–10. On Pope and his books see my The Libraries of King Henry VIII, pp. lxxiv–lxxvi. For a description of this binding, see H. M. Nixon, ‘Early English Gold-Tooled Bookbindings’, in Studi di Bibliografia e di Storia in onore di Tammaro de Marinis (Verona, 1964), iii, pp. 283–308, at p. 295. It is illustrated in Henry VIII: A European Court in England, ed. D. Starkey (London, 1991), p. 159. See H. M. Nixon and M. M. Foot, The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England (Oxford, 1992), p. 29. On the upper edge ‘Rex’ has been written in a contemporary hand and ‘Henricus’ on the fore-edge.

Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors 125 48 Illustrated in ibid., p. 109; also E. W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 1986), pl. 33. 49 Ives, Anne Boleyn, p. 317. 50 As Ives observed concerning verses on the covers of the French Bible, so Starkey has pointed that the Latin verses on the covers of the Expositiones antiquae ‘make typically “evangelical” points: the first contrasts the law of Moses with the saving grace of Christ; the second emphasizes the authority of Scripture itself’ (Henry VIII, ed. Starkey, p. 159). This emphasis is even more pronounced if one takes into account the second half of the verse in Romans 15.4: ‘ut per patientiam et consolationem Scripturarum spem habeamus’ (‘that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope’). On books owned by Anne and their evangelical orientation, see my ‘“Her moost lovyng and fryndely brother sendeth gretyng”: Anne Boleyn’s Manuscripts and Their Sources’, in Illuminating the Book. Makers and Interpreters. Essays in Honour of Janet Backhouse, ed. M. P. Brown and S. McKendrick (London, 1998), pp. 261–80. 51 Until recently it was assumed that the activity of this shop began around 1545 and ended in 1558 or later: see Nixon and Foot, History of Decorated Bookbinding, p. 29. In a private communication, however, Dr Foot has observed that she has located work by the binder dating to the early 1530s. 52 On the books and their binding, see my ‘Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library and Its Acquisitions: An Edition of the Nottingham Benefaction of 1604’, in Books and Collectors 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson, ed J. P. Carley and C. G. C. Tite (London, 1997), pp. 357–86, at p. 364. 53 See Nixon and Foot, History of Decorated Bookbinding, pp. 27–8: ‘there is an obstinate refusal to fill the 1534–44 gap. It now seems likely that the Medallion Binder succeeded King Henry’s Binder after an interval of several years, having acquired at least some of his tools.’ One of the earliest examples of his work is BL, MS Royal 13 B. XX, which bears the initials HR, and can therefore confidently be dated to Henry VIII’s reign. 54 For example, a copy of the Bible (Basel, 1545: see M. Foot, The Henry Davis Gift: A Collection of Bookbindings [London, 1978–83], ii, no. 35); Eusebius, Ecclesiasticae historiae (Paris, 1544–6: see H. Nixon, Sixteenth-Century GoldTooled Bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan Library [New York, 1971], no. 23); Flavius Josephus’ works (Basel, 1544: see H. Nixon, ‘Early English Gold-Tooled Bookbindings’, p. 292); Eusebius, Euangelicae praeparationes (Paris, 1544: see Fine Bindings 1500–1700 from Oxford Libraries [Oxford, 1968], no. 65: it lacks the initials). Edward owned other books in Greek bound by different shops, such as a Gregory of Nazianzus (Basel, 1550: see Nixon, ‘Early English GoldTooled Bookbindings’, pp. 297–8); David Tavelegus, Progymnasmata graecae grammatices (Antwerp, 1547: see T. A. Birrell, English Monarchs and Their Books: From Henry VII to Charles II [London, 1987], p. 13). 55 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 575, p. 5. Slightly later, Matthew Parker’s son John has mistakenly added ‘scriptus’ beside the entry. On the Register see R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and His Books (Kalamazoo, 1993), pp. 2–5. In 1574 Parker gave books to the University Library; one of these was what appears to be a (now lost) complete text of the Expositiones antiquae, on which see E. Leedham-Green and D. McKitterick, ‘A Catalogue of Cambridge University Library in 1583’, in Carley and Tite, Books and Collectors, pp. 153–223, at pp. 176, 223.

126 James P. Carley 56 The following represents an amplification and slight revision of the discussion presented in my ‘Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library and Its Acquisitions’, in Carley and Tite, Books and Collectors, pp. 364-8, where full bibliographical details are given. Oxford, Bodleian Library, O.2.6 begins with the commentary on Romans and carries on through II Corinthians. O.2.7 begins with Galatians and covers the remaining epistles; there is a break before the commentary on the Apocalypse. Entry 22 of the Nottingham bequest thus comprises both volumes. Entry 23, on the other hand, refers only to the final section of O.2.7. 57 Quoted by R. Copley Christie in his edition of the Letters of Sir Thomas Copley (London, 1897), from The Chronicle of St Monica’s, p. xxvii. 58 Nixon, Sixteenth-Century Gold-Tooled Bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, p. 91. 59 S. Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (New Haven and London, 1993), p. 80. 60 Why the set was broken up and how Parker obtained the first volume is less certain. It may be relevant, however, that in a letter to Lord Burghley from exile, dated 25 February 1575, Copley alleged that he had been badly persecuted, not only by Howard but also by his neighbour Mrs Parker, then resident at Croydon: ‘At other times also both in broylls between my late lord Chamberlayn [Howard] and me, and when I was in trooble for Religion by my Lord of Canterbury his procurement (sollicited therunto both day and night by the gentlewoman his bedfellowe) I ever fownde your Lordship inclined to favor me, so farr as the case and swey of the time might beare.’ See Christie, Letters of Sir Thomas Copley, p. 45. 61 See S. Kettering, ‘Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France’, French History, II (1988) 131–51; P. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991); N. Z. Davis, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. XXXIII (1983) 69–88; N. Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford and New York, 2000). For England, see D. R. Carlson, English Humanist Books. Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto, 1993). Broadly speaking, one can isolate three components involved in gift-giving: (1) the object exchanged; (2) the benefits to the recipient; and (3) the benefits to the giver. In ‘Beyond the Market’ Davis, who was concerned with the context of the gift rather than its type and who dealt exclusively with printed books, divided into three categories: ‘the dedicated book, that is, the public gift; the book given to others in the course of one’s lifetime; and the book bequeathed at death’ (‘Books as Gifts’, p. 73). 62 Most of following discussion relates to books specifically given to Henry, but his collection also had a number of sequestered books and, on occasion, these figure among my examples. Books inherited by Henry are not included, although I do discuss them in the introduction to The Libraries of King Henry VIII. The majority of my examples are books found in the main collection at Westminster Palace as it existed shortly after Henry’s death, and I have noted the Westminster inventory numbers in my references. 63 LP, vii, no. 9.

Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors 127 64 Leland kept a notebook with duplicate copies of poetry he had sent out, now lost, and in 1589 Thomas Newton published a large section of verse from it. One of the poems was meant to accompany a book given to Henry and stands as representative of what might have been found in the 1534 gift: In frontispicio libelli Intra laurigeros liber penates Henrici modo principis sereni: Intra, & pellito rusticum pudorem. Te rex accipiet manu benigna, Notus Pegasidum comes, canentisque Argutus Clarii piusque cultor. (Translation: In the frontispiece of this little book. Enter, o book, the laurel-decked hearth Of the serene king Henry Enter and shake off your rustic modesty. The king will receive you with a gracious hand Famous companion of the Muses And lively and devout champion of singing Apollo.)

65

66

67

68

69

70 71 72

Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum, encomia, trophaea, genethliaca & epithalamia, ed Thomas Newton (London, 1589), p. 47. The New Year’s Day gift-giving ceremony was a highly formal affair in which the hierarchy of Tudor culture was strongly marked and loyalties affirmed. Printed in Original Letters, ed. H. Ellis, 2nd ser., i (London, 1827), pp. 286–8. Henry’s annotated copy of Luther’s Operatio in Psalmum XXI (Wittenberg, 1523) still survives (BL, 690.a.9(2); Westminster no. 159) and it may also have come from the same source. On Norfolk and the King’s Great Matter see Ives, Anne Boleyn, p. 159, whose statement – ‘Not that the duke’s calculated commitment to Henry’s divorce had achieved anything, but this stemmed not from unwillingness but from lack of ideas’ – perhaps needs slight revision in the context of this manuscript. See my ‘“Plutarch’s” Life of Agesilaus: A Recently Located New Year’s Gift to Thomas Cromwell by Henry Parker, Lord Morley’, in Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. F. Riddy (York, 2000), pp. 159–69, at pp. 163–4. On the topic of manuscripts copied from printed books in general see M. D. Reeve, ‘Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books’, in J. B. Trapp, ed., Manuscripts in the Fifty Years After the Invention of Printing (London, 1983), pp. 12–20. See Carlson, English Humanist Books, pp. 102–3. For a detailed discussion of these manuscripts see my ‘“Her moost lovyng and fryndely brother sendeth gretyng”’. See W. V. Boutcher, ‘Florio’s Montaigne: Translation and Pragmatic Humanism in the Sixteenth Century’ (PhD dissertation, University of

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73

74

75 76

77

78

79

Cambridge, 1991), p. 47; also J. W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, I (1951) 139–64. Linacre acquired a manuscript copy of Cicero’s De officiis, now BL, MS Royal 15 A. VI, from St Augustine’s, Canterbury, and this later got into the royal collection; it is possible that Linacre presented it to Henry. Henry gave what was presumably the presentation copy on vellum of Linacre’s translation of Galen’s De temperamentis et de inaequali intemperie (Cambridge, 1521), now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl. Arch. Ae. 71, to Cuthbert Tunstall in 1530. On Marshall and the circle of Cromwell’s writers in general see J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965), pp. 135–37. See M. Holahan, ‘Wyatt, the Heart’s Forest, and the Ancient Savings’, English Literary Renaissance, XXIII (1993) 46–80, at p. 49. At approximately the same time Juan Luis Vives wrote his De institutione feminae Christianae at the request of Catherine and dedicated it to her – the presentation copy was printed on vellum and went to Westminster after Catherine’s death. It is now in the Bodleian (Bodl. Arch B.e.30; Antwerp, 1524; Westminter no. 406). By the mid-1530s Henry’s religious policy had become much more evangelical, thanks in great part to the influence of Anne Boleyn. Anne received a number of dedications of theological texts, but even she prudently refused Tristram Revell’s request early in 1536 to dedicate to her an English translation of François Lambert’s highly controversial Farrago Rerum Theologicarum. On André, see Carlson, English Humanist Books, 61–81, and his ‘The Writings of Bernard André (c. 1450–c. 1522)’, Renaissance Studies, XII (1998) 229–50. On the question of whether André was ever crowned poet laureate, see J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London, 1991), p. 30. Trapp queries whether anyone ‘was thus honoured in England’. Another member of the household was Wouter Deleen, originally from Brabant but denizened in 1539. In the printed edition of the Latin New Testament which he dedicated to Henry – the presentation copy of which survives as London, Lambeth Palace Library, **E 1975 1540; Westminster no. 559 – he described himself as ‘biblioscopus’ to the king, which may suggest that he acted as a kind of professional reader of books for Henry. Jean Maillart, who travelled to England from the court of Francis I and received payments from December 1539 until March 1541 as ‘orator’ to the king, had ambitions to become an official poet to Henry on the model of Clément Marot in France. This ambition failed and he left England in the summer of 1541 for Norway, Liège, Maastricht and Brussels. On this point see Birrell, English Monarchs and Their Books, p. 8: ‘[Henry] does not read through folio tomes from cover to cover, he guts them’.

6 Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period: John Leland’s Poetic Praise of Painting1 Susan Foister

Sixteenth-century England has often been viewed in isolation from developments in the rest of Europe, particularly when it comes to the subject of painting. Many studies have concluded that one of the characteristics most associated with the Renaissance – the placing of high value on pictures and painters which was mediated through humanist knowledge of classical writing in a number of ways – is largely irrelevant to England before the seventeenth century.2 Although we cannot avoid the presence of Holbein in England from 1526 to 1528 and again from 1532 to 1543, little evidence has hitherto emerged of written responses to his art, and indeed it has often been assumed, erroneously, that England in the early sixteenth century generally offered little else in the way of visual culture. Historians examining the visual arts in sixteenth-century England have charted a slow march towards the courtly connoisseurship of the Jacobean and Caroline periods, culminating in the great collections of Charles I and his courtiers. It has frequently been assumed that a gradually awakening interest in painting and the other visual arts was earlier handicapped by a lack of material on home ground on which to feast the eyes. The assumed lack was coupled with Elizabethan writers’ often tentative responses to the art of painting in the vernacular and even made its cause: if these authors could not see an example of a painter’s use of perspective, it is argued, they could not write convincingly about it.3 However, not only is it now clear that the visual resources of sixteenth-century England were more substantial than previously believed,4 when we turn to the Latin tradition, a somewhat different view emerges. The Latin verses examined here, above all the neglected output of John Leland, suggest that humanists in early Tudor England were engaged by pictures in a similar way to those elsewhere in northern 129

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Europe, where there is no doubt that painting flourished. Furthermore, these Tudor humanists lent the authority of classical precedent to a highly significant shift in the valuing of painting, one signalled in England as elsewhere both by a change in attitudes and a change in monetary valuation, changes that caused paintings to become something more precious than the coloured planks of wood or canvas they were, and painters to be thought of as artists rather than craftsmen.5 This is not at all extraordinary when viewed in the wider European context, but reassessing the contribution made by early Tudor writers in Latin, above all that of John Leland, suggests that, rather than locating the beginnings of such change in early seventeenth-century England we should look instead to the early sixteenth century. Hans Holbein provides the model of a European artist whose work was not only the subject of humanist praise, but was also commissioned by humanist patrons and created with humanist involvement.6 It is well known that when Holbein came to England for the first time in 1526 it was with the assistance of two humanists, Erasmus in Basel and Sir Thomas More in England. Holbein’s work in Basel during the previous decade had often been carried out for Erasmus and other Basel humanists. Holbein and his brother had famously produced marginal illustrations to Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. Two portraits by Holbein provide important precedents and points of comparison for what we find in England. One is the portrait of the Basel humanist, lawyer and collector Bonifacius Amerbach, which Holbein painted in 1519 (now in the Kunstmuseum, Basel). It includes a tablet inscribed with Latin lines, and we know from Amerbach’s papers preserved in Basel that he composed these lines himself, making several drafts of them.7 They read, as though the picture speaks: ‘Although a painted face, I do not give way to the living one, but am a true likeness in noble lines of my master. As he passes through his twenty-fourth year what in me is natural is assiduously expressed by the work of art’, followed by the name of artist and sitter. The lines encompass the well-worn comparison between nature and art, and in doing so give praise to the artist, Holbein, for the effectiveness of his skill in portraying the face of his sitter. Four years later, in 1523, Holbein painted three portraits of Erasmus himself. The most famous of these resonates with humanist textual allusion. In the top right-hand corner Holbein tells us that it is easier to be his critic than to imitate him. It has been pointed out that these lines derive from Pliny in his account of Zeuxis, but that they are actually closer to his Greek source than to the Latin.8 Clearly this text

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must have been provided by Erasmus himself, in an acknowledgement of his artist’s skill similar to that provided by Amerbach. On the book on which Erasmus lays his hands are the words that allude to the sitter himself, the ‘Labours of Hercules’; that is, the efforts of Erasmus in translating the New Testament and perhaps to other of his efforts as the new Jerome. The painting – almost certainly the one now on loan to the National Gallery from a private collection – was sent to Erasmus’ patron Archbishop Warham in England, and in 1527, after his arrival in England, Holbein was set to produce a reciprocal portrait, a version of which appears to have been made to send back to Erasmus in return.9 In the letter accompanying the portrait Erasmus says that he is sending Warham the picture ‘so that, should God summon me from here, you will have a little piece of Erasmus’, a concept with classical origins much used in the Renaissance, as John Shearman has well charted.10 Such a humanist exchange of gifts of portraits had, of course, already been made a decade earlier in England, when Erasmus and Peter Gillis sent their portraits by Quentin Metsys to Thomas More. The exchange accompanied and initiated a flurry of exchanges of Latin compliments on the pictures, invoking, for example, comparison between the longevity of wood and stone, as well as the request for the return of More’s letter to display with the original, a tribute to the artist’s skill.11 It is easy to view the Erasmus–More relationship with Holbein as untypical of the reach of humanism in early Tudor court circles, even though other figures can be brought into the group such as Archbishop Warham, mentioned above, and the courtier Sir Henry Guildford.12 The exchange of writings around the Metsys diptych can also be seen as a notable exception to other writings in praise of painting by More, which appear to be exercises closely modelled on Greek epigrams and clearly do not engage with actual paintings.13 But in the 1530s Tudor humanism began to make new converts: increasing numbers of courtiers desired to educate their children in a way they had not been educated themselves, began to acquire a classical library and patronize classical scholarship.14 A new generation of humanists flourished at court in the 1530s, and saw paintings by Holbein and others – many of them specifically identifiable – as an opportunity for Latin praise. They praised the subjects of portraiture, the skills of the artist and the taste of the owner, in a genre of writing which, as James Carley has pointed out, has been much misunderstood in modern times, but which has a direct relationship to the kinds of humanist praise extended to Holbein in Basel, as well as to other European artists of the sixteenth century.15

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The fact that John Leland and Hans Holbein moved in the same court circles has perhaps been insufficiently remarked, or simply regarded as both unimportant and obvious, given the immense number of court names mentioned in Leland’s poems.16 But these names include Nikolaus Kratzer, portrayed by Holbein in 1528, Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Thomas More, his daughter Margaret Clement, Sir Brian Tuke, Nicholas Bourbon, Sir Anthony Denny and Richard Morison.17 Leland ended his life lodged in the house of Reyner Wolf, for whom Holbein designed a beautiful printer’s mark.18 Leland was about five years younger than Holbein. After attending St Paul’s School and Cambridge, where he took a BA in 1522, he entered the household of the second Duke of Norfolk as a tutor. In about 1524 he went to Oxford, where he may have taken holy orders, and is said to have been a ‘King’s Scholar’; he is recorded in receipt of a royal exhibition in 1528. Intending to study in France and Italy Leland at this time travelled to Paris, where he made a number of French humanist contacts; he was already writing Latin verse including encomia. He had returned to London by 1529 and soon became a royal chaplain. In 1533 he undertook a commission to examine the contents of monastic and college libraries, and later devoted himself to preparing topographical and historical studies of Britain, but he also continued to write poems dedicated to various courtly and learned figures, of which around twenty were concerned with praise of paintings or other works of art.19 Some years ago, Leicester Bradner noted that a manuscript of Leland’s Latin poetry now in the Bodleian Library, from the hand of John Stow, and compiled by him shortly after Leland’s death in 1552, included several poems which were not included in the printed version of Leland’s works, as well as variant versions of some which were.20 Among these are a number of poems which describe works of art and refer to artists including Holbein. Bradner drew attention to the fact that the poems include lines very similar to those which are found on Holbein’s portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, now in the museum at Hanover. This is a small painting in the shape of a roundel, with a lid on which is painted not only one of Holbein’s most beautiful decorative flourishes, but also two lines of Latin verse. Bradner noted that the Stow manuscript followed the first line with the exception of the opening word, but varied the second of these lines. (See appendix, 1.) He further demonstrated that the variant beginning to the first line in the Stow version is also found on the frame of a version of this painting in the Van Horne collection in Montreal, which otherwise has lines identical to the Hanover portrait and which appears to be a contemporary or near-contemporary version of Holbein’s

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original. Neither painting is dated, but, leaving aside the authorship of the inscriptions, the arguments in favour of an English rather than a Basel origin for the portrait are strong, and have been generally accepted.21 The likeness was probably based on a print, rather than a sitting from life. The decoration is closely related to the motifs used in a title-page design by Holbein, which must have been conceived at the same time as the Coverdale Bible design of 1535 but was actually used for an edition at Antwerp in 1536 of Melanchthon’s Loci communes.22 Whether its origins lie in an orchestrated project, or a simple commission from an English admirer of the reformer, it does not seem improbable that Leland should have been called on to contribute the lines of humanist praise. If Leland’s authorship of the verses on Holbein’s original painting of Melanchthon is accepted, it appears that his role as humanist poet was not confined merely to extolling the merits of contemporary painting, but that it also occasionally led to involvement in the creation of such paintings. In the Stow manuscript is a sequence of poems on what appear to be emblems or devices rather than paintings, on the Tudor rose, on the phoenix symbolizing the dead Jane Seymour, and on the feathers of the Prince of Wales. Bradner pointed out that the manuscript of the poems includes the general title that these are inscriptions pertaining to ‘tabellarum’ of the painter Lucas, and suggested that the painter was Lucas Horenbout, painter to Henry VIII.23 Painted versions of these images may have been produced, with Leland’s verses appended, but it is possible that these verses were merely inspired by imagery that, in the case of the rose and the feathers at least, must have been much in evidence in the palaces of Henry VIII in forms as diverse as stained glass and ceramic tiles.24 However, there is in one instance a closer link to Leland himself, a woodcut of the Prince of Wales’ feathers, reproduced in Leland’s Genethliacon, published in 1543. The Stow manuscript reference to the work of ‘Lucas’ suggests that this woodcut can be attributed to Lucas Horenbout, probably employed chiefly as a painter of portrait miniatures, but perhaps the source of other imagery used for decoration at court, and hence a subject for humanist praise. 25 Paintings incorporating Latin poetry were certainly in evidence at the Tudor court. Two more examples from Holbein’s oeuvre can be cited, with which Leland is likely to have been well acquainted. The humanist Richard Morison, a dedicatee of Leland’s, was in the employ of Thomas Cromwell and author of a proposal for an annual Protestant festival.26 He also signed the verses that Holbein painted onto the panel representing the assured future of Tudor England in the two-year-old form of Edward, Prince of Wales, now in Washington27 (Figure 1). This is almost certainly

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Figure 1 Hans Holbein, Edward, Prince of Wales, oil on panel, photograph © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

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the New Year’s gift presented to Henry VIII by Holbein in 1540, an expensive and precious gift from an artist if so – the cap was originally of silver leaf now damaged and tarnished. We do not know how Morison came to be involved in this project, but Leland may conceivably have composed his own poem on the portrait of the Prince of Wales in response to this painting. ‘As often as I with intent eyes see your happy face and colour O divine Edward, so do I seem to discern the reflected form of your magnanimous father, which shines in that face,’ he writes, possibly echoing Morison’s ‘Little one, emulate your father and be the heir of his virtue; the world contains nothing greater. Heaven and earth could scarcely produce a son whose glory would surpass that of such a father. Do but equal his deeds and men can ask no more. If you surpass him you will have outstripped all kings the world has revered in past ages.’ The manuscript version of Leland’s verses include the two lines naming Holbein as the author of the work painted with rare dexterity, but they were omitted from the printed version. (See appendix, 2.) This portrait is the only image of the Prince of Wales which Holbein is known to have produced, and therefore it is highly likely that Leland’s poem celebrates it.28 The verses of both Leland and Morison seem to echo those written a few years earlier about Edward’s father and grandfather, which also formed part of a painting by Holbein. Their author has not been identified, and neither Morison nor Leland may be responsible for the unsigned and most extensive and public Latin lines on the Tudor dynasty produced in this period: the poem central to Holbein’s famous composition of Henry VIII, Henry VII and their wives of 1537, which once adorned Whitehall Palace, and is now known only from Holbein’s partially surviving cartoon and the painted copy made for Charles II. The idea that a Latin poem celebrating the heroes of the Tudor dynasty should form a central part of such a composition was once considered so bizarre that it was suggested that the Latin was a later interpolation, an assertion disproved by the discovery that the inscription had been faithfully recorded on the painting at Whitehall in 1600 by a foreign visitor. The verses compare the two kings to heroes and ask ‘which is the victor, the father who overcame his enemies and brought peace or the son to whom the presumption of popes has yielded and through whom religion is renewed?’ Leland himself penned at least two verses on an image of Henry VIII, perhaps this one, or possibly a smaller one such as that now in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid.29 One of these poems was certainly inspired by Holbein, for in the Stow manuscript Holbein is named as the painter. Leland compares the image to that commissioned from

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Alexander the Great by Apelles. (See appendix, 3.) In the other, published verses, Leland writes that if any hand painted those living features this ‘verna tabella’ carried the prize. The king is described ‘with his starry eyes and forehead’, as ‘a sun shining without a cloud’. Another Latin poet at the court of Henry VIII, albeit briefly, who wrote in praise of Holbein and was known to Leland, was the Frenchman Nicholas Bourbon. Bourbon, with whom Leland had become acquainted in Paris, arrived in London in 1535 following the persecution in France of those with Protestant sympathies.30 Holbein drew his portrait there, which was made into a woodcut used in Bourbon’s Paidagogeion of 1536 and in the edition of his Nugae published in 1538. Bourbon wrote in praise of Holbein’s works, notably the Dance of Death and Old Testament woodcut series, both of which were published in France at Lyons. But another poem in the 1538 edition of Nugae seems to refer to a work by Holbein seen in London. It describes the figure of a beautiful slumbering youth, looking like a Cupid, and says that it is a work on ivory (‘eburna’).31 No works on ivory by Holbein are known (and indeed miniatures were not painted on this support until the eighteenth century), but this is possibly an indication that this is a miniature inset in an ivory box like the one in which Holbein’s Anne of Cleves miniature is now shown, or perhaps even a work designed by Holbein, but not executed as a painting.32 No surviving work by Holbein has ever been associated with these verses, but a drawing by Holbein for a medallion inset with a jewel in the British Museum does show a youth lying sleeping by a fountain, generally identified as Pyramus.33 Though this is not a painting or even a design for one, it would not have been unworthy of a humanist poet’s interest, for Holbein’s contemporaries probably paid at least as much attention to such small works which were capable of being encased in precious metal and jewels or even made up in that form, in a manner similar to the classical medal.34 Many such small works were listed along with cameos and other jewels in the inventories of Henry VIII and his queens, and it has been pointed out in this connection that Princess Mary owned a jewel with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe.35 Bourbon’s presence in England must surely have acted as a stimulus to Leland in creating his Latin verses on works of art: it may not be entirely coincidental that Leland also penned a poem on the subject of an image of Cupid.36 We seem to come very close to Leland again in another work of Holbein’s, a drawing which used to puzzle its students. This drawing (Figure 2), inscribed with the name of John Colet who died in 1519

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Figure 2 Hans Holbein, John Colet, drawing, The Royal Collection © 2001, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

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before Holbein came to England, was shown by Fritz Grossman to have been based on Torrigiano’s bust of Colet, made for his funerary monument.37 Leland’s poem on the statue of Colet, founder of St Paul’s, the school Leland attended, expresses the belief that Praxiteles might have equalled but not surpassed this work (he does not mention Torrigiano by name) and that by means of it Colet’s image will long endure. (See appendix, 4.) It is perhaps not entirely fanciful to suggest that Leland himself might have commissioned a painting after the bust, for this was surely the reason Holbein drew it. If he did not, his poem certainly suggests the milieu in which such a work would have been commissioned and appreciated. Yet another work by Holbein brings him close to Leland again: the woodcut portrait by Holbein of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt which was published in Leland’s Naeniae in 1542, his elegy on Wyatt’s death38 (Figure 3). The portrait is a roundel in which Wyatt, appropriately for the Latin form, but unusually for Holbein, is shown in classical rather than Tudor dress. Above it are Leland’s words in praise of the portrait of Wyatt, with the humanist conceit that though Holbein has created his image, no Apelles could portray his soul. One last work by Holbein praised in a poem by Leland must be mentioned, a portrait of Erasmus, which is included in the manuscript of Leland’s poems: Holbein is the painter than whom none is more illustrious, and the work is done ‘with rare assiduousness’. (See appendix, 5.) Here Leland might have in mind the aforementioned portrait of 1523 sent to William Warham, but there was also at least one smaller image of Erasmus at the English court, to which Leland’s verses might make reference, that now in the Lehmann collection in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. This portrait was at the end of the sixteenth century in the famous Lumley collection but an inscription on the reverse tells us it was owned before that by John Norris, who gave it to Edward Banister, both members of Henry VIII’s household.39 A particularly interesting sequence of Leland’s poems on works of art, known from the Stow manuscript alone, and again first highlighted by Bradner, deals with works owned by Sir Brian Tuke.40 Tuke was the postmaster to Henry VIII who was painted by Holbein in a portrait now in Washington, probably in the early 1530s (Figure 4).41 The portrait is something of a memento mori, possibly because Tuke had suffered recent illness. It also gives great prominence to the badge of the wounds of Christ which Tuke wears. But Leland’s poems reveal another world, one in which Tuke lives in an ‘elegant villa’ and owns paintings.

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Figure 3

Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas Wyatt, woodcut from John Leland’s Naeniae

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Figure 4 Hans Holbein, Brian Tuke, oil on panel, photograph © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

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Three works of art are mentioned, of which two have portraits as their subject, though – perhaps surprisingly – none seems to refer to the portrait by Holbein. One is in praise of a portrait of the imperial master of posts, Franciscus Taxis, who held the corresponding post to Tuke’s but died in 1517. (See appendix, 6.) The actual portrait was perhaps a version of the portrait attributed to the Netherlandish court painter van Orley, which Taxis had evidently given to Tuke, possibly part of an exchange of portraits; there are a number of versions of Tuke’s portrait which survive.42 Leland’s poem takes as its theme the role of a portrait in preserving memory, in a manner similar to Erasmus’ words to Archbishop Warham. He laments the loss of the two friends one for each other, but ends in declaring that the portrait unites two minds (‘duas mentes’). The other portrait owned by Tuke represented Sir Thomas Knyvett.43 Knyvett died in a famous shipwreck, that of the Regent in 1512, which was blown up; hence the fires and explosions mentioned by Leland, though it is unclear if the portrait itself alluded to this in any way. (See appendix, 7.) Finally, Leland celebrates a work belonging to Tuke which has proved hard to define. It appears to be a book on the subject of Italian customs owned by Tuke, but is possibly a costume book as images of women are mentioned. (See appendix, 8.) In the manuscript version of the poem only, the portrait of Knyvett is said to be by the north Italian painter Antonio Solario. Solario had in 1514 signed the altarpiece painted for Paul Withypoll, a London merchant on the edge of court circles. This altarpiece is now divided between the collections of Bristol City Art Gallery and the National Gallery, the former having the centre panel and the latter the shutters. The altarpiece includes Withypoll’s portrait, and there is strong evidence to suggest that Solario came to England to work. 44 This is made all the more likely by the fact that Leland praises not only the portrait by Knyvett but, in another poem, a religious work produced by Solario, a St John the Baptist’s head. 45 (See appendix , 9.) Leland give this work great praise, and compares Solario to Apelles, who he says would have broken his own work in comparison. To conclude this survey of the poems by Leland praising works of art, some further examples must be mentioned. Although none mentions the names of artists, they include some works of particular interest in the context of Tudor ownership of works of art. In one of these, the only remaining example known from the Stow manuscript only and not included in the published collection of his work, Leland

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praises a depiction of a Moorish rider, possibly a piece of sculpture, perhaps by an Italian.46 (See appendix, 10.) Another poem again makes reference to a portrait of one Andrew Smith.47 Four further poems praise a picture of St Jerome, an extremely popular image throughout Europe at this period; a picture of Fortune as a female figure; one of another semi-clad female figure representing Time, belonging to the Smith family; and one of a Venetian girl, conceivably again a work by Solario. It is, of course, possible that one or two of these last examples were composed merely as exercises, and do not reflect a response to real works, but this is clearly not the case with the majority of Leland’s verses. Leland’s poems celebrating works of art place him alongside More, Bourbon and others as a European humanist who perceived the classically modelled Latin praise of such works, whether real or imaginary, as part of the natural remit of the humanist writer. Those in the circles in which Leland moved at the court of Henry VIII would surely have concurred in his view that valuing works of art was a mark of the civilized man or woman. In this way these Latin poems are also an important indicator of a cultural shift towards the valuing of contemporary painting and sculpture – as well as the works of antiquity, both present and absent – which was occurring in early sixteenth-century England as elsewhere in Europe. The paintings and other works which inspired Leland’s praise are exemplars of English interest in owning non-devotional works of art which began in the early Tudor period, and which was flourishing by the end of the sixteenth century.48 Leland’s verses were in fact composed at just the period at which we start to find paintings of such subjects in the inventories of the king and his courtiers, identifiable from their descriptions as being the recent products mostly of artists from northern Europe. 49 This change has been obscured in England for a number of reasons, not least because of the loss of many works of art as well as the emphasis on foreign rather than native artists. But it has also been influenced by a concentration on the use of the vernacular in the second half of the sixteenth century at the expense of the achievement in Latin in the first half.50 However, as Leland’s work shows, it was in the early sixteenth century that valuing painting, sculpture and their creators became significant. Although it was not until the end of the century that such humanist ideas regularly took form in English rather than in Latin, the idea of a picture as an object of worth in itself had already been born.

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Appendix: Poems on works of art by John Leland from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 464 iv. Note : Poems are presented here in the order in which they have been discussed above. Each poem is accompanied by an English translation. 1. Melanchthon (fol. 36v) In effigiem Melanchtonis Quae cernis tantum non viva Melanctonis ora Holbenus pinxit. Bella tabella nitet. [This face you see is the all but living image of Melanchthon, which Holbein painted. The beautiful painting is resplendent.] 2. Prince Edward (fol. 55r) In effigiem Eadeardi principis incomparabilis Intentis quoties oculis vultumque coloremque Aspicio laetum dive edoarde tuum: Expressam toties videor mihi cernere formam Magnanimi patris, quo nitet ore tui. Immortalis decus pictorum holbenus amoenam Pinxit opus rara dexteritate manus. [On the image of the incomparable Prince Edward: As often as I direct my eyes to look at your delightful face and appearance, so I seem to see the form of your magnanimous father shining forth in your face. The immortal Holbein painted this pleasing picture with rare dexterity of hand.] 3. Henry VIII (fol. 64r) Inscriptio pictae tabellae: Fertur Alexander pictorem magnum Apellem Unum nitido constituisse sibi Henrici effigies octavi poscit et ipsa Holbenae pingi dexteritate manu [Inscription of a painted table: They say that the great Alexander made Apelles his one painter for his outstanding self.

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But the image of Henry VIII demands in its turn to be painted by the dexterity of Holbein’s hand.] 4. Statue of John Colet (fol. 16r) In statuam Ioannis Coleto fani paulini decani Eloquio iuvenum ubi Lillius ora polivit In statua spiras magne Colete tua. Quam si Praxiteles fecisset magnus et ille Forsitan aequasset, non superasset opus. Hac salva statua, divini forma Coleti Temporibus longis non peritura manet. [On the statue of John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral: Where Lily polished the speech of the young, great Colet, your statue draws breath. If the great Praxiteles had made it he would perhaps have equalled the work but not surpassed it. Preserved in this statue, the appearance of the divine Colet endures for ages long and will not perish.] 5. Erasmus (fol. 33v) In effigiem Desiderii E Est mira effigies haec immortalis Erasmi Cui debet musas Theutona terra bonas Holbenus pictor quo non illustrior alter Exhibuit rarae sedulitatis opus [On the image of Desiderius Erasmus: This is the wondrous image of the immortal Erasmus, to whom the Teuton lands owe their gracious Muses. No other painter was more celebrated than Holbein, who produced this work of rare mastery.] 6. Franciscus Taxis (fol. 33v) In effigiem Francisci Taxi Itali Tucca tibi presens Franciscus candidus ille Taxus amicitia nomine iunctus erat Nunc absens etiam tibi pro candore sueto Taxus amicitia nomine iunctus erit Nam colit tuos solito de more penates

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Totus Apellea reddiens arte tibi. Diu vos syncero bene consuluistis amore Dum retinet mentes una tabella duas. [On the portrait of Franciscus Taxis, Italian. The noble Franciscus Taxis when present was joined to you, Tuke, in friendship’s name. Now, even in his absence, Taxis will be joined to you in the name of friendship for the sake of his usual nobility. For in accordance with his usual practice he honours your house, the whole man returning to you in Apelles-like art: long may you take comfort from your sincere love while this one picture links your two minds.] 7. Thomas Knyvett (fol. 5r) In effigiem Thomas dunovedi naumachiae ab Antonio Solariano veneto depictam Ingens gloria martius britannae Gentis dunovedus, ferae cruento Qui proh naumachiae dolor tumultu Inter fulmineos cadebat ignes, Inter caeruleas peribat undas. Spirat, Tucca, tua elegante villa, Pictus dexteritate tam absoluta Vivo vertic ut invicem capillos Discretos vigilli putes labore; Ut nunc hinc oculos putes et illinc Alterna subito rota moveri Et plenas tepido cruore venas. Toto corpore suscitare vitam. Quid quod mirificis modis decoret Illustrem tabulam coronis alma. In qua tot veneres, tot et lepores, Tot blandae illecebrae, tot et colores, Cum grata novitate suave rident, Quot promittere noluisset unquam Clarus Parrhasius, nec ipse Zeuxis. [On the portrait of Thomas Knyvett of the sea battle painted by Antonio da Solario, Venetian: The great glory of the British people,

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warlike Knyvett, who midst the bloody tumult of a fierce sea-battle tragically fell surrounded by exploding fires and perished among the dark blue waves, lives on still, Tuke, in your elegant house, painted with such perfect artistry that you would think as you watched carefully, that each hair on his head stirred as in life, that his eyes were moving now here, now there, with sudden glances in each direction, that his veins, full of warm blood, still maintained the full life of his body. What need is there of Fame to honour in marvellous ways so striking a painting in which there are more delights, more charms, more sweet graces, more colours smiling with a pleasant freshness than could ever have been boasted even by the renowned Parrhasius or the great Zeuxis himself?] 8. Italian women (fol. 49r) Cultus Italidum Italidum varios cultus qui nosse laborat Invisat Tuccae porgoriana mei, Et tum si quaerat quae sora perduxerit illuc Tam nitide excultas, me referente sciet Ausonios inter pictores clarior unus Ex opere insigni debita lucra petens Mundiciem Italidum niveam ornatus quae intentens Sic rara pinxit dexteritate manu Illius ut splendens operis decus undique nymphas Illiceret ……[rest of line is missing] Senserat hec Taxus dives precioque soluto Comparat et Tuccae munera clara dedit Italidum cultus ubi cernitur inclytus usque Qui spectatricum lumina rapta fovet. [The dress of Italian women: Let whoever labours to know the varied fashion of Italian women visit the (?gallery) of my friend Tuke, and then, if he seeks those adornments which chance has brought hither so splendidly, let him know,

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according to me, that one more famous among the painters of Italy, seeking due reward from a famous work, painted the snowy beauty of Italian women with such dexterity of hand that the splendid quality of that work should attract nymphs from everywhere… The rich Taxis perceived this, and, paying the price, bought it and gave the illustrious gift to Tuke, so that where the celebrated dress of Italian women is seen, it animates the delighted eyes of its viewers.] 9. John the Baptist (fol. 36r) In caput D. Ioannis baptistae ab Antonio Solariano pictum Inter pictores felix Antonius ille Aequoreis venetis cognita fama fuit pinxit vulnifico succisum funere divi Ioannis tanta dexteritate caput viveret ut si nunc toties laudatus Apelles pingendi irata frangeret arma manu. [On the head of St. John the Baptist painted by Antonio da Solario: That fortunate Antonio, whose fame was known among the painters of the Venetian lagoon, painted the head of the divine John, cut off at his wound-inflicting death, with such skillfulness that if the often praised Apelles were living now he would have broken his brushes with his angry hand.] 10 Statue of a Moorish horseman (fol. 25r) In statuam maurt [sic ] equitis Horrida candenti reditimus tempora vitta maurus equi alipedis terga superba premit dextra contorquet librata missile telum; contrahit, et lena frena remittit equo. Scilicet hunc credas sinuoso currere passu Illum per tenues mittere tela plagas. [On the statue of a Moorish horseman: The moor, his shaggy temples bound with a bright band, presses the proud back of his swift horse, and in his right hand brandishes his throwing spear; he reins in and gives rein to the horse with a light bit.

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Undoubtedly, you would think you saw the horse running with curvetting step while the rider strikes his javelins through the subtle nets.]

Notes 1 I am grateful to James Carley for reading and commenting on this text. I am also indebted to the assistance given me in the past by Professor J. B. Trapp in the interpretation of Leland’s poems; any errors are my own. 2 For a brief overview of the history of this development see J. Dunkerton, S. Foister, D. Gordon and N. Penny, Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Paintings in The National Gallery (New Haven and London, 1991), pp. 205–10, with bibliography at pp. 389–90; and, especially, M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford 1971). J. Shearman, Only Connect. Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1992), chapter 3, ‘Portraits and Poets’, includes much valuable material on the praise of portraiture by Renaissance poets; see especially pp. 113–17 on the use of Greek and Latin epigrams as a model for such praise by authors including Sir Thomas More in England. And see further H. H. Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1947). 3 See L. Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620 (Leamington Spa, 1981), for example pp. 16, 24. 4 For the evidence recently available, see especially S. Foister, ‘Paintings and Other Works of Art in Sixteenth-Century English Inventories’, Burlington Magazine, CXXIII (May 1981) 273–82; T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991); A. Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Tudor and Jacobean England (London and New Haven, 1997). 5 For the increase in values, see Foister, ‘Paintings and Other Works of Art’; for the artist–craftsman debate seen as first emerging in the early seventeenth century, see D. J. Gordon, ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XII (1949) 152–78. 6 For Holbein’s career generally and a catalogue of his works, see J. Rowlands The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger (Oxford, 1985). For recent treatments of Holbein and humanists, see M. Roskill and C. Harbison, ‘On the Nature of Holbein’s Portraits’, Word and Image, III (1987) 1–26; and O. Bätschmann and P. Griener, Hans Holbein (London, 1997), pp. 13–35. 7 Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. 7. 8 Roskill and Harbison, ‘On the Nature of Holbein’s Portraits’; on the portrait see also W. S. Heckscher, ‘Reflections on Seeing Holbein’s Portrait of Erasmus at Longford Castle’, in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (London, 1967), pp. 128–48. 9 For the history of the portrait see Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. 13. 10 Shearman, Only Connect, p. 115, citing Heckscher and referring to Martial and Alberti.

Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period 149 11 See L. Campbell, M. Mann Phillips, H. Schulte Herbrüggen and J. B. Trapp, ‘Quentin Matsys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gilles and Thomas More’, Burlington Magazine, CXX (November, 1978) 716–24; and L. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (Princeton, NJ, 1993), pp. 27–39. 12 For Guildford’s letters from Erasmus in 1519, see Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1906–58), iii, no. 966, pp. 585–6; and iv, no. 1032, p. 96; for his portrait by Holbein and that of his wife, see Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, nos 25 and 26. 13 See J. B. Trapp, ‘Sir Thomas More and the Visual Arts’, Saggi sul Rinascimento, ed. S. Rossi (Milan, 1984), pp. 27–54. 14 See M. Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London, 1986). 15 J. Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of his Poetry’, Studies in Philology, LXXXIII, 1 (Winter, 1986), 1–50, at pp. 2–4; on Holbein, see Roskill and Harbison, ‘On the Nature of Holbein’s Portraits’; and Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein. 16 See Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris’, and also Carley’s article on Leland in the New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, forthcoming); I am grateful to James Carley for allowing me to consult this prior to publication. 17 All these names occur in Leland’s encomia published in T. Hearne, ed., Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii de rebus Britannicis collectanea (Oxford, 1715). For the unpublished work, see the appendix. 18 See Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris’; for the woodcut, see C. Dodgson, ‘Woodcuts Designed by Holbein for English Printers’, The Walpole Society, XXVII (1938–39) 1–10. 19 See Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris’. 20 L. Bradner, ‘Some Unpublished Poems by John Leland’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXXI (1956) 827–36. 21 For the portraits, see Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. 60. 22 Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, p. 94, suggests it was made for an English admirer of Melanchthon. The portrait may conceivably have been made to be sent to Melanchthon at a time when Henry VIII was making a rapprochement with German Lutherans: see S. Foister, ‘Holbein and the English Reformation’ (MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1977). 23 Bradner, ‘Some Unpublished Poems’. 24 See S. Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (London and New Haven, 1993), pp. 98–102, 227–33. 25 See L. Campbell and S. Foister, ‘Gerard, Lucas and Susanna Horenbout’, Burlington Magazine, CXXVIII (1986) 719–27. 26 On Morison, see J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965), and S. Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), pp. 266–7. 27 For the portrait see Rowlands’ Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. 70; and J. O. Hand, German Paintings of the Fifteenth Through Seventeenth Centuries (Washington DC, 1993), pp. 85–91. 28 A full-length version on panel also including the verses survives: see Hand, German Paintings, p. 88; a full-length on cloth was in the collection of Henry VIII but whether it bore any relation to the Holbein image is unknown. 29 Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, nos L. 14 and 61.

150 Susan Foister 30 Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris’, pp. 16–17. 31 See A. B. Chamberlain, Hans Holbein the Younger (London, 1913), ii, p. 74. 32 Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. M. 6; the vellum has been slightly cut in order to fit it into the ivory box; therefore it is assumed that the box is not the original but is likely to be of sixteenth-century date. 33 See J. Rowlands with G. Bartrum, Drawings by German Artists … in the British Museum (London, 1993), no. 346(c), p. 165. 34 See S. Foister, ‘Sixteenth-Century English Portraiture and the Idea of the Classical’, in Albion’s Classicism: English Art, 1550–1660, ed. L. Gent (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 163–80. 35 See Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein. 36 Leland, Encomia (London, 1589), p. 9. 37 F. Grossman, ‘Holbein, Torrigiano and Some Portraits of Dean Colet’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XIII (1950) 202–36. 38 See Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, p. 95 and Dodgson, ‘Woodcuts’. 39 Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. 34. 40 Bradner, ‘Some Unpublished Poems’, 833–5. 41 For the portrait see Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. 64, and Hand, German Paintings, pp. 91–7. 42 For Taxis see O. Le Maire, ‘Les Portraits de Francois de Tassis’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, XXIII (1954) 203–16. For versions of the Tuke portrait see Rowlands, Paintings of Hans Holbein, no. 34, and Hand, German Paintings, pp. 91–7. 43 Bradner’s identification of Dunovedus as Knyvett was later supported by the late Dr Roger Virgoe of the University of East Anglia, who had carried out research into the Knyvett family (personal communication). 44 For the altarpiece see M. Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: The Earlier Italian Schools (London, 1962), pp. 492–4. 45 There is a head of the Baptist by Solario in the Ambrosiana, Milan, dated 1508, which appears to be modelled on one by his namesake Andrea Solario, with whom he is sometimes confused. 46 Bradner, ‘Some Unpublished Poems’, suggests a work by Bertoldo di Giovanni, but Henry VIII possessed similar statues. 47 Andrew Smith has not been identified. 48 See Foister, ‘Paintings and Other Works of Art’. Two indications of the increased valuation of painting which would lead to the great collectors of the following century can be seen in a) the increased use of the English word ‘picture’, which early in the century has always to be further defined, but by the end of it can be used on its own without such tagging; and b) an increasing monetary valuation of pictures (allowing for inflation). 49 See the forthcoming essay by L. Campbell and S. Foister in The Inventories of Henry VIII, ii, ed. D. Starkey. 50 See, for example, Gent, ‘Picture and Poetry’.

7 Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo, 1547–1553 M. A. Overell

The Beneficio di Cristo was an enigmatic Italian best-seller, first published in Venice in 1543.1 In this study I ask how it came to be known at the court of Edward VI and what part humanism played in the process. This is controversial territory. Historians argue a great deal about the meaning of humanism, and its relationship to Protestantism is almost as fiercely contested. The debts of Protestantism to humanism were enormous and yet conflicts between the two could operate at profound levels.2 Edward VI’s court rapidly became identified with continental Protestantism, for which it aspired to be both refuge and rallying point. Yet the continuities with England’s humanist past remained. All those with power over the king had a humanist education. Edward was being brought up in the same way in the charge of the great Cambridge humanist, John Cheke. It was not a matter of necessity that humanists should be Protestants but those in charge in 1547 were both.3 They had read the classics and the fathers as well as the Scriptures; several had learned other European languages and Greek as well as Latin. They paid close attention to their texts and believed that such studies could be applied to the development of individual morality and to public life. Where the court led, English nobles followed. Edward Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, had been imprisoned in the Tower of London since the Western Conspiracy of 1538 when he was twelve or thirteen. In 1548, a translation of the Beneficio di Cristo appeared in his name. His dedication of the work to Anne Stanhope (Seymour), Countess of Hertford and Duchess of Somerset, played on humanist sympathies. He bemoaned his own lack of educational opportunity in the Tower and sought freedom in order to gain more learning. We do not know for certain when the translation was begun, if Courtenay did all the work 151

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himself, who was the scribe or who brought the original into England. But it is clear that Courtenay’s manuscript reached Edward VI. He either read it or pretended to, because there are two brief notes in his hand.4 The Beneficio di Cristo was the Italian Reformation’s most famous book. It circulated widely in manuscript and, after two publications in 1543, sold in large numbers. Soon it was viewed as hot property. In the 1550s the Inquisition used it to detect Protestantism, a litmus test of guilt by association. For all that, many of those involved in its evolution in the early 1540s remained Catholic, not least Cardinal Reginald Pole and several members of his humanist household. Its precise theological meaning for contemporaries is therefore problematic.5 The first English readers at Edward’s court were dealing with a text of immense complexity, a patchwork of sources. It puzzled contemporaries and has sparked off arguments among Italian historians in the late twentieth century.6 This study tries to answer two questions related to the import and translation of the Beneficio di Cristo in England. Does it reveal a hinterland of Anglo-Italian contacts, which were based on shared humanism as much as shared Protestantism? Second, do these humanist contacts help to explain the warm welcome given by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and the court to Pietro Martire Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino and other Italian exiles when they arrived in England in December 1547?7 Without doubt there was a brief and fruitful moment of real connection between the English and Italian Reformations; the Italian interrupted and incomplete and the English advancing rapidly and very eclectic. What part was played by humanist enthusiasms for ‘good letters’, for texts, translation, foreign languages and especially the Italian language? The Beneficio became identified with Protestantism, but it was not always so clear. Most of the exiles who fled across the Alps to safety in Protestant areas during the 1540s had definite connections with the groups from which the Beneficio manuscripts originated: Caelio Secundo Curione, Bernardino Ochino, Pietro Martire Vermigli, Pier Paolo Vergerio. They had all had a humanist education, in varying degrees, but they all became Protestants.8 Yet others, who were also humanists, with even stronger direct links to the Beneficio, remained in Italy, seeming to believe that loyalty to both the book and the Catholic Church was possible. Cardinal Giovanni Morone thought it ‘molto spirituale’ and paid for it to be distributed, whilst Cardinal Reginald Pole was friend and protector of one of the book’s authors, the humanist poet and writer, Marcantonio Flaminio.9 Although Flaminio was

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widely read in Protestant literature, he was weaned away from radical resistance to Catholic beliefs in Pole’s household at Viterbo between 1541 and 1542.10 Flaminio’s close friend Pietro Carnesecchi, much less cautious than the others, finally came before the Inquisition in 1566–67, where he described the process of composition of the Beneficio very precisely: The first author of this book was a black monk of St Benedict called Don Benedetto … since this Don Benedetto was a friend of Marcantonio Flaminio he gave him the said book, wanting him to polish it and comment on it with his beautiful style, so that it would be more readable and pleasing, and so Flaminio, while preserving the subject completely, corrected it as seemed proper to him.11 All this happened in the very early 1540s when doctrinal matters were not perceived in the either/or categories imposed by later generations. ‘Beautiful style’ and humanist-sounding qualities like being ‘readable and pleasing’ seem to have been important to Carnesecchi and these may well have served to blur the doctrinal issues. Moreover, mild solifidianism was not certain heresy in 1542; it only became so when pressed to the point of ‘dismantling the Catholic economy of salvation’, as Dermot Fenlon described it. The Catholic doctrine of justification was defined at Trent in January 1547, but even that did not really settle matters. It is significant that it took Pole (and others) several years to record their acceptance of that decree. The humanist poet Flaminio set out to revise the Beneficio and improve its style several years before the doctrinal mists had begun to clear.12 Any reader skimming the text of the Beneficio would conclude that the style is indeed lucid and passionate, that there is much more of the Scriptures than of the classics and that justification by faith is a recurring theme. The motive force seems to be the intention to salvage all the spiritual shipwrecks caused by emphasis on works and merit. There, however, generalizations must end, because the Beneficio is a collage of different theologies. The tract incorporated debates and controversies inherited by this mid-century generation. The early chapters included neo-Platonist ideas of the ascent to divine love and Benedictine traditions drawn principally from Greek theology, especially Chrysostom.13 These are very different from the developed Protestant doctrine found later in the book. For instance, Christ ‘the kind physician’ is presented as ‘healing all our sicknesses, reforming our free will and restoring us to our first innocency and bringing us

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again to the likeness of God’.14 On such points the Beneficio reads more like a pre-reform text influenced by humanism or neo-Platonism than a Protestant one. A section in the third chapter veers close to a theology of Universal Salvation.15 This probably derives from the teaching of the Spaniard Juan de Valdés, who had decisive influence on the core Italian Reformation group, in Naples in 1539–40, of which Flaminio was a leading light.16 As the pace, the passion and the Protestantism increase in chapters 4, 5 and 6, the evidence for Flaminio’s ‘polishing’ becomes more definite. Unlike other possible authors, he had had the perfect apprenticeship. Not only did he know Valdés, but he had been reading the works of the northern reformers for years and had loaned Calvin’s Institutes to Carnesecchi in 1541. These later chapters are noticeably longer; it is as if someone has tacked on a lot of extra material.17 Moreover, the tone is more combative and partisan; there is a sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Such separatism was part and parcel of the book’s history. It had been produced under wraps in the context of groups not sure of themselves or their safety. Often they were secret, Nicodemite, communicating with initiates in code, hoping upon hope that the beliefs to which they were so attracted would turn out to be accepted doctrine.18 The fourth chapter concludes with a clear statement of the doctrine of salvation by faith and, by the final one, predestination and reprobation have the full Calvinist treatment.19 In total, the book contained a great deal of Scripture, few classical references, several patristic ones (many to Augustine and some to Origen, Hilary and Basil), but over sixty quotations from Melanchthon, Luther and Calvin, not attributed but either verbatim or so similar that their source is certain.20 Flaminio, the protégé and friend of cardinals, had brought humanist polish, rhetoric and a sense of history. But he had also tackled his Protestant reading list. It is small wonder that when the second of the two 1543 editions appeared in Venice, it was, in the view of Scipio Bianchini, an on-the-spot observer, ‘not without uproar and suspicion of novelty’.21 In the early reception of the text at the Tudor court five years later, no such suspicions were apparent. Edward VI’s autographs on Courtenay’s 1548 translation are unexceptionable aphorisms. The first quotes St Jame’s epistle: Faith is dede if it be without workes, your loving neveu, Edward. The second has no obvious doctrinal thrust: Live to die and die to live again. Youer neveu, Edward.22

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We do not know exactly when the king made these additions. Because of his rigorous humanist education he was tackling difficult texts at an early age. In 1549, the year after Courtenay’s ‘Beneficio’ was completed, he seems to have been reading another Italian work in translation, John Ponet’s rendering of Bernardino Ochino’s A Dialogue of the Unjust Primacy of the Bishop of Rome. But this was set in drama form, which was far easier for a child to master than the Beneficio.23 Edward’s notebooks reveal a rigorous educational routine of grammatical exercises on extracts from Cicero and Aristotle and the listing of excerpts from St Matthew’s Gospel under doctrinal headings. He gave up on the latter very quickly.24 The myth of the ‘godly imp’ may need some modification. Edward was clever and committed to Protestantism, but at eleven or twelve his understanding and enthusiasm had limits. The sentences he inserted in the Beneficio manuscript suggest that he had grasped part of the Protestant message. Courtenay, then in his early twenties, also skipped deep doctrinal analysis. In his preface, he described the Beneficio as a ‘litle boke’ which ‘playnely declarethe and settithe out’ Christ’s glory.25 There was no arguing with that. There were good reasons why these two young men might not have seen the full extent of the doctrinal problems. This was 1548. Both the Homily of Salvation and the Tridentine Decree of Justification had appeared a year before.26 Soteriological questions were still partially understood and many were baffled. But the humanist influences came across loud and clear. Courtenay’s preface dedicated the work to Anne, Duchess of Somerset. He wanted her to get him out of gaol, his ‘miserable captivite’. As the sole Courtenay heir and direct descendant of Edward IV, he was one of four prisoners regarded as too dangerous for inclusion in the general pardon of 1547. He had been shut up, he says, ‘from such of whom and bi whose godlie conversation I should or mought have conceived or lernid annj either godliness or civilite.’27 ‘Civilitie’ is a word that crops up often in this period. Associated with cultivation and sophistication – personal, social and political – it was a notion much promoted by humanists, whilst ‘godliness’ accounts for the other, more distinctly religious, part of the Tudor programme. Courtenay says he has been ‘destitute of all good lerning and experience’ and is ‘abashed to speak or write to annj man’. But he is persuaded that the duchess will accept ‘whatsoever is unfeignedlie and from a careful mind written or spoken’. He wants the duchess to find him a place in the duke’s household where ‘godliness and civilitie is continually exercised’. Tudor cultural endeavour, even in the Tower, seems to have inculcated ambitions deeply connected with the

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humanist programme: ‘lerning’, ‘godliness’ ‘civilitie’ and ‘a carefull mynde’. Two questions arise about Courtenay’s translation of the Beneficio. First, was he the translator and/or the scribe? Second, who gave him the original and why? In the dedication, he emphasizes the educational deprivations caused by imprisonment. This was no idle selfdeprecation. Both the spelling and the syntax of the manuscript are certainly odd, an oddness which seems to persist in some of his later correspondence. Of the very few historians who have commented on this document, McConica accepts Courtenay’s explanation that the literary shortcomings were caused by his imprisonment. But Churchill Babington suggested that the slavish nature of the spelling mistakes proved that it was the work of a scribe. That would certainly explain the exquisite presentation – for this is one of the most beautiful of all mid-Tudor manuscripts.28 Courtenay claimed that he had translated the tract ‘from the Italionne, the understanding whereof I have by my noune studie acheved’. Even in the Tower, the humanist educators had prevailed.29 Evidence from later in his life suggests that he both read and wrote Italian. When Mary came to the throne in 1553, he was set free but, after involvement in the Wyatt Conspiracy, imprisoned again and released on condition that he went abroad. In 1555, he sent a short letter in Italian to King Philip. After he arrived in Italy, he was certainly involved either in plots or in discussions about plots and he died, probably from poisoning, in Venice in 1556. Sir Thomas Wilson’s funeral oration after Courtenay’s death in Padua, in September 1556, mentioned painting, music and mathematics among his attainments. There was no specific reference to Latin and Greek but: Not satisfied with his great learning and cultivation, he added the Spanish, French and Italian languages to all that he had already acquired … On this difficult occasion, Wilson undoubtedly needed to scrape the bottom of the barrel to divert suspicions about the English government’s involvement in Courtenay’s murder. However his eulogy and all the other evidence combine to suggest that Courtenay had some Italian and possibly enough to translate the Beneficio.30 So, if we were to accept that Courtenay did some or all the actual translating, who put him up to it, and what does it reveal about the humanism of this court?

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James McConica, assumed that the translation could be explained by pervasive Erasmianism: Someone in the English court felt that, of the many possible approaches to the king, this one, through the most celebrated contemporary Erasmian treatise of personal devotion, would be the most likely to bring Edward Courtenay his freedom. The tendency to attribute too much to an undefined court Erasmianism has come under fire.31 Moreover, the Beneficio was not truly Erasmian; it was mostly Valdesian and Lutheran and Calvinist. On the other hand, Edward VI’s own notebooks prove that he was following a curriculum advocated by Erasmus, in which translation was playing a significant part, just as it did in Princess Elizabeth’s education. She certainly knew Italian and translated Ochino’s sermons on Predestination. In 1551 François de Scepeaux, an observer from the French court, reported that Edward spoke good French as well as Spanish and Italian and had made a good start on Greek letters. Courtenay in the Tower seems to have been keeping up with his peer group.32 McConica may have applied the term ‘Erasmianism’ rather widely but he certainly captured the mood of this court. The translation of texts was assumed to be inherently valuable because good letters led to good lives.33 Courtenay’s dedication was based on the same assumption. Since his Beneficio translation clearly found its way back to the king and court where such enthusiasms prevailed, the original may well have been passed to him from there. But who imported it? There are several possibilities. Reginald Pole was the one European humanist who was both related to Edward Courtenay and closely involved with the beginnings of the Beneficio. As such he deserves consideration as a possible supplier of the text. At present, however, there is no evidence supporting Pole’s involvement and some of the circumstances make it unlikely. In the early 1540s Pole still believed in the possibility of adherence to the Beneficio and obedience to the Church and might therefore have found a way to send the Italian original to his young cousin. But, in those years, Courtenay was under strict guard, had no tutor until 1541 and was probably too inexperienced to make use of the text. By October 1548, the year of the appearance of Courtenay’s translation, bridge building between the new English government and Pole had begun and Pole’s representatives, carrying letters to England, arrived in the summer of 1549. But it is unlikely that these exchanges prompted or included the sending of the Beneficio to

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Courtenay for two reasons. First, they seem to have begun too late. Second, all the evidence of the Italian side suggests that, however close Pole’s early involvement with the text, he had become more cautious in the face of the mounting chorus of attack on its theology. 34 On balance, European Protestant humanists hovering around Edward’s court seem more likely to have passed on the text. One such likely importer is Guido Giannetti da Fano, because he was in England, had been trading in ‘heretical’ books and was deeply involved with the Beneficio from its very earliest days. Marcantonio Flaminio was his friend and Carnesecchi loaned him a copy of the work in 1541.35 At some time between 1543 and 1545, Giannetti was lending out the Beneficio. An Inquisition witness recalled: In Rome I saw a book entitled Il Beneficio di Cristo, dating from 1543. And, if I remember rightly, Guido da Fano lent it to me and I kept it for one day, and I showed it to Spada, our General and then I returned it. I couldn’t examine it, neither do I think I read it because Guido made a fuss about returning it. And I had the feeling that he was upset because I showed it to the Superior.36 Giannetti had two visits to England. The first was from 1536 to 1538 and his second trip began in 1546. He had been a hanger-on at numerous Italian courts and he seems to have gained entry to Edward VI’s, since he explained Sebastian Cabot’s demonstration of the workings of the magnetic compass to the young king. Giannetti also acted as a middleman for correspondence between needy Italian exiles on the continent and the royal court, which was viewed as the Protestant promised land.37 Giannetti was in constant touch with Pietro Vanni, who was Latin secretary to Edward VI in the early years of the reign and then English ambassador to Venice from 1550 to 1556. Vanni’s protection of the Italian Reformation group in Lucca and his lending of Italian Reformation books during the period of his embassy are less well known but in this context very relevant.38 Several other Italians had found favour at this court. Their humanism and their religion combined to recommend them. Giovanni Battista Castiglione, Elizabeth’s Italian teacher, may have taught Courtenay the language as well. He had a distinctly Protestant pedigree and was suspected of being involved in importing and distributing heretical and seditious material in Mary’s reign. If Courtenay’s Italian did not prove quite up to the work of Beneficio translation, Castiglione would have been a perfect ghost-writer.39 Pietro Bizzarri, a religious exile from Perugia, was

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well entrenched in England by 1549. In that year, he was made a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, through the influence of John Cheke, and he was certainly in touch with Roger Ascham and John Bradford whilst he was there. In the 1550s, Bizzarri knew Edward Courtenay and possibly was with him when he died in Padua in 1556. As time wore on, Bizzarri became less of an Italian reformer and more of a wandering humanist-cum-spy, but in his younger days he had certainly been influenced by the incomplete Reformation in his own land.40 Petruccio Ubaldini had been in England, in the service of the English crown since 1545. He returned to Italy for a short time and then came back to England in Edward’s reign. He was a humanist translator and a close observer of the formalities and eccentricities of Edward’s court, including the young king’s unreliable taste in hats. Given the beauty of the manuscript of Courtenay’s translation, it may be important to add that Ubaldini was also a famous calligrapher.41 All these Italian exiles sought and gained patronage through activities associated with humanism: language teaching, writing and calligraphy. They were also Protestants. At Edward’s court this was the winning combination. Whatever ideas or books the native Italians brought to court, they could rely on skilled help from competent English Italianists and translators. Tudor travel to the peninsula, and especially to Padua, was reinforcing awareness of cultural debts to Italy.42 The main ‘dramatis personae’ on the English side were members of the learned group gathered round John Cheke, known to historians as ‘the Cambridge Connection’. In their own day they were called ‘the Athenian tribe’ because of their extensive classical and especially Greek learning: Anthony Cooke, Richard Morison, Roger Ascham, John Ponet.43 Sir Anthony Cooke’s blue-stocking daughter Anne (later Lady Bacon) had a small volume of Ochino’s Sermons elegantly translated and published a mere eight months after his arrival. She followed this up with his difficult, convoluted Sermons on Predestination three years later.44 John Ponet turned into English Ochino’s A Dialogue of the Unjust Primacy of the Bishop of Rome. It was published in two versions in 1549. From the first one, Edward seems to have taken ideas for his own fervently anti-papal compositions. And if the king was dipping into Italian Reformation works, what was to stop Courtenay doing the same? It may have been Ponet who translated Ochino’s dangerously sympathetic comments on rebellion, the ‘Dialogus Regis et Populi’. Subsequently, Ponet was to flee to Vermigli’s house during the Marian exile. He was an Italianate churchman if ever there was one and, significantly, he was also chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury by 1547.45

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At the centre of all these humanists, apparently revered by all of them, was John Cheke himself, the king’s tutor. There have been attempts to pigeon-hole Cheke and Ascham as ‘humanists who found it safer to restrict themselves to educational matters’, examples of ‘the separation of humanist and religious preoccupations’. Recent research, however, suggests that the opposite is the case. Edward’s accession ended his tutor’s need to shelter behind the half-spoken and private Protestantism which had marked his behaviour in the previous reign. A mutual admiration seems to have existed between Cheke and radical Protestants in Basel. In 1547, the radical Caelio Secundo Curione praised Cheke’s skills as a teacher and sent him a letter together with two books dedicated to the king. One was Curio senior’s edition of Cicero’s Philippics and the other a volume of his own son’s translations. The elder Curio’s letter assumed that Cheke would be in contact with Bernardino Ochino for further information. Curio, an anti-Calvinist even at this stage, was probably aware that there was mutual admiration between Cheke and another Basel radical, the Frenchman Sebastien Castellio. Cheke also knew Pietro Martire Vermigli and Pietro Bizzarri well, and Girolamo Cardano, the physician and mathematician, stayed at his house. When Mary came to the throne, Cheke chose to go to Padua in 1554, partly to learn the Italian language. He did not like Italy when he got there and, after his capture, he recanted his Protestantism in July 1556. But these later events do not alter his earlier affiliations. In Edward’s reign, Cheke was a humanist who befriended Italian exiles and was warmly admired by the humanist radicals of Basel.46 In later years, Roger Ascham made a talking point of his dislike of Italy and ‘Italianate’ Englishmen, but in Edward’s reign he was angling for an appointment to an English delegation to the Council of Trent, where, presumably, he must have expected to meet Italians.47 But it was Richard Morison who was probably the best Italian speaker of all the court humanists. He had gained that knowledge at Padua between 1534 and 1536 where he had studied Greek literature, philosophy and theology. He was accused of attending a secret ‘conventicle’ where there were plots afoot to stop the election of a French rector. It is virtually certain that he encountered early rumblings of the Italian Reformation at this time. In Edward’s reign he was clearly so keen on keeping up his Italian that he caused a diplomatic scuffle at the Imperial court, where he was posted in 1550, by staging Italian readings to his household. He recounted the incident to Cecil in his usual devil-may-care tone: I did but read them Bernardine [Ochino] Prediches for the tongue and sometimes Machiavel.

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The point which needs to be emphasized here is that even when these activities or translations happened after the arrival of Martire and Ochino, they prove that the court’s, and especially the Cambridge Connection’s, Italian awareness was already well developed when they came. The most influential of all the English ‘italianati’, Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione, was actually in Italy ‘for the tongue’s sake’ between 1548 and 1550. William Thomas, the other famous Italianist, was likewise on his way home from there in 1548. But even without them, Edward’s court was fertile ground, completely ready for Vermigli and Ochino and for the reception of the Beneficio.48 The Europhile archbishop also had some Italian; he had been on missions to Italy during Henry VIII’s reign. A letter to the king shows that he read the language. In 1536, Cranmer wrote, perhaps with a note of pride: Here I have written the very words of the letter as I did translate them out of Italian into English as near as I could, word for word.49 Churchill Babington suggested that Cranmer made use of the Beneficio when he was preparing his ‘Homily of Salvation’ in July 1547. No evidence is given, but the suggestion is possible. Cranmer’s status as humanist reformer and his interest in foreign scholars are well documented. In 1547, he already had Ponet as his chaplain, so Italian awareness was in the archiepiscopal air.50 The court, the Cambridge Connection, the archbishop’s household and Courtenay in the Tower all knew that much wisdom had come from Italy. Exiled Italian reformers were a logical next step. In July 1547 Cranmer issued his invitations and, in December, Vermigli and Ochino arrived. The two had left Italy in 1542 and since then Vermigli had been mostly in Strasbourg and Ochino in Augsburg. Both were put in danger by the series of events of 1547, a year of kaleidoscopic change on both sides of the Channel. They spoke no English but they needed the safety of the young Josiah’s kingdom.51 It is not part of the purpose of this study to repeat the details of these two famous exiles, readily available in published work.52 Vermigli and Ochino are relevant here only in so far as they are part of the humanist context of the reception of the Beneficio. It is possible that they brought the book with them. In Italy, both had moved in exactly the right circles to make them familiar with it. They were escorted across the Channel by John Abell, an English merchant, whose bills survive for the freight charges for their two boxes of books. We do not know if the Beneficio was in those boxes. If it was, Courtenay (and/or his assistants) made fast work of a demanding text and a beautiful manuscript during 1548.53

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Ochino remained in London for almost the whole of his stay, financed by a Crown pension and a non-resident prebend at Canterbury. There is new evidence that he was catapulted into the limelight very rapidly. A mere month after his arrival he was allowed to set up the church of the Italian Strangers in London. The records show that he was in the orbit of Cranmer, Ponet, John Bradford and the Cambridge group. In London, he was a distinct success – ‘sanctified Bernardine’, as Anne Cooke called him. Bradford was a regular visitor to the Italian’s house and seems to have made Ochino’s work known among friends and disciples.54 The Princess Elizabeth translated his sermons and her autograph translation has survived. She also talked to him about predestination. Numerous influential people, including the devoutly Protestant Duchess of Suffolk, went to hear him preach – in Italian, of course. In May of 1548, the Spanish ambassador referred sneeringly to Vermigli and Ochino as ‘the pet children of the Archbishop of Canterbury’.55 Their wives arrived to join them in the spring of 1548, accompanied by Giulio Terentiano, Vermigli’s servant, and Emmanuele Tremellio, who was subsequently appointed to the Chair of Hebrew at Cambridge University. Still other Italians on the continent were watching enviously. During 1550, the propagandist Pier Paolo Vergerio mounted a campaign to gain the notice of Edward VI and his court.56 In March 1548, four months after his arrival, Pietro Martire Vermigli was moved to less harmonious circumstances in conservative Oxford, where the support of the court was missing. His time there was marked by bitter university politics. He was brought back to London for his safety during the Western Rebellion of 1549. Cranmer employed both Ochino and Vermigli as propagandists in preparing the government response to the rebellions. Cranmer’s ‘Sermon Concerning the Time of Rebellion’ draws on two of Vermigli’s sedition sermons, whilst Ochino was responsible for the ambivalent ‘Dialogus Regis et Populi’, written in a Tuscan Italian and translated into English soon after he completed it. It was not published, probably because it gave the grievances of the common people more of an airing than was circumspect.57 These strangers’ links with the archbishop and with his Italianate protégé, John Ponet, helped overcome the language barrier which, as Vermigli ruefully recorded, cut them off from the ordinary people. Cranmer’s influential patronage operated within the context of a humanist court where these strangers could communicate in Latin and often in Italian as well. 58 Thus Vermigli, who was both the better Latinist and more reliable theologian, could have immense influence

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on the progress of the Reformation and especially on its Eucharistic theology. Excerpts from his writings were included in the second Prayer Book, the Article XVII on Predestination, the Ecclesiastical Laws and at least two of the Homilies, the one on rebellion and Bishop Pilkington’s ‘Homily on Drunkenness’, which appeared in the later Elizabethan collection.59 Ochino’s London popularity, Vermigli’s theological influence and the archbishop’s reliance on them both confirmed the Italian phase. There are multiple proofs of settled Italian influence in learned and literary circles by the end of Edward’s reign. Michelangelo Florio was made minister of the church of the Italian Strangers in London in 1550.60 By 1553 the translators had published five volumes of Ochino’s works and only two of Vermigli’s, but since he always wrote in Latin there was less urgency. The Italian Reformation movement was clearly well known at court. Although there are no relevant titles in the surviving volumes of Cranmer’s library, the king’s own private collection contained several items with bearings on the Italian Reformation. Included were Ochino’s Dialogue of the Unjust Primacy in the second edition, Flaminio’s translation of 30 Psalms and, of course, the manuscript of Courtenay’s translation of the Beneficio. Moreover, after 1550, Edward had as his companion and confidential mentor William Thomas, the author of the enduringly popular History of Italy (1549) and the first Italian grammar book (1550) for English readers.61 The popular death story of the Italian Reformation, the orchestrated tragedy of Francesco Spiera, who recanted his Protestant beliefs and died in despair late in 1548, was translated and published by the king’s printer in Worcester in 1550, just months after the first accounts appeared on the continent.62 As the Beneficio was the Italian Reformation’s spiritual handbook, Spiera was its dramatic morality tale and negative pattern. Hugh Latimer’s confident reference to the story in a court sermon in 1552 suggests that by then the dramas of the Italian Reformation were becoming part of English Protestant mythology: I know now that Judas had sinned against the Holy Ghost, also Nero, Pharaoh and one Franciscus Spira; which man had forsaken popery and done very boldly in God’s quarrel; at the length he was complained of … he contrary to that admonition of the Holy Ghost denied the word of God and so finally died in desperation.63 This world of settled Italianism, based on an intricate nexus of AngloItalian contacts, illuminates the questions with which this study

164 M. A. Overell

began. The Beneficio was passed to Courtenay in the Tower because the whole court was keen on reading and translating and this included Italian Protestant works. Humanist linguistic skills made possible the rapid work of translation. The old humanist habits of turning to Europe and especially to Italy for learned opinion had been transmuted and turned towards distinctly Protestant objectives. Several people could have brought in the book. We know that Giannetti, in particular, was given to lending the Beneficio, but the others, Castiglione, Bizzarri, Ubaldini, Vanni, Vermigli, Ochino, even Morison, Thomas or Hoby are all perfectly possible middlemen. They could all rely on an informed interest in Italian Reformation literature, because at court there were several very competent Italianists. The Italian strangers were specially revered for two reasons. They were associated with the home of Renaissance humanism and they were religious exiles from the pope’s own back garden. The evidence suggests that English translators were far more concerned to praise their courage than to examine their theology in detail. All the extrinsic evidence, of personnel, skills and enthusiasm, suggests that humanism was a crucial part of the process of the import and translation of the Beneficio. The court’s Italian interests involved people who were undoubtedly humanists and many of them were in that humanist vanguard, the ‘Cambridge Connection’. Furthermore, in this set-piece of the Italian Reformation, indelible humanist characteristics remained: the return to the ancient sources of Christian belief, a sense of history (fulfilled in Christ) and a concern for eloquence and rhetorical skills, all placed at the service of the crucial theological issues of the day. Humanists could not escape theology by burying their heads in the classics and most showed no wish to do so. Maria Dowling, Margo Todd and Patrick Collinson all note how Protestantism adapted to and adopted existing humanist cultural forms.64 Edward VI’s court and Courtenay in the Tower were making similar adaptations. The Beneficio was ‘a litle boke’ written ‘by a famous clerke in the Italionne’ and ‘it playnely settithe out’ Christ’s glory. As such, it needed translating. Courtenay, the translator, and Edward, the reader, were caught up in a cultural process which was both humanist and Protestant. * It would have been satisfying to end by recording that Courtenay’s Beneficio was published immediately and that he was given his

Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo 165

freedom. It was not so. Publication of the Beneficio was delayed until 1573 and even then it was not from Courtenay’s manuscript translation but from a French version.65 Far from continuing the Italianism of her brother’s reign, Elizabeth put up a definite resistance to plans to invite Vermigli back to England. In 1563, Ochino was pronounced a heretic by his fellow Protestants in Zurich and English opinion turned against him, albeit more slowly.66 Thereafter, the Italian exiles at Elizabeth’s court seem to have been mostly sidelined into safe secular occupations where they could not infect England with the heterodoxy and radicalism for which Italian Protestants were by then famous. Only the books cast a longer shadow, as literature usually does. The Beneficio had a sudden run of re-editions in the 1630s; John Milton raided Ochino for Paradise Lost; the Spiera story crops up in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and, much later, in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.67 These literary influences were the long-term results of a unique moment of real receptiveness between 1547 and 1553, based on a humanist English court, which was linguistically competent and well informed about the Reformation in Italy.

Notes 1

2

Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Cristo (Venice, 1543). The first edition appeared in the early months of 1543 and the second in the autumn of that year; see Marcantonio Flaminio, Apologia del Beneficio di Cristo e altri scritti inediti, ed. D. Marcatto (Florence, 1996), especially pp. 7, 21, 25. This and other sixteenth-century publications of the Beneficio in all European languages have been printed together in Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo, ed. S. Caponetto (Florence, 1972). The early circulation in manuscript form is emphasized by C. Ginzburg and A. Prosperi, ‘Le due redazioni del Beneficio di Cristo’, in Eresia e riforma nell’ Italia del Cinquecento (Florence, 1974), pp. 135–205. The estimated sale of 40,000 copies by 1549 is surely an exaggeration by the propagandist Pier Paolo Vergerio, but it seems true that the book was one of the best-sellers of its time and place: Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 443–4; U. Rozzo and S. Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, in The Reformation and the Book, ed. J.-F. Gilmont and trans. K. Maag (Aldershot and Brookfield, 1998), pp. 319–67, at pp. 332–4. See Jonathan Woolfson’s ‘Introduction’, above; J. Delumeau, Naissance et Affirmation de la Réforme (Paris, 1973), p. 74. For balanced accounts of both sides of the argument, see L. Spitz, ‘Humanism and the Protestant Reformation’, in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, ed. A. J. Rabil (Philadelphia, 1988), iii, pp. 383–5, and E. Cameron, ‘The Late Renaissance and the Unfolding Reformation in Europe’, in Humanism and Reform: The Church in Europe, England and Scotland 1400–1643: Essays in Honour of James Cameron, ed. J. Kirk (Oxford, 1991), pp. 15–36, at pp. 35–6.

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Woolfson, ‘Introduction’, above; A. Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, and ‘English Humanism and the Body Politic’, in A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 9–51; R. Rex, ‘The Role of Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’, in The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. N. S. Amos, A. Pettegree and H. van Nierop (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 19–40, at p. 29. For John Foxe’s blending of humanist assumptions with Protestant belief, see John King’s contribution to this volume. 4 Cambridge University Library, MS Nn. 4. 43, ‘A treatice most profitable of the benefitt that true christianes receyve by the dethe of Jesus Christ’, 1548, fols 1v–4v and 92r; Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 155–206; R. Prelowski, ‘The Beneficio di Cristo’, in Italian Reformation Studies in Honour of Laelius Socinus, ed. J. Tedeschi (Florence, 1965), pp. 37–42. 5 See, for instance, contemporary testimonies and depositions cited in Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 452–6. 6 For a lucid review of the controversy see P. McNair, ‘Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio and the “Beneficio di Cristo”: A Developing TwentiethCentury Debate’, Modern Language Review, LXXXII (1987) 614–24. 7 D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (London and New Haven, 1996), pp. 374, 480, 501. 8 ‘Caelio Secundo Curione’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1960–); R. H. Bainton, Bernardino Ochino (Florence, 1940); Bernardino Ochino, Seven Dialogues, ed. R. Belladonna (Toronto, 1988)–see pp. vii–xli for a modern introduction to Ochino’s life; P. McNair, Peter Martyr in Italy: An Anatomy of Apostasy (Oxford, 1967); F. James III, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination: The Augustinian Inheritance of an Italian Reformer (Oxford and New York, 1998); A. J. Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva, 1977), now in an unrevised Italian translation with a revised bibliography: Pier Paolo Vergerio e la riforma a Venezia (Rome, 1988); M. A. Overell, ‘Vergerio’s anti-Nicodemite Propaganda and England: 1547–1558’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, LII (2000) 296–318. 9 Pole’s most recent biographer suggests that he played a very prominent part in the ‘collective effort’ which lay behind the final publication of the Beneficio: T. F. Mayer, Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 120–1, and A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and his Manuscripts (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 4. Dermot Fenlon highlights Flaminio’s role: D. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 26, 90–100; see also P. Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole: eresia e santità nelle polemiche religiose del Cinquecento (Rome, 1977), p. 27; M. Firpo, Inquisizione romana e Controriforma: studi sul cardinal Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna, 1992), pp. 114–18; Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 454. 10 Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 74, 89–95; Mayer, Reginald Pole, pp. 116–18; T. F. Mayer, ‘When Maecenas was Broke: Cardinal Pole’s Spiritual Patronage’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVII (1996) 419–35, at pp. 426–7; B. Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford, 1985), pp. 206 and 244; C. Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio: Poet, Humanist and Reformer (London, 1985), pp. 123–4.

Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo 167 11 Estratto del processo di Pietro Carnesecchi, ed. G. Manzoni (Turin, 1870), pp. 202–3; Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 460; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 63. 12 Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 63, 131–6, 200–4; A. D. Wright, ‘The Significance of the Council of Trent’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXVI (1975) 353–62, at p. 355. On the style and language of the spirituali, ‘an unstable mix of poetry and piety’, see Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 123. 13 A. Olivieri, ‘Ricerche su Il Beneficio di Cristo’, Archivio Storico Italiano, CXLII (1984) 437–55, at pp. 438–9; Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, pp. 26–7; Woolfson, ‘Introduction’ above. 14 Quoted in Courtenay’s translation; for the Italian original see Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 163, lines 31–2. All extracts from the Beneficio are from Courtenay’s translation unless otherwise stated. 15 Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 165. 16 B. B. Wiffen, Life and Writings of Juan de Valdés … with a Translation from the Italian of his ‘One Hundred and Ten Considerations’, trans. J. Betts (London, 1865), p. 204; M. Firpo, ‘The Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés’, trans. J. Tedeschi, Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVII (1996) 353–64, at p. 356; M. Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali: studi su Juan de Valdés e il Valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del’500 (Florence, 1990), pp. 132–8. Valdés himself sometimes paraphrased Calvin: Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, pp. 165–7. 17 Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 169–70; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 79 and 91; T. Bozza, Introduzione al Beneficio di Cristo e all’Instituzione della religione cristiana di Calvino (Rome, 1963); Ginzburg and Prosperi, ‘Le due redazioni’, pp. 142–9. 18 See, for instance, Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 182–3; P. Matheson, Cardinal Contarini at Regensburg (Oxford, 1972), p. 179; S. Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, in The Reformation in National Context, ed. R. Scribner, R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 181–201, at p. 188; Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, pp. 358–9. 19 Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 182–3 for salvation by faith, pp. 196–205 for predestination. 20 The only classical references are conventional comparisons of the story of Christ to the histories of Caesar and Alexander: Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 179. For patristic references, see Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 172–6, 198, 204; Prelowski, ‘The Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 37–42, 93; Prelowski and Caponetto record all certain borrowings from the northern reformers in the footnotes to their editions. 21 Scipione Bianchini to Ludovico Beccadelli, 26 October 1543, cited by Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 74; Flaminio, Apologia, p. 25. 22 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Nn. 4. 43, fols 4v and 92r. 23 D. MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), pp. 26–8. 24 Literary Remains of Edward VI, ed. J. G. Nichols (London, 1857) i, pp. cccxx–cccxxv. 25 For the recent controversy on Foxe’s view of Edward as the ‘godly imp’ who was always listening to sermons, see J. Loach, Edward VI, ed. G. Bernard and P. Williams (London and New Haven, 1999), pp. 158, 180–9; and MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 23–38. Note also Maria Dowling’s comment that ‘In

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26 27 28

29

30

31

32

33

34

Edward … is seen the humanist education of a gentleman at its fullest extent’, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London, 1986), p. 214; Courtenay’s dedication is Cambridge University Library, MS Nn. 4. 43, fol. 3r. Wright, ‘Significance of Trent’, p. 354. Cambridge University Library, MS Nn. 4. 43, fols 1v–4v. J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965), p. 257; The Benefit of Christ’s Death, ed. C. Babington (London and Cambridge, 1855), pp. vi–vii. For Courtenay’s enigmatic correspondence after he was given his freedom, see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Reign of Mary I, ed. C. S. Knighton (London, 1998), passim. H. Durant, Sorrowful Captives (Pontypool, 1960), pp. 64–9; Beneficio, Cambridge University Library, Nn. 4. 43, fol. 3r. Knowledge of modern languages was widespread among gentlemen and other noble prisoners in the Tower had found solace in humanist books; see Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII, pp. 191–200, 205. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, ed. R. Lemon and M. A. Everett Green (London, 1872), p. 66; J. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford, 1822) iii, part 1, p. 550; Earl of Devon to the king, 21 May 1555: Knighton, Calendar of State Papers, p. 94, no. 174; K. Bartlett, ‘“The Misfortune that is wished for him”: The Exile and Death of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon’, Canadian Journal of History, XVI (1979) 1–28 and ‘The English Exile Community in Italy’, Albion, XIII (1981) 223–41, at pp. 235–7; Giacomo Soranzo to the Senate, 18 August 1554, Calendar of State Papers Relating to England in the Libraries of Venice and Northern Italy, ed. R. L. Brown (1864–97), v, p. 539. McConica, English Humanists, p. 258; A. Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies’, p. 11; R. Rex, ‘The New Learning’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XLIV (1993) 26–44, at pp. 26–7, 34; see also Woolfson, ‘Introduction’, above. Nichols, Literary Remains, i, pp. cccxx–cccxxv; L. V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford and London, 1963), p. 105. For Elizabeth’s autograph translation, see Bainton, Ochino, p. 90; ‘Memoires de la vie de François de Scepeaux, sire de Vieilleville’, in Collection complète de mémoires relatif a l’histoire de France, ed. C-B. Petitot (Paris, 1822), xxvi, pp. 339–341, cited in Loach, Edward VI, p. 13; John N. King ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’, in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, ed. M. Hannay (Kent, OH, 1985), pp. 43–60; and the same author’s contribution to this volume, below. McConica, English Humanists, passim; Fox, ‘English Humanism and the Body Politic’, pp. 34–51, at p. 35; John King, ‘John Foxe and Tudor Humanism’, below. LP, xvi, p. 483. In October 1548, John Yonge conveyed to Michael Throckmorton, Pole’s friend and agent, the Protector’s willingness to receive Throckmorton and Richard Hilliard, who was bringing letters from Pole as a private citizen. His letter suggests that Pole may have made soundings before that date: Calendar of State Papers, Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553, ed. C. S. Knighton (London, 1992), no. 160, p. 366; Mayer, Pole, pp. 163–5, 169–71 and 206–78; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 148. For humanists at Henry VIII’s and Edward’s courts, see Dowling, Humanism, pp. 140–50; Loach, Edward VI, pp. 144–9.

Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo 169 35 Flaminio, Apologia, p. 7; M. Firpo and D. Marcatto, eds, Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone (Rome, 1981–95), i, pp. 282–3 and vi, pp. 223, 236, 304, 425–7; A. Stella, ‘Guido da Fano eretico del secolo XVI al servizio dei re d’Inghilterra’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, XIII (1959) 196–238, at pp. 201, 207–8 and 209; Manzoni, Processo di Carnesecchi, pp. 510–11; Firpo, Inquisizione romana, pp. 170–1. 36 The ‘Lutheran’ group in Rome in the household of Pietro Antonio da Capua between 1541 and 1545 included Giannetti, who had brought in Protestant books from London and was thought to have the best stock available in Rome: A. Stella, Dall’anabattismo al socinianesimo nel Cinquecento veneto (Padua, 1967), p. 31, note 80; Firpo and Marcatto, Processo Morone, vi, p. 304; Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, p. 209. 37 Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 216–17; R. Biddle, A Memoir of Sebastian Cabot (London, 1831), and L. Sanuto, Geografia distinta in XII libri (Venice, 1588), cited by Nichols, Literary Remains, i, p. clxxxix. 38 LP, xiii, part 2, no. 598, p. 233; Giannetti had been granted the prebendary of Hyworth in Salisbury in 1533; Vanni became Dean of Salisbury in 1540, but gave it up in 1546; Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 200–3; H. Chapman, The Last Tudor King: A Study of Edward VI (London, 1961), p. 51. Vanni continued in his post under Mary, peddling the government line against Cranmer: MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, p. 597; but Nicodemism was common among ambassadors. It was Vanni who filed the first full report of Courtenay’s death in 1556. He may well have been involved with Courtenay’s assassins: Bartlett, ‘Misfortune’, 23–5; but his sympathies for Protestantism point in the opposite direction. For his Protestant links, see S. Adorni-Brocesi, ‘Una città infetta’: la repubblica di Lucca (Florence, 1994), pp. 56–7. 39 ‘Giovanni Battista Castiglione’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani; K. Bartlett, The English in Italy: 1525–1558: A Study in Culture and Politics (Geneva, 1991), pp. 91–5. 40 Peter of Perugia [Pietro Bizzarri] to Bullinger, 10 February 1550: Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, ed. H. Robinson (Cambridge, 1846–47), i, p. 338; M. Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri esule italiano del Cinquecento (Turin, 1971), pp. 23–5, 241–5; N. Barker, ‘The Perils of Publishing in the Sixteenth Century: Pietro Bizarri and William Parry’, in England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge, 1990), ed. E. Chaney and P. Mack, pp. 125–41; T. Baker, History of St John’s College Cambridge, ed. J. E. B. Mayor (Cambridge, 1869), i, p. 285; Writings of John Bradford: Letters, Treatises and Remains, ed. A. Townsend (Cambridge, 1853), pp. 353–4. Bizzarri believed, along with others, that Courtenay’s premature death was not a natural one: see Firpo, Bizzarri, p. 35. I am very grateful to Dr C. S. Knighton for his generous help on this and many other points relating to Courtenay’s correspondence and connections. 41 Ubaldini’s Relazione d’Inghilterra is printed in G. Pellegrini, Petruccio Ubaldini: un Fiorentino alla corte d’Inghilterra nel Cinquecento (Turin, 1967), pp. 57–152; Loach, Edward VI, p. 139. 42 J. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 103–20, 136–9. 43 J. Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (Oxford, 1821), pp. 9–10, 20; W. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559

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44

45

46

47 48

(Durham, 1980), p. 54; M. K. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke: Tudor Humanist, Educator and Religious Reformer’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CXIX (1975) 233–50. [Anne Cooke, Lady Bacon, trans.], Sermons five of Bernardine of Siena (London, 1548; STC, 18,764); [Bernardino Ochino], Fourteen Sermons concerning the predestination and election of God, trans. Anne Cooke, Lady Bacon (London, 1551; STC, 18,767). For Sir Anthony Cooke’s humanist daughters, see R. Warnicke, ‘Women and Humanism in England’, in Rabil, Renaissance Humanism, ii, pp. 39–55, at p. 46; and M. E. Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes towards Learned Women in the Renaissance’, in Hannay, Silent but for the Word, pp. 107–25. [Berdardino Ochino], The Tragedy or Dialogue of the Unjust, Usurped Primacy of the Bishop of Rome, trans. J. Ponet (London, 1549; STC, 18,770 and 18,771). For Edward’s likely use of this work, see MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 27–9. For Ochino’s writing on the rebellions, P. McNair, ‘Ochino on Sedition’, Italian Studies XIV and XV (1959–60) 36–49; P. McNair, ‘Bernardino Ochino in Inghilterra’, Rivista storica italiana, CIII (1991) 231–42; P. McNair, ‘Ochino’s Apology: Three Gods or Three Wives’, History, LX (1975) 353–73; Ochino, Seven Dialogues, ed. Belladonna, pp. xviii–xxi; W. Hudson, John Ponet (Chicago, 1942), p. 28; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 452–4; N. Pococke, ‘Preparations for the Second Prayer Book’, Church Quarterly Review, XXXVII (1893–94) 137–66. Ponet was arrested briefly in November 1549, probably because the translation of the Dialogue of the Unjust Primacy was dedicated to Somerset and contained flattering comments to him (MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, p. 452). Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, p. 30; J. F. McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XLVIII (1997) 100–20; Strype, Cheke, p. 23; Caelio Secundo Curione, Selectarum epistolarum, libri ii (Basel, 1553) i, p. 287; Caelio Horatio Curione, De amplitudine misericordiae dei (Basel, 1550); Nichols, Literary Remains, i, cccxxx; R. Chavasse, ‘Humanism in Exile: Caelio Secondo Curione’s Learned Women Friends and Exempla for Elizabeth I’, Parergon, XIV (1996) 165–86. For Castellio’s dedication of his Latin biblical translation to Edward VI and his praise of Cheke, see MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, p. 174. For Cheke’s links with Vermigli, see Cheke to Peter Martyr, 10 March 1551, in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Mm. 5. 41, no.12, cited by K. Bartlett, ‘The Strangeness of Strangers’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, I (1980) 46–63, at pp. 52–3; Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, pp. 121, 221–2. Cardano was alone among these exiles in not being involved with Protestantism; see J. Cardan, The Book of my Life, trans. J. Stoner (London and Toronto, 1931), pp. 63 and 79. G. B. Parks, ‘The First Italianate Englishmen’, Studies in the Renaissance, VIII (1961) 197–216, at pp. 201–2; Ryan, Ascham, pp. 114 and 151–2. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, pp. 35, 66–70, 125–6; Emperor to Scheyve, 3 September 1551, Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers Relating to the Negotiotiations between England and Spain Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere (London, 1862–1919): 1550–2, pp. 349–52; Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, of the Reign of Edward VI, ed. W. B. Turnbull (London,

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49 50

51

52

53 54

55

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1861), p. 216 (Richard Morison to William Cecil, 13 July 1552); Ryan, Ascham, pp. 133–5; W. G. Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, MA, 1948), pp. 239–40; T. F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Common Weal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 195, 198; T. Hoby, A Book of the Travail and Life of me, Thomas Hoby, ed. E. Powell (London, 1902), pp. 36–7, cited by Bartlett, ‘Strangeness’, p. 57. Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J. E. Cox (Cambridge, 1846), pp. 330–2. Babington, Benefit of Christ’s Death, Introduction, p. lv; M. Dowling, ‘Cranmer as Humanist Reformer’, in Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar, ed. P. Ayris and D. Selwyn (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1993), pp. 89–114, at pp. 101–2; D. Selwyn, ‘Cranmer’s Library: Its Potential for Reformation Studies,’ in Ayris and Selwyn, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 39–72. Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings, ii, pp. 422–3; A. Santuosso, ‘Religious Orthodoxy, Dissent and Suppression in Venice in the 1540s’, Church History, XLII (1973) 476–85, at p. 480; A. Santuosso, ‘The Moderate Inquisitor: Giovanni della Casa’s Venetian Nunciature, 1544–1549’, Studi Veneziani, XX (1978) 119–210, at pp. 171–2; C. Bradshaw, ‘David or Josiah? Old Testament Kings as Exemplars in Edwardian Religious Polemic’, in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. B. Gordon (Brookfield, VT, 1996), ii, pp. 77–91, at p. 89. P. McNair, ‘Peter Martyr in England’, in Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, ed. J. McLelland (Waterloo, 1980), pp. 85–105; M. A. Overell, ‘Peter Martyr in England 1547–1553: An Alternative View’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XV (1984) 87–104; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 380–3, 435–7; D. Bertrand-Barrand, Les Idées Philosophiques de Bernardin Ochin de Sienne (Paris, 1924); P. McNair, ‘Ochino on Sedition’, pp. 39 and 43; McNair ‘New Light on Ochino’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance: Travaux et Documents, XXXV (1973) 289–300, at p. 299; McNair, ‘Bernardino Ochino in Inghilterra’, Rivista storica italiana, CIII (1991) 231–42; M. A. Overell, ‘Bernardino Ochino’s Books and English Religious Opinion: 1547–1580’, in The Church and the Book, ed. R. N. Swanson, forthcoming. N. Nichols, ‘The Bill of Expenses Attending the Journey of Peter Martyr and Bernardino Ochinus’, Archeologia, XXI (1827), item 28, 469–73. The evidence for Ochino’s early appointment has been found by Paul Ayris in Bishop Bonner’s Register: London, Guildhall Library MS 9531/12, pt1, fol. 117v (cited by MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, p. 79); Robinson, Original Letters, i, p. 353, Dryander to Bullinger, 3 December 1549; Fourteen Sermons, Anne Cooke’s Dedication; Bradford to Bullinger, probably early 1550 in Townsend, Writings of John Bradford, pp. 353–4. Ochino’s memories of conversations with Elizabeth are recorded in his dedication to her of his Laberinti, hoc est libero aut servo arbitrio (Basle, 1561): ‘I remember your Majesty having read some of my sermons on predestination and asking me about doubts on that subject’ (my translation); Calendar of Letters at Simancas: 1547–49, p. 266. Tremelli, who was Jewish, had become a convert of Pole’s in 1540: Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 72, n. 8; Simoncelli, Pole, pp. 78–9; F. C. Church, I riformatori italiani (Milan, 1967) i, pp. 281–2; P. P. Vergerio, Copia di una lettera a iiii di gennaio 1550, n.p, n.d., and Al serenissimo Re d’inghilterra

172 M. A. Overell

57 58

59

60 61

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Eduardo Sesto (n.p.,1550), cited by Simoncelli, Pole, pp. 78–9; Vermigli to Bullinger October 1551, Robinson, Original Letters, ii, pp. 499–500. Vermigli’s sermons on rebellion survive in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; see McNair, ‘Ochino on Sedition’, p. 37. Robinson, Original Letters, ii, p. 485, Vermigli to Rudolph Gualter, Oxford, 1 June 1550; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 416, 468–9, 501. On Vermigli as ‘a case study in the interaction between humanism and scholasticism’, see J. C. McLelland, ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli: Scholastic or Humanist?’, in Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, ed . J. C. McLelland (Waterloo, Ontario, 1980), p. 141. Vermigli, Tractatio de sacramento eucharistiae (STC, 24,673); MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 462–9; J. C. McLelland, The Visible Words of God: An Exposition of the Sacramental Theology of Peter Martyr (Edinburgh, 1957); Overell, ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli’, p. 93; M. Anderson, ‘Rhetoric and Reality: Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XIX (1988) 451–69; A. Beesley, ‘An Unpublished Source of the Book of Common Prayer: Peter Martyr Vermigli’s “Adhortatio an Coenam Domini Mysticam”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XIX (1968) 83–8. J. P. Donnelly, SJ, argues that Article XVII on Predestination is very similar to Vermigli’s definition in his Commentary on Romans, based on lectures he gave at Oxford in Edward’s reign, but not published in England until 1568; see Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden, 1976), p. 176. For Vermigli’s influence on the reform of the Ecclesiatical Laws, see ibid., pp. 178–9; J. Spalding ‘“The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum” and the Furthering of Discipline in England’, Church History, XXXIX (1970) 162–71; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, p. 501; James Pilkington’s ‘Homily on Drunkenness and Gluttony’ includes parts of Vermigli’s Commentary on Judges, published in Zurich in 1561 and in London in 1564; compare STC, 13,651 with STC, 24,670. A. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth Century London (Oxford, 1986), p. 72. Ochino, STC, 18,764; 18,765; 18,766; 18,767; 18,770; 18,771; Vermigli, STC, 24,665, 24,666. Works of the Reformation period are relatively sparse in the Archbishop’s library but Cranmer did possess a controversial work of Ambrosio Catarino, an opponent of Italian reformers, D. Selwyn, The Library of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1996), pp. lxxxvi–xcii and number 260. Although the library contained three works in Italian, none of them has direct relevance to the Italian Reformation, see nos 359, 382 and 599; Nichols, Literary Remains of Edward VI, pp. cccxxv–cccxxxiii. The Duke of Northumberland also owned a copy of Ochino’s Unjust Primacy: see MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 53, 230; W. Thomas, The History of Italy (London, 1549), STC, 24,018; W. Thomas, Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar (London, 1550), STC, 24,020; E. R. Adair, ‘William Thomas: A Forgotten Clerk to the Privy Council’, in Tudor Studies, presented to A. F. Pollard, ed. R. W. Seton-Watson (London, 1924); Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, pp. 125–6. A Notable and Marvailous Epistle, trans. E. A. [Edward Aglionby] (Worcester, 1550); M. A. Overell, ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVI (1995) 619–37, at p. 626; M. A. Overell, ‘The

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63 64

65

66

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Reformation of Death in Italy and England: circa 1550’, Renaissance and Reformation, XXIII (1999) 5–21. H. Latimer, Works, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, 1844–45), i, 425; Overell, ‘Spiera’, p. 633. M. Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 53–95, 260; P. Collinson, Godly People: Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 138–41. For ‘the continued centrality of religion’ in later Tudor culture, see D. K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1990), p. 251. The Benefit that Christians receive by Jesus Christ Crucified (1573; STC, 19,114); M. A.Overell, ‘Arthur Golding’s Translation of the “Beneficio di Cristo”’, Notes and Queries, XXV (1978) 424–6. A half-hearted invitation to Vermigli was sent and refused: Overell, ‘Peter Martyr’, pp. 103–4; K. Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, trans. H. Zimmern (London, 1876), pp. 279–81; M. A. Overell, ‘Bernardino Ochino’s Books and English Religious Opinion’, forthcoming. See A. dalla Paglia [erroneous attribution], The Benefit of Christ’s Death or the Glorious Riches of God’s Free Grace (London, 1631) and further editions of the same in 1633 and 1638: STC, 19,116.5; 19,117; 19,118; Cristopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources, ed. V. Thomas and W. Tydeman (London, 1994), pp. 177, 180–1, 242; L. A. Wood, The Form and Origin of Milton’s Anti-Trinitarian Conception (London, Ontario, 1911); S. Richardson, Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady (London, 1965–7), ii, pp. 256, 262, letter no. 74, Clarissa to Miss Harlowe.

8 John Foxe and Tudor Humanism John N. King

Few readers associate John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days with Tudor humanism.1 Known from the beginning as the Book of Martyrs, it is the largest and most sophisticated printing venture of sixteenth-century England. The most memorable parts of this history of the Christian Church are scores of impassioned Protestant martyrologies that date from the reign of Mary I (1553–58). Based upon the revival of classical learning and closely associated with the views of Desiderius Erasmus, humanistic ideals may seem antithetical to Foxe’s heterogeneous collection of ecclesiastical documents and tales of persecution, imprisonment, torture and execution. Examination of Foxe’s versatile career demonstrates, on the contrary, that he is a Renaissance man equally comfortable in the world of Greek and Latin scholarship and Reformation polemics.2 His drive to return ad fontes in the accurate transcription of documents, regardless of whether he approves of their contents, is in the tradition of humanist historiography. Aside from Foxe’s translations of writings by German Lutherans, he devoted his scholarly career to Latin scholarship until he reluctantly turned to the vernacular in the Book of Martyrs. Alluding to Homer, Plutarch, Eusebius of Caesarea and St Jerome, a Latin dedication entitled ‘Ad doctum Lectorem’ explains Foxe’s use of the vernacular to the learned reader. A dedication to Queen Elizabeth that appears in the 1570 and later editions further acknowledges that his history, ‘being written in the popular tongue, serveth not so greatly for your own peculiar reading, nor for such as be learned’. None the less, he follows the precedent of Erasmus in begging indulgence for his attempt to instruct those who are literate only in English: ‘And, though they be but simple and unlearned, yet not unapt to be taught if they were applied.’3 He did not abandon Latin, however, in a collection filled 174

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with Latin documents and Greek tags that supplement martyrologies in the vernacular. Foxe’s advocacy of humanism in the encyclopaedic array of texts in the four, ever-expanding editions of the Book of Martyrs that he oversaw before his death (1563–83) rests upon his contrast between the alleged barbarity of scholasticism and the intellectual freedom of humanism, as epitomized by figures such as Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla and John Colet. Simplifying the complexity of the era before Henry VIII’s schism from the Church of Rome, when humanism informed the thought of both moderate reformers and conservative ecclesiastics, Foxe subscribes to the anachronistic opposition between humanism and scholasticism. He thus misrepresents the eclecticism of figures such as Thomas Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner, who denied a radical break with scholasticism prior to the 1530s.4 Attacks on scholasticism served humanists as a convenient means for accusing their predecessors of intellectual pettiness and methodological folly. In line with the principle of returning ad fontes, to the earliest sources in their original languages, Foxe advocates abandonment of scholasticism in favour of a return to patristic theology and earlier Christian sources. In so doing, he recalls scoffing allegations in Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man that logic-chopping schoolmen are nothing more than ‘sophisters with their anagogical and chopological sense’.5 Mocking the speculations of scholastic logicians as a nonscriptural tradition remote from human experience, Foxe praises humanists who rebelled against medieval learning. They include Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, Petrarch, and Erasmus, who furnished with the help of good letters … [sustained] the cause and defence of learning against barbarity; of verity against error; of true religion against superstition… . By their learned writings and laborious travail, they had opened a window of light unto the world.6 Not only does the Book of Martyrs not display searching familiarity with writings by these humanists, but Foxe’s opinion that such figures espoused proto-Protestant ideals is hardly original. Translated by Lady Bacon, John Jewel’s official exposition of Elizabethan church polity, Apologia ecclesiæ anglicanæ (1562), praises the following scholars, who ‘at no time departed from the Catholic faith’, for attacking the ‘tyranny of the Bishops of Rome and their barbarous Persian-like pride’: Lorenzo Valla, Marsiglio of Padua, and Francesco Petrarch.7 In his Defence (1567) of the Apology of the Church of England, Bishop Jewel

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adds Dante and Boccaccio to his pantheon of pre-Reformation Christians who opposed the papacy. The likely source for both Jewel and Foxe is a collection of antipapal extracts compiled by Matthias Flacius Illyricus: Catalogus testium veritatis, que anti nostram ætatem reclamarunt Papæ (Basel, 1556; Strasbourg, 1562).8 We know that Foxe was familiar with the Catalogus, because he served as a proof-reader when the book went through the presses at the Basel printing house of Johannes Oporinus. Born in Istria, Flacius was Professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg University before migrating to Magdeburg during the Augsburg Interim. His Ecclesiastica Historia (Basel, 1561–74), the first comprehensive Protestant ecclesiastical history of the Church better known as the Magdeburg Centuries, supplied an important model for Foxe’s expansion of the second edition of the Book of Martyrs (1570) into a history of the Church since early Christian times.9 It should come as no surprise, then, to find that the dedication of the 1563 Book of Martyrs alludes to Lorenzo Valla’s famous application of humanistic methodology when he exploded the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine on the grounds that the crudity of its Latin marked it as a medieval forgery. Foxe assumes that apostolic succession runs not through an unbroken line of Roman pontiffs descended from St Peter, but in a spiritual descent to Queen Elizabeth as a ‘godly’ monarch. Declaring that the Virgin Queen plays the role of a second Constantine, who conferred legitimacy upon the Christian Church at the same time that he exercised imperial authority by convoking ecclesiastical councils at Arles and Nicaea, Foxe assumes the guise of a new Eusebius, the fourth-century ecclesiastical historian whose martyrologies afford models for saintly lives in the Book of Martyrs. In the 1570 revision of the Acts and Monuments, a new dedication praises peace and clemency attributed to Queen Elizabeth as a new Solomon, the king of Israel and Judah, renowned for great wisdom. Attacking critics of the 1563 edition as ‘Catholic Phormians [who] think now to dash out all good books’, Foxe alludes to the old comedy of the classical world in making light of detractors for falsifying evidence in the manner of Phormio, ‘who, being in all the fault himself, began first to quarrel with Demipho, when Demipho rather had good right to lay Phormio by the heels’. Alleging the fraudulence of ‘feigned fables, lying miracles, [and] false visions’ of Roman Catholic tradition, Foxe defends the truthfulness of his martyrologies with the complaint that one may discover ‘almost no true tale in all their saints’ lives’.10

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Citing patristic authority, he returns ad fontes by emulating the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, which concentrates on the interrogation, torture and suffering of faithful witnesses rather than upon the working of miracles. Flacius’ Magdeburg Centuries supplies a model for Eusebian church history. By contrast, pre-Reformation hagiographies catalogue ecstatic visions, prophecies, miracles, healing and magical feats as essential components of sainthood. Foxe’s vernacular address on ‘The Utility of this [Hi]story’ further likens the Book of Martyrs to the patristic project of constructing sacred alternatives to profane texts of classical antiquity. Likening his collection to the ‘learned hymns and songs of Prudentius and Nazianzen’ and the ‘learned orations of eloquent Cyprian, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Jerome’, Foxe claims that the ‘unspeakable fortitude’ of Christian martyrs constitutes a higher form of heroism ‘more worthy than an hundred Alexanders, Hectors, Scipios, and warlike Juliuses’.11 Foxe’s discipleship of Erasmus affords support for James McConica’s claim that the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations originated in ideals and actions of English humanists inspired by Erasmus.12 Although the McConica thesis has influenced many works of scholarship,13 the degree of Erasmian influence on Tudor religious and governmental policy is still subject to lively dispute.14 One scholar responds that McConica and others have posited mythic harmony and consensus among early Tudor humanists. Although Erasmus’ Novum Testamentum, his landmark edition of the Greek New Testament (1516), inspired new forms of spirituality, important English humanists resisted the political side of Erasmian thought. It seems that the humanist circle patronized by Thomas Cromwell exerted a more powerful influence upon late Henrician and Edwardian public policy.15 Claiming that McConica has exaggerated both the influence and the erudition of Catherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII, another scholar questions whether English evangelicals identified with Erasmian humanism and whether it exerted a major influence upon thinking within courtly circles. She observes that McConica’s claims concerning consensus among Henrician Protestants find their origin, to a not inconsiderable degree, in John Foxe.16 Praise of Erasmus is central to Foxe’s account of the reign of Edward VI, which he regards as the high water mark of the English Reformation, a halcyon interval prior to Queen Mary’s persecution of Protestants. The Book of Martyrs commends the product of Erasmus’ textual scholarship most visible in late sixteenth-century England, his Paraphrases on the New Testament. The government of Protector

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Somerset, who ruled at the outset of his nephew’s reign as a minor, subscribed formally to the Erasmian ideal of educating the laity in the Bible through preaching and individual study when it ordered clerics to employ this text as a study guide and commanded ‘that the Paraphrases of Erasmus in English should be set up in some convenient place in every parish church of this realm, whereas the parishioners may most commodiously resort to read the same’.17 Edited by Miles Coverdale, the second volume (16 August 1549) takes on a stridently polemical tenor through inclusion of Tyndale’s prologue to Romans and Leo Jud’s violently antipapal commentary on the Book of Revelation. Erasmus himself refused to comment on Revelation because of suspicion that it lacked canonical authority.18 Documents gathered by Foxe go into considerable detail concerning the opposition to Erasmus’ Paraphrases of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who opposed lay reading of the English Bible. In a remarkable stream of letters addressed to Protector Somerset from Fleet Prison, Gardiner enumerates ‘great faults’ attributable not only to Erasmus, but to wilful mistranslation: ‘I may term that book at one word, abomination, both for the malice and untruth of much matter out of Erasmus’ pen, and also the arrogant ignorance of the translator into English.’19 Rebutting Gardiner’s arguments,20 Foxe demonizes the bishop as a bloodthirsty opponent of humanism who suffered imprisonment under Edward VI for his resistance to Protestant reforms in general, and to Erasmus’ Paraphrases in particular: So is he to be reckoned amongst ignorant and gross divines, proud prelates, and bloody persecutors, as both by his cruel life and pharisaic doctrine … and also in crying out of the Paraphrase … [which he] maketh thereof heresy and abomination.21 It is important to recall that Gardiner, during his education in canon law, was himself exposed to humanistic innovations at Cambridge University. Prior to Henry VIII’s schism from Rome, he and many contemporaries perceived no necessary conflict between scholasticism and humanism.22 Continuing his attack on the Paraphrases on the New Testament, one of Bishop Gardiner’s letters reflects on how he has changed his mind concerning the Erasmianism that he once supported: ‘I have favoured Erasmus’ name as much as any other, but I never studied over this book till now, and now I agree with them that said, “Erasmus laid the eggs, and Luther hatched them”.’23 The bishop quotes a colourful charge attributed by Erasmus to Franciscan friars at Cologne.24

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One may wonder why the Book of Martyrs is so favourable to Erasmus, because Luther’s critique of him, and the controversy that they became embroiled in during the 1520s, would have enabled Foxe to construct the Dutch humanist as an opponent of the Reformation. The book’s silence concerning Erasmus’ controversy with Luther on freedom of the will constitutes a significant absence. Harmonization of discordant views held by Erasmus and Luther is compatible with Foxe’s irenicism, his belief in religious toleration, and his yearning to portray unity among evangelical reformers critical of the papacy.25 The issue of Erasmus’ responsibility for the Protestant Reformation represents a vexed question. On the one hand, Erasmus and Luther shared hostility to scholasticism and rejected substitution of formalistic practices for internalized devotion to Christ. On the other hand, Erasmus questioned many Lutheran positions, notably the German reformer’s willingness to engage in dissension and denial of freedom of the will. None the less, the scholar defended Luther’s right to articulate his critique of the papacy and believed that it might stand up over time.26 Unlike Erasmus himself, Foxe entertains no doubt about whether Luther hatched Erasmian eggs. Attributing the origins of the Protestant Reformation to Erasmus and humanistic predecessors such as Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, and Petrarch, the Book of Martyrs declares that they had somewhat broken the way before and had shaken the monks’ houses. But Luther gave the stroke and plucked down the foundation and all by opening one vein long hid before, wherein lieth the touchstone of all truth and doctrine, as the only principal origin of our salvation, which is our free justifying by faith only, in Christ the Son of God.27 Of the German reformer’s return ad fontes to Greek and Hebrew sources, a marginal gloss states: ‘Erasmus openeth the way before Luther.’28 Citing Chrysostom as the source for the trope of the good physician, Foxe lodges this charge concerning the papal claim to temporal supremacy: True it is that the sickness hath begun in the head, that is, at the very triple crown: and therefore the sickness … having need of a sharp physician, God hath sent Luther unto the pope (as Erasmus writeth of him) as a meet physician to cure his disease; yet he refuseth to be healed.29

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Like Thomas More, Erasmus could turn virtually any statement into a jest. The Book of Martyrs may not contain too many amusing stories, but Foxe does recount an anecdote about a judgement on Luther solicited by Frederic the Wise, Elector of Saxony. Its facetiousness is in keeping with the satirical spirit and paradoxical irony of Erasmus’ Colloquies and The Praise of Folly: Erasmus, thus being entreated of the duke, began thus jestingly and merrily to answer the duke’s request, saying that in Luther were two great faults: first, that he would touch the bellies of monks; and second, that he would touch the pope’s crown, which two matters in no case are to be dealt withal. Then opening his mind plainly to the duke, thus he said that Luther did dwell in detecting errors and that reformation was to be wished and very necessary in the church, and added, moreover, that the effect of his doctrine was true, but only that he wished in him a more temperate moderation and manner of writing and handling.30 Foxe’s handling of Erasmus, concerning whom he cities only occasional and anecdotal evidence, differs radically from that of Luther. The Book of Martyrs acknowledges Luther’s centrality as the initiator of the Protestant Reformation in a densely documented ‘History of Doctor Martin Luther, with His Life and Doctrine Described’.31 Based upon Melanchthon and other German Lutheran sources, the detailed narrative concludes by heroizing Luther as a latter-day saint who, avoiding the ‘holy’ deeds of medieval hagiography, functioned as an agent of divine providence: what a miracle might this seem to be, for one man, and a poor friar, creeping out of a blind cloister, to be set up against the pope, the universal bishop, and God’s mighty vicar on earth; to withstand all his cardinals; yea, and to sustain the malice and hatred of almost the whole world being set against him… . Which miraculous work of God, I account nothing inferior to the miracle of David overthrowing the great Goliath. Wherefore if miracles do make a saint (after the pope’s definition), what lacketh in Martin Luther, but age and time only to make him a saint?32 Foxe was not uncritical of Luther, but he articulates fundamental concurrence with the German reformer’s views for the sake of evangelical unity. In dedicating his translation of Luther’s Fruitful Sermon of the

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Most Evangelical Writer M. Luther, Made of the Angels (1548?) to a friend, Foxe declares that Luther’s books are ‘very expedient and also necessary in Christ’s church’ at the same time that he takes issue with specific points of Lutheran theology: ‘I will not say this author in all points to stand upright and absolutely, as in the sacraments, but what humane writer hath there ever been but some default he hath left behind him.’ Foxe’s dedication to Henry Bull’s translation of Luther’s Commentary upon the Fifteen Psalms of Degrees (1577) affords the martyrologist’s final comment on the ‘heavenly instruction and edification’ of Luther, who, ‘though thou hadst no other expositor upon the holy Scripture, thou mayest have almost sufficient to make a perfect soldier against all the fiery darts of the tempting enemy’, that is, the Devil. In praising Erasmus, Foxe places great stress upon compatibility between his application of humanistic methodology to New Testament scholarship, on the one hand, and the Lutheran principle of sola scriptura, on the other. Undergoing mediation through Luther’s translation, Erasmus’ Novum Testamentum afforded the basis for Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. Also important was Erasmus’ Latin New Testament, according to Foxe’s martyrologies of Richard Bayfield and Thomas Garret. Designed to replace the Vulgate version, that annotated text supplied early English Protestants with a companion to Tyndale’s translation and theological tracts.33 It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that humanistic principles permeate the life of William Tyndale in the Book of Martyrs, despite the Bible translator’s conflicted relationship to humanism. Although Tyndale pays homage to Erasmus’ intellectual influence, which endorses Latin and Greek scholarship in addition to translation of the Bible into the vernacular, he was at odds with the conservative theological views and opposition to vernacular translation espoused by notable members of Erasmus’ circle, Sir Thomas More and Cuthbert Tunstall.34 Exemplifying Foxe’s construction of narratives out of diverse written documents, the Tyndale martyrology combines at least seven manuscript witnesses, which are no longer extant, with autobiographical comments in Tyndale’s pamphlets and Bible prefaces.35 Artfully shaped by Foxe, the narrative constitutes the first biography of Tyndale, a composite text that constitutes the fundamental source for the translator’s life to the present day. The centrality of the Tyndale martyrology in the Book of Martyrs constitutes an endorsement of humanistic principles that permeated the translator’s career. During his Oxford years, Tyndale dedicated himself to study of the liberal arts, notably languages, and instructed fellow

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students in ‘the knowledge of the Scriptures’. When he accepted appointment as tutor in the household of Sir John Walsh and his wife, Lady Anne, of Little Sodbury, Gloucester, Tyndale would join them at dinner, ‘sitting at the same table, [where he] did use many times to enter communication, and talk of learned men, as of Luther and of Erasmus’.36 Indeed, Foxe reports that he translated Enchiridion militis Christiani, the most important of Erasmus’ works of lay religious instruction, as a manuscript gift for his patrons. Foxe implies that Tyndale’s humanistic gift, which lodges an appeal for lay piety based on Bible study rather than formalistic devotional observances, turned the Walshes against ignorant and superstitious clerics who dined at their table.37 In 1522 the time came for Tyndale to depart for London to pursue translation of the Bible into English, a project that Foxe defines in Erasmian terms: ‘This good man was moved (and no doubt stirred up by God) to translate the Scripture into his mother tongue, for the public utility and profit of the simple vulgar people of his country.’38 Prior to departure from Gloucestershire, he uttered highly dramatic words to a local divine with a reputation for learning: ‘“I defy the pope and all his laws”; and further added that if God spare him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough, to know more of the Scripture than he [the cleric] did.’39 At this distance, it is impossible to determine whether Tyndale actually uttered those words, or whether they were added by Foxe or his source for the Gloucestershire years. Verification of those words would have little impact on our understanding of a narrative that recounts the career of a humanistic disciple who paraphrases words from the introduction to Erasmus’ Novum Testamentum. Erasmus’ text lives up to the meaning of its Greek title, Paraclesis, that is, ‘exhortation’, by declaiming strenuously in favour of lay instruction in the vernacular Bible: I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles… . Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at the plough, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveller lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind!40 Tyndale’s ploughboy is a descendant not only of Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s ploughman, but of Erasmus’ earnestly literate farmer. The tale enshrines the Erasmian ideal that humble readers could comprehend the Bible without intercession from clerical mediators.

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Moving to London in search of a high-ranking patron for his translation of the New Testament from Greek into English, Tyndale recalled Erasmus’ commendation of the erudition of Cuthbert Tunstall, who had assisted the Dutch scholar in producing the Latin translation of his Greek New Testament. Making his overture to the Bishop of London in the bookish manner of the learned humanist who had converted the master and mistress of Little Sodbury with a manuscript translation, Tyndale demonstrated virtuosity in the study of classical Greek with a gift copy of his own translation of an unusually difficult text, an oration by Isocrates. Although we cannot be sure which oration Tyndale translated, we do know that his manuscript attested to the humble scholar’s mastery of classical learning, to his having continued his studies since leaving Oxford University and to his knowledge of a rhetorical model for clarity in prose style.41 His offering failed to win patronage from Bishop Tunstall, who differed from Erasmus on the issue of vernacularity. The cleric rebuffed the translator with the reply ‘that his house was full’.42 Tyndale’s writings appear on an index of books prohibited under Queen Mary. This proclamation corresponds to the widespread currency of Foxe’s conviction that humanistic rebellion against scholasticism prepared the way for Erasmus’ biblical scholarship and for Luther’s recovery of the seeds of the Protestant Reformation from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The proclamation of 13 June 1555 ‘for the restraining of all books and writings tending against the doctrine of the pope and his Church’ leaves no doubt about whether the government of Mary Tudor concurs with Stephen Gardiner’s opinion that Erasmus laid the eggs that Luther hatched. Quoted in its entirety in the Book of Martyrs, this order ‘concerning the repressing of heresies’ rendered it a capital offence to own or read books written by Erasmus, Luther, Tyndale and many others.43 It represents a considerable departure from Mary’s willingness, as a princess who held fast to her Catholicism under Edward VI, to lend her prestige to publication of the English version of Erasmus’ Paraphrases by contributing a translation of the Gospel of John. Condemnations of some Erasmian texts date back to the 1520s, but the Marian proclamation predates both the blanket condemnation of Erasmus’ books in the Index librorum Prohibitorum promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1559 and the Tridentine decree, which banned six texts by Erasmus but allowed for publication of expurgated editions of the remainder of his writings.44 Although Foxe’s construction of the Book of Martyrs post-dates the Marian proclamation, it does attest to his fervent belief that the burning of books could not impede pursuit of humanistic scholarship

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as a foundation for ecclesiastical history. Even though few readers have identified the Book of Martyrs with Tudor humanism, the text’s polemicism is compatible with the derivation of its historiographical method from both non-Christian and patristic texts of ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed to a considerable degree, Foxe’s drive to return ad fontes is grounded upon humanistic textual scholarship and historiography.

Notes 1 In a form that is revised and expanded, this essay incorporates some of the findings presented in my ‘Religious Dissidence in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Humanism or Heresy?’ Religion and Literature, XXXII (2000) 141–56. Unless otherwise noted, citations are to the 1583 edition of Acts and Monuments, the final version overseen by Foxe prior to his death. Acts and Monuments (1563) refers to the first edition. Citations to signatures in these editions are accompanied by references to page and column numbers in brackets in the same texts, and to Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs, ed. S. R. Cattley, 2nd edn (London, 1843–49); hereafter cited as Acts and Monuments (1843). I include reference to the nineteenth-century edition, despite its many inaccuracies, because a facsimile reprint of it (New York, 1965) represents the most readily accessible version of Acts and Monuments. The abbreviation sig. is omitted from signature references. All texts undergo modernization, and contractions are expanded. I am grateful to Christopher Manion for valuable assistance in preparing this essay for publication. I gratefully acknowledge support for research provided by the Department of English, College of Humanities, and Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The Ohio State University. 2 See P. Collinson, ‘Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography’, in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. D. R. Kelley and D. H. Sacks (Cambridge, 1997), p. 66. 3 *1r; Acts and Monuments (1843), i, p. viii. 4 D. MacCulloch, ‘Two Dons in Politics: Thomas Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner, 1503–33’, The Historical Journal, XXVII (1994) 4–17. 5 W. Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. H. Walter (Cambridge, 1848), p. 307. 6 DDd5r (p. 841.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, p. 253. 7 J. Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England, ed. J. E. Booty (Charlottesville, 1963), pp. 74–5. 8 F. A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), p. 41. 9 See V. N. Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), pp. 20–1; and The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Reformation, ed. H. Hillerbrand et al. (Oxford, 1996), ii, p. 110. 10 §6v; Acts and Monuments (1843), i, p. vii. 11 *6r; Acts and Monuments (1843), i, p. xxvi. 12 J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics Under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxfords, 1965), pp. 145–7, 224–7, et passim.

John Foxe and Tudor Humanism 185 13 E.g. M. Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987). 14 On dispute concerning the interrelationship of humanism and Protestantism, see also Jonathan Woolfson’s Introduction and M. A. Overell, this volume, chapter 7. 15 A. Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, in A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 10–11; Fox, ‘English Humanism and the Body Politic’, in Fox and Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age, pp. 34–51, citing pp. 37, 46. 16 M. Dowling, ‘The Gospel and the Court: Reformation under Henry VIII’, in Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England, ed. P. Lake and M. Dowling (London, 1987), pp. 36–7, 40, 46, 60–71. 17 FFFf3r (p. 1358.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), vi, p. 83. 18 McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics, pp. 240–6. 19 Acts and Monuments (1563), UU4v, XX3r (pp. 740.2, 749.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), vi, pp. 42, 55. 20 EEEe4 (p. 1348.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), vi, p. 57. 21 FFFf4r (p. 1360.2); Acts and Monuments (1843), vi, p. 266. 22 MacCulloch, ‘Two Dons’, pp. 4–5. 23 Acts and Monuments (1563), UU6v (p. 744.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), vi, p. 47. 24 D. Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. J. C. Olin (New York, 1965), p. 16 and n. 35. 25 Olsen, Foxe and the Elizabethan Church, pp. 210–19. 26 Hillerbrand, Oxford Encyclopaedia, ii, p. 58. 27 DDd6r (p. 84[3].1); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, p. 259. 28 DDd6v (p. 844.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, p. 262. 29 FFf1r (p. 857.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, p. 301. 30 DDd6v (p. 844.2); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, p. 263. 31 DDd6r-FFf4v (pp. 841.2–864.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, pp. 260–319. 32 FFf4r–v (pp. 863.2–864.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, p. 319. 33 TTt5r (p. 1021.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), iv, p. 681. 34 For further discussion of Tyndale’s development as a reformer and of his relations with More, Erasmus and Cuthbert Tunstall, see Alan Stewart’s contribution to this volume. 35 See J. N. King, ‘“The Light of Printing”: William Tyndale, John Foxe, John Day, and Early Modern Print Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly, LIV (2001) 52–85. 36 BBB2r (p. 1075.1–2); Acts and Monuments (1843), v, p. 115. 37 D. Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 63. See also McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics, p. 145. 38 BBB2v (p. 1076.2); Acts and Monuments (1843), v, p. 119. 39 BBB2v (p. 1076.1); Acts and Monuments (1843), v, p. 117. 40 Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation, ed. Olin, p. 97. 41 For discussion of the oration see Alan Stewart’s contribution to this volume; and Daniell, William Tyndale, pp. 89–90. 42 BBB2v (p. 1076.1–2); Acts and Monuments (1843), v, p. 118. 43 DDDD2v (p. 1597.1–2); Acts and Monuments (1843), vii, pp. 127–8. 44 McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics, p. 33; Hillerbrand, Oxford Encyclopaedia, ii, pp. 313–14.

9 The Humanist Latin Tradition Reassessed J. W. Binns

Roger Ascham encapsulates as well as any Latin writer the characteristic features of Tudor humanism. He composed Latin poetry, including dedicatory verses. He was part of the movement to translate Greek writings into Latin – in his case the commentaries of Oecumenius, the tenth-century Bishop of Tricca. He wrote on educational theory in his influential The Scholemaster, still an excellent guide to what happened in an Elizabethan grammar school, and on technical topics: his Toxophilus on archery, and his Themata theologica on various theological matters.1 He is too the author of undoubtedly the most interesting collection of Latin letters to survive from Elizabethan England, most of them still untranslated, a collection that was printed several times both in England and on the continent and still found a readership in the eighteenth century.2 These letters show him cultivating his contacts with influential patrons, corresponding with important foreign humanists like Sturm, and they provide his responses to sixteenthcentury continental humanists never printed in England, such as Longolius and Bartolomeo Ricci, who wrote on Ciceronianism and the theory of imitation.3 Ascham’s letters also give glimpses of life at court, for though hardly a figure of political importance, Ascham moved in high circles. But most of all they show Ascham’s constantly enquiring mind. To give but one example, in a letter of November 1550 to Sir John Cheke, written when Ascham was part of the mission to the Emperor Charles V, Ascham writes of inspecting monasteries, temples, libraries, old books and coins.4 He is interested in the method of government of the cities he has visited, and in their town planning and in their monuments. At an Antwerp bookshop he saw a Latin commentary on Plato’s Timaeus for sale. At the University of Louvain, he attended a lecture on Sophocles by a visiting French professor, 186

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Theodore Lang. In Cologne he went to lectures on the Bible and on the Greek text of Aristotle’s Ethics. Some of Ascham’s letters are miniature treatises, such as that to Sturm of 1568 on imitation.5 These few examples of the range of Ascham’s activities and correspondence must suffice to exemplify the richness of the learned humanism of his day, Latin based, with excursions into Greek and the vernacular, interested in books, scholarship and learning in the widest sense. Clearly the Latin-based humanism of Tudor England is extensive and finds expression not only in the composition of Latin poems, plays letters and orations, but also in the fact that works written in Latin can be found for every area of intellectual life – treatises on music and mathematics, works of philosophy, logic and law, translations into Latin from many other languages and works on translation theory, Aristotelian commentaries and editions of classical texts.6 University students of the times would have been aware of this body of material, though it is difficult to say to what extent they would have been conscious of English Latin writings as a sharply differentiated corpus, since no sixteenth-century reader could ever systematically read the Latin output of the English presses. Such an endeavour became possible only when this output had first been catalogued and then microfilmed. The sixteenth century lacked such modern tools as specialized bibliographies and the book review sections of learned journals. Given that even today, word of mouth, a rather haphazard process, aids the spreading of news about scholarly books, in Tudor times such word-ofmouth transmission would have played a much more important role. The Oxford, 1599 edition of Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon by Thomas James, Bodley’s first librarian, illustrates this lack of systematic knowledge about books. James thought that the work had never been printed before.7 In fact, the text had first been printed at Cologne in 1473, and there were other incunable editions, but how was James to know that?8 Again, remarks by Robert Wright, the editor of the Oxford commemorative anthology on the death of Sir Henry Unton in 1596, show that he was unaware of the existence of his own university’s anthology on the death of Sir Christopher Hatton in 1591.9 On the other hand, the latter volume is very rare – the revised Short Title Catalogue records only one copy, in the library of Lambeth Palace, so it seems perfectly plausible that very few copies of the work were printed, and that it was soon forgotten. This was, of course, a work not for all time, but for an occasion. It is perhaps not too surprising that such a work had a rather ephemeral impact even in the university city in which it was produced. On the other hand, mysterious non-literary

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factors affect the reception of books, and it is not always easy to explain why one book becomes widely read and another falls into oblivion. One might have expected that a work such as Sir Thomas Chaloner’s De republica anglorum instauranda (London, 1579), probably the longest Elizabethan Latin poem, a ten-book epic crammed with didactic moralizing and advice about statecraft, written in very stylish Latin, and handsomely printed on the press of Thomas Vautrollier, would have made a real impact. The work was printed with the support of Lord Burghley, who wrote dedicatory verses for it; Barnabe Googe’s copy survives to this day in the library of Westminster Abbey; and that seems to be the end of the matter.10 The contrast with the fortuna of a not dissimilar work, Palingenius’ Zodiacus vitae, which soon found a place as a school textbook in England in particular, is striking.11 Again, in terms of sheer intrinsic interest, John Parkhurst’s Ludicra sive epigrammata iuvenilia (London, 1573) ought to be much better known. This is a varied, stylish, technically accomplished miscellany, which contains a certain amount of racy love poetry, something the English Latin writers did not often write, yet again it is a very rare book, never so far as is known reprinted on the continent, and Parkhurst has remained virtually unknown as a Latin poet to this day.12 The Oxford geographer Richard Vernam observed that English printers failed properly to market Anglo-Latin works overseas, and the mid-century Cambridge humanist Thomas Hatcher complained that English printers were less effective than those in continental Europe.13 All this is not to say that many Tudor Latin works did not find readers abroad, for clearly they did, and many Anglo-Latin writings were reprinted on continental presses,14 but the enterprise was a rather haphazard one. Similarly, it is doubtful if most such works lasted more than a couple of generations. The works of Ascham and some other writers were still reprinted in eighteenth-century England, but that is exceptional.15 Thomas Warton, writing in his large and comprehensive History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1774–81), had a low opinion of Elizabethan Latin, including the letters of Ascham, though he seems to have been aware of only a very few authors.16 His dismissive views show how the memory of the vast corpus of Tudor Latin writing did not survive until Warton’s day. Even Walter Savage Landor, who wrote a quite interesting Latin treatise in the 1820s on why neo-Latin poetry was little read, a treatise discussing some seventy neo-Latin poets, several of them English, does not go as far back as the Elizabethan period for his arguments.17

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But this, of course, simply takes us back to the conundrum of how to know which books were available, and to whom, at any given time. In recent years a great deal of new information about private library holdings has come to light, thanks to the work of Elizabeth Leedham-Green and her colleagues on the Private Libraries in Renaissance England project, which reconstructs private library holdings from inventories and book lists. Volume 5 of this project, published in 1998, is representative and gives details of the books owned by some twenty-five reasonably obscure Oxford scholars who died in the 1560s and 1570s. The holdings are overwhelmingly in Latin, which is exactly what one would expect. Technical and educational works predominate. There is much theology, including patrologic writing, there are editions of the classics, Aristotelian commentaries, works of law and rhetorical theory. There are works of medicine, sermons, dictionaries, grammars, collections of apothegms. What one might call belles-lettres, the lighter side of humanism perhaps – poems, orations, elegant histories – are distinctly in a minority; I doubt if one book in twenty would fall into this category. But then these are the working libraries of practising scholars. The number of what one might call humanistic works by Anglo-Latin authors is very small. Two of the twenty-five scholars owned copies of Walter Haddon’s Lucubrationes first printed in 1567, that engaging collection of Haddon’s verse, letters and speeches, and one scholar owned a copy of the commemorative anthology on the death of Martin Bucer, edited by Sir John Cheke in 1551. Virtually none of the books listed was printed in England.18 This again is very useful confirmation of the view that the range of Latin texts which appeared from the presses of Tudor England is merely representative of the learned interests of the time. The English were certainly writing and reading Latin works in all the learned areas just mentioned, but most of what they read in Latin would have been supplied by foreign authors on continental presses. At the same time, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, English intellectuals became aware of their own cultural belatedness and were making a definite effort to catch up with the latinate intellectuals of France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. Statements of such an intent are easy enough to find in the works of Haddon and Nicholas Carr of Newcastle.19 Even so, the English achievement in Latin is fairly impressive for what was then quite a small country with a population of some four million in the high Elizabethan age. The Short Title Catalogue microfilms of books printed in England to 1640 runs I believe to over four million pages; as a rough rule of thumb, a tenth of these are in

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Latin, giving 400,000 pages of Latin which at a conservative estimate of 250 words a page gives a corpus of a hundred million words, of which the majority certainly originate in the Tudor period. This corpus of material is roughly double in size the entire extant corpus of Latin material from classical antiquity, where only 144 authors have left complete books.20 There are therefore many opportunities for reassessment of this body of work available. Additionally, in the last ten years or so a good many previously unknown Latin writings by English writers have come to light. In their examination of foreign language material in their Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, i: Works in Languages other than English (Aldershot, 1989), A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers have brought to light a fair number of titles by Catholic exiles whose writings may have survived in only one copy in a remote library.21 And a certain number of works have been translated into English during the last few years, hence opening them up to wider study, e.g. the complete works of the Oxford dramatist William Gager and the Cambridge plays of Thomas Legge, Richardus Tertius and Solymitana Clades (The Destruction of Jerusalem).22 Richardus Tertius exists in eleven contemporary manuscripts which were clearly made for people who wanted a copy of the play; the Solymitana Clades in a manuscript long thought lost which came to light in the 1970s.23 Most Latin plays of the time were not printed, but are extant in manuscript, often in several copies.24 H. R. Woudhuysen and Harold Love in recent books have shown how printing had not yet entirely supplanted the circulation of works in manuscript, and this is true of Latin texts also. A great deal of poetry, even by writers who achieved some renown for their printed works (William Gager, John Shepery), survives in manuscript, as well as many other reasonably important poems such as John Herd’s long historical poem on British history, which was edited in 1868 and has to my knowledge never been mentioned since.25 My impression is that the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge colleges contain many such works, and there are manuscripts of many works of non-fictional interest too – the geographer Richard Hakluyt’s commentary on Aristotle,26 for example, or Thomas Hatcher’s work on Paracelsianism.27 The fact that so much Tudor Latin is extant only in manuscript or was printed on the continent, thus escaping the bibliographical net of the revised Short Title Catalogue, provides what one might call a logistical impediment to its assessment (as opposed to the Latin material printed in the British Isles, which can be consulted on microfilm in

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many university libraries). Sir John Cheke I have always regarded as a major figure, yet it was only comparatively recently that I had in my hands a copy of his Latin translation of the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI’s treatise on the art of war, made in the early 1540s and dedicated to Henry VIII – a compulsively readable work on military tactics, which was clearly intended to be of direct use to the belligerent king.28 This treatise was printed in Basel, hence it is not a Short Title Catalogue book, and thus not microfilmed, and whilst I had examined several dozen such continental printings, the Cheke was not one of them. Moreover, literary scholars tend to pay more attention to orations, letters, poems, histories and works of literary theory than to more severely technical works. Yet even such highly specialized subjects such as logic,29 Latin grammar,30 Aristotelianism,31 and the study of law32 were transformed by the activities of the humanists. So too was theology. Elizabethan Latin theologians are part of the humanist world. They had the same education as their humanist contemporaries; when they died, theologians such as John Jewel and William Whitaker both received commemorative anthologies of memorial verse,33 and both were the subject of humanist biographies in Latin.34 Evidence of the increasing proficiency of the English at Greek, surely a sign of the impact of humanism in England, can easily be found in works of Latin theology, which show an increasing mastery of Greek sources. Then again there are what one might call the interesting asides, such as William Whitaker’s comments on the poetry of Prosper of Aquitaine and Hugh of St Cher.35 Apart from Peter Milward’s outline guides36 to the religious controversies of the time, untranslated Tudor Latin theology remains virtually unstudied. Then too one tends to forget about such things as the English printings of Sepúlveda37 and François Douaren38 on marriage law and church law, which do not harmonize well with traditional ideas about English humanism. Clearly, there is a great coincidence of interest between the ideals of writers in Latin and humanism in the broad sense of being interested in the civilization of the classical world and the nobler, more dignified ideals thereof. Latin writers study and cite the writers of ancient Rome. They praise its moral nobility, they write an elegant classicizing Latin, they attempt versions of the Ciceronian prose style, they recreate the poetic genres of antiquity, they write Horatian odes and pastoral eclogues and love poetry in the Ovidian mode. Yet it would be very easy to show too that at the same time they also remain committed Christians – few indeed are the Latin poets who do not write a certain amount of poetry on religious themes – defences

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of Protestant doctrine, metaphrases of biblical incident, poems about the afterlife.39 Thus the interest in the ancient world takes place in a definitely Christian context. What are the characteristic features of Renaissance Latin poetry? There is an initial temptation, perhaps, to locate this in the physicality of the printed book. These little, dumpy-sized books with page after page of elegant verses in clear Italic type, bound in vellum or calf, with the attractive swash letters and printing ornaments, have an engaging physicality about them that is redolent of a vanished world. They are set apart from modern books by the apparatus of prefatory verses and dedicatory prose prefaces to the great and the good. Yet as has already been stated, much Latin poetry was not printed at all. Perhaps it is their style, then, that is distinctive. The difficulty there, though, is that when people get good at writing Latin verse, they often get so good at it that, in the absence of specific references, it can be difficult to say with certainty in what century a poem was written. Carolingian, twelfth-century and eighteenth-century poets can all write elegant Latin on occasions, whilst many Renaissance Latin poets write clumsy lines. Whilst Tudor Latin has a great deal in common with Tudor humanism, it also has a great deal in common with the Latin of other centuries. In the twelfth century, Reginald of Durham40 is a writer of great force and power, a master of narrative and a brilliant stylist. For the last ten years of so I have been engaged with another scholar in editing Gervase of Tilbury,41 whose major work was written in the early thirteenth century. His intellectual ambience is similar to that of the Tudor world – Gervase writes a clear, readable Latin, he writes on Roman history and geography and antiquities, he too is interested in coins, the range of ancient writers available to him and upon whom he draws is very little different from that available in the sixteenth century. The difference – and it is an important one – is that the texts he cites were not so widely and easily and cheaply available, since printing had not then been invented. But, of course, the Latin tradition does not cease at the end of the Tudor age, nor even in 1640 when the Short Title Catlaogue comes to a halt. Many Latin books are printed in England throughout the whole of the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century too virtually all the characteristic forms of Elizabethan Latin – poems of all types, commemorative anthologies, letters, treatises in defence of poetry, works of history, lexicography, science, theology, and so on are still to be found there. Not till the end of that century does the Latin tradition

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descend towards literary trifling. But, of course, by that date the tide running in favour of the vernacular is in full flood, and so the tradition is not as central as it was in Elizabethan England. What differentiates Tudor Latin from both twelfth-century Latin and eighteenth-century Latin is that it attains critical mass – there is a large amount of writing centred on the universities and bound together by networks of people who knew each other, wrote poems to each other, drew on each other’s writings and enjoyed the patronage and support of those influential persons at court who shared the cultural ideals of Latin humanism. This culture benefited from the fact that the Tudor universities were much more lively places than were the universities of eighteenth-century England, say, and was disseminated through printing. The Latin writers of the Tudor period are on the whole hardly household names today, yet I do believe that it would be true to say that their interest in bonae litterae helped to prepare the way for the great flowering of English vernacular literature – that the writings of such men as Spenser, Herbert, Donne, Milton and countless others were possible only because they too had experienced the intellectual ambience of a still Latin-based university system with all that that implied.

Notes 1 The standard biography of Ascham is still Lawrence V. Ryan’s excellent Roger Ascham (Stanford, 1963). More recent scholarship is summarized by J. S. Dees, ‘Recent Studies in Ascham’, English Literary Renaissance, X (1980) 300–10. The fullest edition of Ascham’s works is still that of J. A. Giles, The Whole Works of Roger Ascham (London, 1864–65), though this omits the Apologia pro caena dominica of 1577 and the Themata theologica which were printed with it. 2 A selection of these letters is translated by M. Hatch and A. Vos, Lettters of Roger Ascham (New York, 1989). Continental printings of Ascham are listed in M. A. Shaaber, Check-list of Works of British Authors Printed Abroad, in Languages other than English, to 1641 (New York, 1975), items A471–A474. An edition of Ascham’s letters was printed at Oxford in 1703. 3 See Ryan, Roger Ascham, pp. 117, 269–70, 277; J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), p. 288; and Giles, Whole Works, ii, pp. 180, 186–7. 4 Ryan, Roger Ascham, pp. 119–55; letter cviii, Giles, Whole Works, ii, pp. 216–22. 5 Letter xcix, Giles, Whole Works, ii, pp. 174–91; translated by Hatch and Vos, Letters, pp. 265–82. 6 For an overview of this material see Binns, Intellectual Culture. 7 James’ letter to Joseph Barnes, the Oxford printer, is given in Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 408–11.

194 J. W. Binns 8 The early editions of the Philobiblon are discussed in E.C. Thomas’ edition of The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury (London, 1888), pp. li–lv. 9 As Robert Wright makes clear in his letter to the reader prefacing Oxford University’s Funebria nobilissimi ac praestantissimi equitis D. Henrici Untoni (Oxford, 1596), fol. 2r. 10 Chaloner’s work is discussed in Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 26–9. 11 On Palingenius, see Jacques Chomarat, ed. and trans., Le Zodiaque de la vie (Geneva, 1996), especially pp. 14–15 for some translations and Latin editions of this work. 12 See J. W. Binns, ‘John Parkhurst and the Traditions of Classical Latin Poetry in Sixteenth-Century England’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, I (1994) 52–61. 13 See the remarks of Richard Vernam quoted in Nicholas Carr’s De scriptorum britannicorum paucitate oratio (London, 1576), fol. 8v, and the letter from Thomas Hatcher to Thomas Wilson quoted on fols 2v–3r of the same work; see Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 402–3. 14 Such printings are listed by Shaaber, Check-list of Works of British Authors Printed Abroad. 15 E.g. Alexander Ross’ Virgilius evangelisans, printed at London in 1769; Bartholomew Clarke’s Latin translation of Castiglione’s Courtier, printed London, 1713. There were also two eighteenth-century printings of Elizabeth Weston’s Opuscula at Frankfurt-on-Oder in 1723 and 1724. Contrariwise the works of the Oxford philosopher John Case were printed for only 30 years or so after his death. See the list of editions in C. B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston and Montreal, 1983), pp. 261–3. 16 See Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1824), iii, pp. 283–4. Warton does, however, know Charles Fitzgeffrey’s Affaniae (Oxford, 1601) and Thomas Campion’s Epigrammata (London, 1619). See Warton, iv, pp. 298, 388 and 397. 17 Walter Savage Landor, Quaestio quamobrem poetae latini recentiores minus legantur in Poemata et inscriptiones (London, 1847), pp. 264–348. Milton, referred to e.g. on pp. 272, 344, seems to be the earliest Anglo-Latin poet to whom Landor refers. 18 See R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-Green, eds, Private Libraries in Renaissance England (Tempe, 1998), v, items 129.67, 135.15 and 126.147. In discussion Dr Leedham-Green has commented that the inventories in these volumes tend to under-represent books seen as ephemeral and hard to cost (as against standard textbooks) and, consequently, to give too low an estimate of the amount of humanist Latin poetry actually owned by such scholars. 19 See Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 198–204. 20 At the time of writing the Short Title Catalogue microfilms series runs to over 2,100 reels. An approximation of 1,000 openings a reel would give a corpus of over four million pages. For the difficulty of making precise numerical statements about Short Title Catalogue items, see Peter Blayney, ‘The Numbers Game: Appraising the Revised STC’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LXXXVIII (1994) 353–407. For the figures on extant

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21

22

23

24

25

26

27 28

29

30

31

32

33

classical Latin literature, see H. Bardon, La Littérature Latine inconnue (Paris, 1952), i, p. 13. E.g. Edmund Hollings’ Poemata (Ingoldstadt, 1584) (item 676); Latin verses and epigrams by Luke Wadding (item 1319); some speeches by Richard White of Basingstoke printed in Douai in 1604 (item 1376.2). William Gager, The Complete Works, ed. and trans. D. F. Sutton (New York and London, 1994); Thomas Legge, The Complete Plays, ed. and trans. D. F. Sutton (New York, 1993). Sutton discusses the eleven manuscripts of Legge in i, pp. xxii–xxxix of his edition. Leonard Forster, ‘Further to Janus Gruterus’ English Years’, Studia Germanica Gandensia, XVI (1975) 5–10. The manuscript of this work is now in Cambridge University Library. See Sutton’s edition of Legge, ii, pp. 5–6 for an account of its purchase. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996); Harold Love, Scribal Publication in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford, 1993). William Gager’s commonplace book, for example (British Library, MS Additional 22 583) contains much poetry that was not printed at the time; John Shepery’s verse Vita Claymondi is extant in five Oxford manuscripts (details in Binns, Intellectual Culture p. 552); John Herd’s Historia quatuor regum Anglie heroico carmine conclusa was edited from BL, MS Cotton, Julius C. ii. 134 by Thomas Purnell (London, 1868). See L. V. Ryan, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage into Aristotle’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XII (1981) 73-83. There are two manuscripts of the work, both in the British Library, MS Royal 12 G. XIII and MS Sloane 1982. Thomas Hatcher’s Contra Paracelsitas is Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS cclviii, fols 67 et seq. The De apparatu bellico. See J. F. McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface to the De Superstitione’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XLVIII (1997) 100–20, at p. 101 and n. 4. See e.g. L. Jardine, ‘Humanist Logic’, in C.B. Schmitt, Q. Skinner and E. Kessler, eds, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 173–98. See e.g. W. K. Percival, ‘Renaissance Grammar’, in A. J. Rabil, ed., Renaissance Humanism, Foundation, Forms and Legacy (Philadelphia, 1988), iii, pp. 67–84. A good introduction to the way in which humanism transformed the study of Aristotle is C. B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 67–88. See R. J. Schoeck, ‘Humanism and Jurisprudence’, in Rabil, ed., Renaissance Humanism, iii pp. 310–26; J. H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, 1963); D. R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970); G. Kisch, Humanismus und Jurisprudenz: Der Kampf zwischen mos italicus und mos gallicus an der Universitat Basel (Basel, 1955). The verses on the death of Jewel are collected at the end of Laurence Humphrey’s Ioannis Iuelli vita et mors (London, 1573). Those on the death of Whitaker are to be found in Charles Horne, In obitum ornatissimi viri

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34

35

36

37 38 39 40 41

Guilielmi Whitakeri (London, 1596), and at the end of volume i of Whitaker’s Opera theologica (Geneva, 1610). Laurence Humphrey’s lengthy Ioannis Iuelli vita et mors (London, 1573) and Abdias Ashton’s Vitae et mortis…Gulielmi Whitakeri vera descriptio, printed in Whitaker’s Praelectiones…de ecclesia (Cambridge, 1599). Hugh of St Cher in Whitaker’s Controversiae, Quaestio i. 6; Prosper of Aquitaine in his De peccato originali, i. 10. See his Opera omnia (Geneva, 1610), pp. 268 and 645 respectively. P. Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1977) and Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1978). Ioannes Genesius de Sepúlveda, De ritu nuptiarum et dispensatione libri tres (London, 1553). François Douaren, De sacris ecclesiae ministeriis ac beneficiis libri viii (London, 1585). See Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 81–108. On Reginald of Durham, otherwise known as Reginald of Coldingham, see A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge, 1992). The edition of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia is now in press with Oxford Medieval Texts, ed. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns. For bibliography on Gervase, see J. W. Binns and S. E. Banks, Gervase of Tilbury and the Encyclopaedic Tradition: Information Retrieval from the Middle Ages to Today (Leicester, 1999).

10 Between Bruni and Hobbes: Aristotle’s Politics in Tudor Intellectual Culture1 Jonathan Woolfson

Viewed from the perspective of one influential characterization of Renaissance humanism, Aristotle’s Politics occupies an odd position within the humanist canon of ancient texts. Difficult, technical and obscure, more about structures and systems of classification than people, it contains little to inspire the admiration of the humanist advocates of Ciceronian eloquence and individual virtue. One might expect that its history of reception and commentary at the hands of the late medieval scholastics would have rendered it hopelessly old-fashioned in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And yet in 1438 one of the most creative and influential humanists of the Florentine Quattrocento, Leonardo Bruni, placed it at the centre of the classical revival by translating it into Latin. He dedicated his version to, among others, Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of the English king. In England and elsewhere, Bruni’s translation became the most popular way to read the Politics and was reprinted many times. Indeed so influential did the Politics become that by 1651 Thomas Hobbes would go so far as to claim that Aristotle’s anti-monarchical message had been responsible for the ‘effusion of so much blood’ during the English civil war.2 What had happened between Bruni and Hobbes to transform a text fit for a royal duke into something resembling a republican manifesto, the very cause of the monarchy’s downfall? When did that transformation happen? And what role did humanism play in it? There are no easy answers to these questions; but in this chapter I will cautiously suggest that the transformation took place around the very end of the Tudor period. I will further argue that the fortuna of the Politics, while shaped in important ways by the humanist approach to ancient texts, also reveals the continuity of other intellectual traditions and ideological needs. It is the combination of these different pressures which 197

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shaped the reception of the Politics; humanism per se cannot, in relation to that work, be said to have conveyed a very distinct political message. What the humanists did achieve by their archaeology of ancient literature was to expand, to an unprecedented degree, the conceptual and linguistic marketplace into which works such as the Politics were inserted. Despite pressures towards orthodoxy and conservatism which prevailed for most of the sixteenth century, this, ultimately, increased the articulation of different political thoughts.3 * The Politics first entered into western European consciousness in the 1260s when it was translated from Greek into Latin by William of Moerbeke. A clutch of medieval thinkers then wrote interpretations of it. The most important of these was Thomas Aquinas, whose commentary was completed by Peter of Auvergne. Walter Burley’s commentary of c. 1338–39 was based on Aquinas’ and, as a university text, reflects the Politics’ relatively wide diffusion in learned circles in England by that period. This is especially so at Oxford, where the university statutes dating from before 1350 name it as one of the texts which students incepting for the BA could study, a provision which is repeated in the statutes of 1431.4 A few years later the scene was set for the Politics’ reception in Tudor England when Leonardo Bruni sent his humanistic Latin translation of the Politics to the Duke of Gloucester. This became the standard Renaissance version, and was printed seven times in the fifteenth century and forty-eight times in the sixteenth. It had apparently been undertaken at Duke Humfrey’s request and enjoyed a significant diffusion in fifteenth-century England, with more than half a dozen manuscript copies extant, some of them containing Bruni’s dedicatory letter to Humfrey and fifteenth-century marginalia.5 Moving into the Tudor period, the Politics continues to makes its appearance mainly in a university context. This is no doubt because it was still a set text, but also perhaps because its complexity and technicality – and, as we shall see, its radical potential – rendered it useful for university disputations, but unappetizing in other areas. Elizabeth I’s long-time chief minister William Cecil apparently carried a copy of Cicero’s De officiis in his pocket; it is difficult to imagine him doing the same with the Politics.6 Nevertheless it was Cecil – the former student of John Cheke at Cambridge – and two other figures near the centre of government, Christopher Hatton and Henry Unton, who urged the Oxford philosopher John Case to undertake a commentary on the text.

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I shall return to this important work, the Sphaera civitatis, which was first published in Oxford in 1588 and ran to a further five editions in Germany. By then the Politics had established an even firmer place in the Oxford curriculum: in the university statutes of 1549 it is to be expounded by the university lecturer in philosophy, a provision repeated in the 1564–65 statutes, which put it alongside Aristotle’s Ethics and Plato’s Republic.7 We have a range of evidence to show that the statutes were acted on. In 1552 the Oxford student Conrad ab Ulmis devoted one hour every day – 6 to 7 am – to studying the Politics.8 In his Optimates sive de nobilitate of 1560 (and in its English translation, The Nobles, of 1563), Lawrence Humphrey, president of Magdalen College from 1561, recommends that ‘daily and nightly study’ of the Politics should form a component of a nobleman’s education.9 Richard Hakluyt’s analysis of the Politics, dedicated to Elizabeth I, was undertaken in the early 1580s while he was censor of Christ Church: it originated in his college lectures and supervision of student disputations.10 For the same period there are extant the university questions which students incepting for the MA were required to address in moral philosophy disputations. They reflect the subject matter of the Politics, for example: Are contentions among citizens to be tolerated by a good ruler? Are foreigners to be admitted to government? Is it better for the subjects of a prince to be rich or poor? Is constitutional change fatal? Can a bad man be a good citizen? A significant number of these questions are about women: Are women’s dispositions more acute than men’s? Do women lead more pleasant lives than men? and so on.11 These are the kinds of matters to which Case and Hakluyt directed their writings, both of them referring to contemporary issues as they did so. In Oxford, therefore, the Politics was in part source material for developing dialectical and rhetorical skills. It is thus, perhaps, his Oxford education which explains Philip Sidney’s interest in the Politics after he had left the university. A student at Christ Church from 1568 to 1570, Sidney was connected there with Hakluyt.12 While on his European tour in 1574, he informed his mentor Hubert Languet that he intended to study Greek in order to read Aristotle, particularly the Politics; Languet was not enthusiastic, remarking on Aristotle’s obscurity and difficulty.13 Given Sidney’s convictions about the moral utility of poetry as outlined in his Defence of Poesy, and the later statement of his friend Fulke Greville that his aim in writing Arcadia was to turn ‘the barren Philosophy precepts into pregnant Images of life’,14 it is impossible not to notice that one of the

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key figures in Arcadia is called ‘Basilius’ (i.e. the Greek for king). In faithful Aristotelian terms, the dissolution of Basilius’ state begins when he turns away from public affairs to attend to his private interests: technically, he thus become a tyrant. However these dimensions of the work are understood, Aristotle’s political thought is certainly here.15 So much for Oxford and one of its most famous alumni. Although in official terms the Politics arrived later in Cambridge, first being mentioned in the statutes of 1549, it is here that a distinctive humanistic approach to the text is more clearly discernible. The 1558 and 1570 statutes prescribe that the university reader in philosophy should lecture on the Politics in Greek as far as is possible, reflecting a tradition that seems to go back to Sir Thomas Smith.16 He lectured on the Greek text of the Politics at Cambridge in the later 1530s, and during his lectures he began controversially to introduce students to the Erasmian pronunciation of that language.17 His pupil and successor was John – later Bishop – Ponet. Both of these figures bear some obvious relation to Aristotle’s Politics in their most famous writings, De republica anglorum (?1583) and A Short Treatise of Politic Power (1556) respectively. Sir John Cheke, who became Regius Professor in Greek in 1540, taught the Politics in that language to Edward VI, claiming in a letter to him that two chapters in particular, on changes in kingdoms and the purposes of states, were the best passages in all the literature they had covered from which to learn about government.18 In his Synopsis Politica of 1582, a summary of ancient political philosophy which draws especially on Aristotle, John Foorth (or Foorde), an MA of St John’s College, defends Aristotle’s Politics with the very humanistic observation that the modern text contains corruptions and interpolations, and he gives an indication of how the original Aristotle might be restored through a sensitivity to classical history.19 As in Oxford, by the later Elizabethan period the Politics had penetrated the collegiate teaching curriculum at Cambridge as well; it was prescribed, for example, in Sir Walter Mildmay’s statutes for Emmanuel College in 1585.20 Indeed, in the 1570s Gabriel Harvey claimed that at Cambridge everyone had the Economics and Politics ‘by rote’, and that ‘you can not steppe into a schollars study but (ten to one) you shall litely finde open either Bodin de Republica or Le Royes Exposition uppon Aristotles Politiques or some other like French or Italian Politique discourse’.21 Although extant Cambridge library lists do not seem to corroborate that claim for Louis Le Roy’s text and commentary on the Politics in French, which was first published in 1568, Le Roy’s work did assume

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an undoubted importance when printed in a close English rendition in 1598, translated by an unidentified ‘ID’, and dedicated to Robert Sidney.22 This ushered in a new phase of the Politics’ diffusion in England, and one which significantly took the work beyond the university context.23 Turning to the evidence of book lists, both from university and extramural contexts, we find the Politics in a range of languages and versions, and with many different commentaries.24 As one would expect, Oxford and Cambridge college and university libraries tended to have more manuscript versions, containing translations by Moerbeke and Bruni, and older commentaries, such as those by Thomas Aquinas and Walter Burley. The broader picture suggests that English readers made some use of all the older and more recent work on the Politics. Thus although Bruni’s Latin version remained the most popular, we also find a significant number of Greek editions, one or two French versions, and other sixteenth-century Latin translations by Denys Lambin, Pietro Vettori, Joachim Périon and Jacques-Louis d’Estrebay (Strebaeus).25 And, if we add to library lists the evidence of literature cited in texts from England, we find a familiarity with the medieval commentaries of Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Walter Burley, Johannes Versor and John Buridan, and the Renaissance commentaries of Donato Acciaoli, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Martin Borrhaus, Louis Le Roy, Johann Thomas Freige, Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and Theodor Zwinger.26 There are four points to note from this material. First, the Politics was by no means the most popular ancient political text in Tudor England: Cicero’s De officiis was much more widely read.27 The tendency for the Greek tradition to play second fiddle to the Roman was strengthened by the fact that Bruni’s translation of the Politics itself used a great deal of Ciceronian terminology. Second, even within Aristotelian moral philosophy, the Ethics was much more popular than the Politics, as indeed it was throughout Europe and as it had been in the Middle Ages.28 First published in Bruni’s Latin translation in 1479, and in English in 1547, in the traditional order of studies the Ethics was read before the Politics, which in effect meant both that it was read more than the Politics and that, given that Aristotle’s moral philosophy was regarded as a unity, it conditioned in certain crucial ways the reception of the Politics. However, this is not to imply that the Politics was displaced by the Ethics or by Cicero in the Tudor period. On the contrary, it was read much more than before, especially in the second half of the sixteenth century, but so were these other works.

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Third, the Politics continued to be accessed above all through the commentary of Thomas Aquinas and Peter of Auvergne, backed up by the De regimine principum attributed to Aquinas29 and Aquinas’ Summa theologiae; Richard Hooker, whose debt to Aquinas is often noted, was no more than typical in reading his Politics through this medieval master.30 There were nine editions of the Aquinas/Auvergne commentary to 1595, and usually its terminology, originally based on Moerbeke’s translation, was modified at certain points to conform to Bruni’s translation, with which it was commonly printed. The continued dominance of Aquinas is particularly striking when we think of all the contemporary humanistic commentaries which were issuing from European presses and which reached England.31 Finally, as a result of the contextual factors described here, but above all because of the fact that by the second half of the sixteenth century the English vernacular had stepped up alongside Latin as a medium of educated communication, some but not all of the most important Greek terminology Latinized by Moerbeke but thrown overboard by the Ciceronian Bruni became current again. Thus in English and in Latin ‘democracy’ or ‘democratia’ are often used in preference to Bruni’s ‘popularis status’ or ‘popular estate’; ‘aristocratia’ and ‘aristocracy’ are preferred to Bruni’s ‘optimorum gubernatio’; and ‘polity’ or ‘politia’, as well as ‘politic’, ‘politique’, ‘political’ and ‘policy’ stand alongside ‘government’, ‘commonweal’, ‘republica’ and ‘republic’.32 There is not yet a sense that the latter word, republic, refers exclusively to republican government in the modern sense of a state in which, to quote one of the definitions of the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 1989), ‘supreme power rests in the people and their elected representatives and officers, as opposed to one governed by a king or similar ruler’; but there are one or two indirect and sometimes fortuitous anticipations of this meaning. In order to understand this – and also to make sense of remainder of this essay in general – we must briefly review the complex but crucial use of the Greek word ‘politeia’. For Aristotle ‘politeia’ had two broad meanings: first, it was a generic term for ‘constitution’ or ‘regime’, in which case it could include monarchy – I will call this the general form of ‘politeia’; second, it could mean a specific constitution which was both ‘right rule’ by the many and a mixture of democracy and oligarchy; and this sense may also refer to a ‘middle way’ between democracy and oligarchy, which is a regime with a large middle class. This second meaning of the word – which broadly anticipates the OED’s definition of republic, and which I shall refer to as the specific form of ‘politeia’ – is particularly compli-

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cated and much disputed, but what can be said about it uncontroversially is that it definitely excludes monarchy.33 Aristotle was therefore using the same word for (at least) two quite different things, and in places he admits to this; he therefore forced his interpreters to try to remain close to him while still distinguishing between the two meanings. The results are various.34 Moerbeke and Aquinas originally stuck closest to Aristotle, using the word ‘politia’ for both forms; Bruni called both forms ‘respublica’; but by the sixteenth century there are some attempts at subtle differentiation. In France, for example, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples distinguishes in 1508 between ‘republica’ (the general form) and ‘republica peculiariter’ (the specific form),35 and Louis Le Roy sometimes uses ‘republique’ for both forms, and sometimes differentiates between ‘police’ (the general form) and ‘republique’ (the specific form). The Florentine humanist Pietro Vettori on occasion distinguishes between a constitution in general which he calls ‘status’ and the specific one which he calls ‘respublica’.36 In England Hakluyt distinguishes between ‘republica’ and ‘respublica’,37 and John Case between ‘politia’ (the general form) and ‘timocratia’ (the specific form), taking the latter word not from the Politics but from the Ethics.38 Le Roy, in the 1598 English translation of his work, is made to use both ‘governement’ and ‘commonweale’ for the general sense and ‘commonweale’ for the specific.39 Exemplifying the way in which the humanist and scholastic traditions were combined – though not exclusively in an English context – is Thomas Aquinas, the outstanding representative of the medieval tradition, when his commentary was published with the parallel texts of Bruni and Moerbeke together: in order that Aquinas seems to refer to both Bruni’s and Moerbeke’s versions, and can be read with reference to both of them, he has been made to distinguish between the general ‘politia’ (Moerbeke’s word), meaning any constitution and therefore including monarchy, and the specific ‘republica’ (Bruni’s word), meaning ‘right rule’ by the many and the mixture between oligarchy and democracy.40 But he is not made to be consistent in this. Indeed the sheer range of sixteenthcentury responses to this difficult problem in Aristotle’s text should warn of the instability of a word which in our times has accrued more specific meanings.41 None the less, this latent ambivalence about whether republics can be monarchies points to the potential for a larger fissure in Aristotle’s Politics between monarchy on the one hand, and the notion of mixed government on the other. This is highly significant for Tudor England since the notion of the mixed constitution was ubiquitous in sixteenth-century political thinking.

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Comprising a blend of the three elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, the mixed constitution is so often described as a part of the Aristotelian tradition that we sometimes forget that Aristotle does not actually advocate this model in the Politics. Admittedly the Politics represents the most detailed and subtle ancient source for classifying constitutions; it contains the influential description of monarchy, aristocracy and ‘polity’ as ‘right’ forms of constitution; and it also includes the idea of mixing constitutional elements, so in these broad senses most later thinking is derived from it. But only once in the Politics is the mixture of these three elements mentioned, and it is disparagingly in relation to Sparta.42 Elsewhere Aristotle places the three forms of right government in a pecking order with kingship as best, but only if the king is greatly superior to everyone else in the state.43 This links to another part of the Politics where Aristotle says that a certain kind of kingship, that of the absolute monarch or ‘pambasileia’, is best ideally, if the virtue of the ruler or the ruler’s family surpasses that of everyone else. In practice, however, he does not expect this ever to happen and is critical of this form.44 In certain other passages Aristotle is critical of monarchy in general, and more opposed to hereditary monarchy than elective monarchy.45 However Aristotle’s comments on kingship are interpreted, it is crucial for the Tudor context to note that the Politics is overwhelmingly about forms which quite explicitly exclude monarchy, either ‘politeia’, the mixture of oligarchy and democracy which has already been discussed, or – what according to most modern commentators is the same thing – the middle way between oligarchy and democracy, which is a state with a large middle class: at one point this, rather than monarchy, is described as the best form of constitution, because it is the most stable.46 In other words, monarchy plays no part in Aristotle’s model of mixed government, which is a model of two not three elements.47 Indeed because, as has been explained, the word ‘politeia’ in the Politics refers both to constitutions in general and therefore comprehends monarchy, and to this particular form of oligarchy and democracy mixed together, which excludes monarchy; and because Aristotle’s definition of a citizen is one who rules and is ruled in turn, there is an ambivalence here about whether monarchy is any kind of political government at all.48 This ambivalence was transmitted in different ways by Moerbeke and Thomas Aquinas and exploited by some of their less monarchically inclined medieval counterparts; and in the sixteenth century this less monarchical reading of the text seems to receive endorsement, albeit itself an ambivalent one, from no less an

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authority than Calvin in his Institutes, to be followed in Elizabethan England by the presbyterians Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright.49 Aristotle does admit that different forms match different peoples. But overall his thinking at the very least complicates what he says in the Ethics, where in book eight there is a far more straightforward list of constitutional forms in which monarchy is simply claimed to be the best.50 Interestingly, the dedicatory letter to his translation of the Politics by the ‘civic humanist’ Leonardo Bruni, addressed to Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, summarizes the book’s contents in a manner resembling this passage in the Ethics, claiming for Aristotle the straightforward opinion that kingship is best. And Bruni’s letter is, therefore, both a suggestive illustration of the conceptual transformations that could be wrought during the processes of Italo-English transmission, and a hint at the ways in which the Ethics could be used to condition the reception of the Politics.51 Having just translated the Politics, it is inconceivable that Bruni did not realize the partiality of this claim about monarchy, but he also understood that he was writing to the uncle of a king. When it came to the Florentine constitution, Bruni was able to describe it as a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, thus using – and adapting slightly – Aristotle’s model of mixed government; in the historiography of Florentine political thought he has sometimes been accused for doing so of abandoning his earlier, more purely democratic republican principles.52 In translating the Politics, Bruni supplied sixteenth-century Englishmen with the same analytical resources which he had used to describe Florence. Finding out whether or not Tudor readers deployed that resource in the same way will help contextualize – and suggest the limits to – Tudor ‘republicanism’. Of course, Tudor readers did not get their political thought from Aristotle alone, and there were in fact other, better sources than Aristotle for the mixture of three elements. Plato’s Laws, which, by contrast to the Politics, finds things to praise in the Spartan constitution, was the most important ancient one, becoming well known for this in England in the second half of the Tudor period.53 Polybius became available in the early sixteenth century, though I have not found evidence for the direct influence of his mixed model in England;54 his ideas were transmitted, however, via Machiavelli,55 and via Cicero’s De republica. Although this last work remained unknown in its complete form until the nineteenth century, his approval in it of the mixed model comprising three elements was preserved for the Renaissance by the fourth-century encyclopaedist Nonius Marcellus; it is directly or indirectly through Nonius that Cornelius Valerius, in a

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1566 treatise which was translated into English in 1571, could claim that ‘the common weale which consisteth of them three whiche are esteemed good, Cicero in his booke De Repub. supposeth to be best, by reason it is more excellent, more profitable, and of longer perpetuitie than the rest’. This is an important testimony, coming as it does from Cicero; had his entire text been available – it was eagerly sought in this period by, among others, Roger Ascham, Johann Sturm, and Reginald Pole – the history of this topic might have been very different.56 Even without the complete text, however, this formula – an especially convenient one because on the one hand it does not place ‘right’ constitutions in a pecking-order and on the other it avoids potentially problematic metaphors to do with bridling, tempering, restraint or mixture – was taken up for presbyterian purposes only two years after the English publication of Valerius’ treatise by Thomas Cartwright, in his A Replye to An Answere made of M. Doctor Whitgifte againste the Admonition to the Parliament: ‘For the churche is governed wyth that kinde of government whych the Philosphers that wryte of the best common wealthes affirme to be the best.’ Cartwright goes on: For in respecte of Christe the heade it is a Monarchie and in respecte of the auncientes and pastoures that governe in common and wyth like authoritie amongste them selves it is an Aristocratie or the rule of the best men and in respecte that the people are not secluded but have their interest in churche matters it is a Democratie or a populare estate. An image whereof appeareth also in the policye of thys Realme for as in respecte of the Queene her maiestie it is a Monarchie so in respecte of the moste honourable Counsell it is an Aristocratie and having regard to the Parliament whych is assembled of al estates it is a Democratie. Such a statement, it seems, is basically Ciceronian rather than Aristotelian. But medieval writers also contributed to the armoury of resources on the mixed constitution comprising three elements. Thomas Aquinas was the most important, though monarchy clearly predominates in his version.57 Sir John Fortescue’s well-known late fifteenth-century notion of ‘regal and political dominion’ also bears some relation to the Aquinas tradition. And in the sixteenth century a new input for theories of the mixed constitution was added by Gasparo Contarini, Machiavelli, Le Roy and many others.58 Where does this leave Aristotle? Set against the Politics in particular, the more radical political thinkers of Tudor England, such as Thomas

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Starkey, John Ponet and John Foorde, all of whose involvement with the Politics is documented, and who advocate a model of the mixed constitution which contains the three elements and/or an elected monarch, seem a good deal less ‘republican’ than they do when set against some of the grander pretensions of the Tudor monarchy, and it is perhaps possible to see them as attempting to negotiate between the two things.59 The Politics might have pushed Starkey towards his proposal in the Dialogue between Pole and Lupset for an elective monarchy, and this would have made the work explosive had it seen its way into print in the late 1520s or 1530s.60 Indeed, it was just such radical thinking by Marsiglio of Padua, also in part derived from Aristotle, which led William Marshall to expunge the passages advocating elective monarchy from Marsiglio’s Defensor Pacis when he translated it into English and had it printed in 1535.61 And yet neither Starkey, Ponet nor Foorde seems to want to do away with monarchy altogether. Disobedience or resistance to a tyrant, on the other hand, as propounded by Ponet and the other Protestant theorists of his ilk, as well as by the Elizabethan Catholic resistance theorists, was no more than the logical conclusion resulting from a traditional application of ideas about tyranny. What had changed, as the result of the Reformation, was that Catholic and Protestant monarchs were now vulnerable to being defined not only as ruling in their own narrow interests, and therefore as tyrants, but also as in breach of the law of God, whose authority, all were agreed, was higher even than that of Aristotle’s.62 It is not altogether surprising, therefore, to find that, among less radical thinkers, another response to the Politics was to reject it because of its failure to endorse monarchical government explicitly enough. This is the case with Charles Merbury’s Discourse of Royal Monarchy of 1581. In his prefatory letter to the reader, Merbury explains that his original plan had been to write three treatises on moral philosophy in imitation of Aristotle. He began with a moral work based on the Ethics which he completed but chose not to publish, and then moved on to the Politics, ‘concerning the best form and fashion of a perfect commonweal’. But then he changed his mind, and decided not to follow Aristotle after all, but relied instead, as he claims, ‘upon the riper judgement of later writers’, choosing to ‘preferre Monarchie above all other kindes of Commonweales’. He does not really explain this change of heart but the reason, I think, is simple: the Ethics had led him to expect the Politics to contain emphatic arguments in favour of monarchy. In the event his use of Aristotle is restricted to borrowing the typology of constitutions and criticizing him for his objection to

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hereditary monarchy: had he lived longer and witnessed the undoing of the Macedonian rulers of Athens for want of a clear succession, says Merbury, Aristotle would have thought again.63 The rest of Merbury’s treatise is both a bid for royal patronage, being dedicated to Elizabeth I, and a persuasion to her to settle the royal succession: it is entirely about absolute, divine right and hereditary monarchies as the best forms of government. This renders all the more unusual the political sympathies of John Case as represented in his commentary on the Politics, the Sphaera civitatis of 1588.64 Thanks to working in the flexible dialectical mode of university disputations (‘mos dialecticorum’ as he calls it), Case is able both to stick relatively closely to the text and at the same time, though not without difficulty, turn it into a treatise in favour of monarchy in general. Furthermore, in spite of Aristotle’s notorious views on women, Case uses the Politics to provide an extremely positive defence of the rule of his queen in particular. What follows is an exploration of how Case achieves this not inconsiderable feat. For Case, politics is a practical not a theoretical science, and dialectic is the method by which to resolve the difficulties of Aristotle’s text.65 The questions, distinctions, doubts, propositions, oppositions and responses which structure his book were intended to bridge the gap between Aristotle and Case’s own world, and therefore the Sphaera civitatis is full of contemporary concerns as they relate to Aristotle. For example, one of the objections to the Aristotelian proposition that virtue is inherent to political communities is that contemporary England permits usury and contemporary Italy permits brothels: therefore England and Italy are not subject to virtue. The answer is that, although these communities tolerate these things, they do not institute them or approve of them, so they are not inherent to the state.66 In fact the issue of virtue was a crucial one for Case, and illustrates in general how little difficulty there was in integrating the Politics into Christian thought. Aristotle’s teleological sense that the political community exists for the exercise of virtue was easily transmuted into Christian and providential terms: the project of political organisation becomes part of a Christian project, not only for Case, but also, for example, for Richard Hooker and Thomas Starkey, both of them heavily indebted to the Politics. Case’s Sphaera civitatis begins with a letter to the Christian reader about the existence of God and his role in the world. The very first ‘quaestio’ is: ‘Can there be a true commonwealth without virtue?’ to which the answer is a resounding no. Machiavelli’s famous redefinition of virtue (virtù) is rejected; indeed

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Machiavelli is violently attacked for taking God and virtue out of the political equation. Part of Case’s project is to demonstrate the continued vitality and usefulness of Aristotelian philosophy in the Christian era and he does this by contrasting Aristotle with the writers of his own age, not just Machiavelli but darkly unnamed ‘machiavellians’ and ‘atheists’. His aim, he states, is to take the spoils of the Egyptians to the promised land. Although Aristotle was not a Christian, he knew God.67 It is in the light of this that we must understand one of the most significant dimensions of his book, his defence of female rule, particularly striking in the light of his fairly straightforward endorsement of what Aristotle has to say about slavery.68 He begins by agreeing with Aristotle’s proposition that women are by nature inferior and subject to men, and goes on to claim that a man’s sphere is public administration, whereas a woman’s is the home. But he argues that Aristotle did not refer here to all men and women: some men are born to servitude, some men are stupid, and therefore some women are superior to some men. Case gives examples of exceptional women in ancient and biblical history, who prove that ‘some women are by nature free, clever, and adorned with wisdom, piety, knowledge and virtue’. This is followed by two more claims: though women are physically weaker than men, they are crucially their equals in virtue, and Aristotle teaches that a woman is subject to a man only in married life, that is, in the household. According to Case, therefore, those who claim that Aristotle objects to female rule are ‘hallucinating’: ‘Why shouldn’t a woman rule who has inherited a kingdom?’ Case condemns as insane ‘that man’ who has written about the rule of women as monstrous, an oblique reference of course to John Knox, whose First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women of 1558 had cited the Politics as support for his condemnation of female monarchy.69 If a woman’s virtue is more excellent than everyone else’s, asks Case, why should she not rule? Finally, Case makes the link with England: the inheritor of the English throne, he says, ‘is now a woman, deny it if you dare: for many years she has reigned blessedly; therefore you should subscribe to the rule of women.’70 One of the most revealing things about Case’s argument is that, consonant with the entire moral tenor of his treatise, he makes superior virtue the condition of female monarchy, and this suggests a link – which, however, is never made explicit – with that form of kingship which Aristotle doubts will ever exist but which he concedes may be the best form of government: that of the ‘pambasileia’, the king or ruling family whose virtue is superior to everyone else’s in the state

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(a kind of total or absolute monarchy). In fact the ‘pambasileia’ had already been associated with the English monarchy in Walter Burley’s commentary on the Politics where he is identified with Edward III.71 Moving on to Case’s discussion of the different forms of constitutions, he attempts to defend Aristotle, not by any means successfully, against those who have accused him of being shifting and contradictory. Though Case again promises that the dialectical method will show that Aristotle is consistent after all in his advocacy of monarchy, he hardly demonstrates this. Instead he supplies a raft of analogical or historical arguments for monarchy, many of which are found in Aquinas rather than Aristotle: as God rules the universe, so one king rules the political community; kingship is the oldest form of government, and the oldest is the best; bees have a king, so do people;72 kingdoms like the Spanish, French and English have lasted for longer than other forms, because the aristocracy and the people cannot stand together unless they are united by a monarch; and so on. Strikingly, Case does not here compare monarchy to the government of a household. To do so would be to damage his defence of female rule and to identify his monarch explicitly with the ‘pambasileia’, the only form of government which Aristotle identifies as qualitatively identical to that of household rule. And yet by the end of this discussion, Case is ready to criticize Aristotle directly, accusing him of ineptitude and ignorance for favouring kingship by election over kingship by succession.73 Case insists that England does not have a mixed constitution: although laws are agreed by the ‘prince, nobles and tribunes of the people’ together, so that no law can be ratified or rescinded without universal consent, a single prince holds dominion, and therefore England is rightly called a monarchy. Here Case is delicately negotiating between his text and the ideological needs of the time. He is trying to provide a defence of the Tudor monarchy, but to do so along the only lines explicitly allowed by Aristotle’s text would generate a model of absolute kingship dangerously reminiscent of tyranny, a particularly hazardous procedure in a period of female rule and one that would undermine Case’s attack on the Machiavellian prince, whom he denigrates as tyrannical.74 The outcome – mixed monarchy rather than mixed government – resembles the conservative position which had been reached by John Whitgift in 1574 by almost the opposite route, an assertion against the mixed government of Thomas Cartwright as quoted above. Whitgift writes: ‘I know that all these three kinds of governments may be mixed together after divers sorts; yet still the state of government is named according to that which most ruleth, and

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bearest the greatest sway … . As in this realm in the court of parliament, although all the states be represented, yet, because the judgment, confirmation, and determination resteth in the prince, therefore the state is neither “aristocraty”, nor “democraty”, but a “monarchy”.’75 The same opinion, drawing explicitly on the Politics, is also found in Robert Persons’ A Conference about the next Succession of 1594.76 Likewise, Case does not describe England in terms of mixed government; yet he is in effect saying that England’s monarchy is tempered after all by some forms of consent, participation and law.77 What makes Case’s political thought interesting and exceptional in an English context is that it is mapped so closely onto an ancient political text, and yet on the central issue of government the end result is nearer to Aquinas and Fortescue than to Aristotle himself. All of this provides a way, then, for reinterpreting the famous image of Elizabeth as primum mobile at the beginning of Case’s (and this) volume, which replicates in visual form the tensions I have described in Case’s text. Consistent with the ubiquity of analogies in the book as a whole, it is, on one level, a kind of visual metaphor for the monarch whose virtue is above all others, the ‘pambasileia’, as embodied in Elizabeth I. As in the image, Aristotle claims of this kind of king that he will not be a part of the political community, and should be regarded as a god. But in Case’s version, she presides over politically active counsellors, noblemen, and administrators. And though the queen holds dominion, unlike the state ruled by a ‘pambasileia’, unchanging justice stands at the centre of everything. The Sphaera civitatis was thus a suitably triumphant publication for the year of the failure of the Spanish Armada, and provides an interesting contrast with the method of Sir Thomas Smith. In his De republica anglorum of about 1583 he tends to classicize English experience, assimilating Tudor forms to ancient Greek and Roman ones. Smith seems to have regarded himself as continuing Aristotle’s great empirical research project of collecting and classifying constitutions, and thus in a letter to Walter Haddon he wrote that he gave his book ‘the shape in which I imagined that Aristotle wrote of the many Greek commonwealths, books which are no longer extant’.78 But Case the dialectician attempts the opposite process: to transform Aristotle from ancient Greek polis dweller to Tudor loyalist and proto-feminist. * Humanism is clearly a part of the Politics’ story in sixteenth-century England. And yet the humanist engagement with this work intermingled

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with other intellectual and ideological forces. On the one hand, as a result of the classical revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was read much more than before, and in Greek or in humanistic Latin translations, most often Bruni’s; and its reception was nourished by a large number of humanistic commentaries and treatises, as well as translations and editions of other ancient works. On the other hand, it also continued to be accessed to a considerable degree through Thomas Aquinas and Peter of Auvergne. And at Oxford it was interpreted more through a humanistically reformed dialectical method than through a philological or historical one. Paradoxically at the heart of university teaching in the later sixteenth century, this work combined all the authority of ancient wisdom with a potentially incendiary message. But that message only circumscribed its usefulness beyond the university sphere: the closer we get to the ways it was read the more its reception seems to owe to medieval interpretation, bolstered by the more widely diffused Ethics, by other, more moderate texts, and by ongoing political realities. If the Politics directed its readers into a more ‘republican’ position, it is at its most extreme one that is more consonant with the contemporary Venetian model than with some of the ancient Greek ones, because the Tudor horror of monarchically derived tyranny was matched by a horror of that ‘many-headed monster’, democracy. Here Tudor writers agreed with Aristotle that Athenian democracy went too far, sometimes comparing the misfortunes consequent upon it with those of contemporary Florence, which included, according to English observers, an abject decline into tyranny: democracy no less than monarchy, it should be emphasized, was seen to contain within itself a tyrannical potential.79 Venice, then, with its elected doge, aristocratic bias and apparent mixture of three constitutional elements, undoubtedly provided a more satisfying model. The very least we may therefore ask of the myth of Venice’s appeal in England is what John Case, at one point in the Sphaera civitatis, asks of the Venetian state itself: where would it be without the doge?80 The answer seems to be: nowhere; and this includes the greatest ‘Nowhere’ of them all, Thomas More’s Utopia. Even in the realm of More’s fantasy, each city has, among other representative officers, a single ruler who is elected for life. In the original Latin edition he is called ‘princeps’; in Ralph Robinson’s English translation of 1551 he is called a ‘prince’; given that the Venetian doge himself was sometimes described by that word, I wonder whether the modern translation in the Yale edition, ‘governor’, takes us back to the intellectual world of the Tudors.81

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As the example of More suggests, there is no obvious conformity between more humanistic approaches and less monarchical ones. Case in the Sphaera civitatis was indebted to a dialectical method which by his time had been humanistically reformed and simplified, and this may explain how he is able to relate Aristotle’s thought in a very direct way to contemporary affairs, when compared both to his medieval predecessors and indeed to many of his continental, more philologically inclined, contemporaries.82 Moreover, he was evidently knowledgeable in Greek, well read in classical literature in general, including, of course, the works of Cicero, and fully up to date with humanistic scholarship on the Politics. Despite all this, as Charles Schmitt observed long ago, ‘By no stretch of the imagination can he be called a “humanistic” interpreter of Aristotle.’83 Sir Thomas Elyot was much more fully committed to the entire Greek and particularly the Roman heritage, to it historical and moral implications, and to language and eloquence. And yet both of these writers, from these different approaches, come out in favour of rather similar versions of monarchy. Elyot’s much reprinted Boke named the Governor is about providing an education to the governing class, and yet it commences with the claim that monarchy, rather than aristocracy or democracy, is the best form of government. The connection between this superior form and the governing class is that the king requires what Elyot calls ‘meane authorities’ or ‘inferior governors’ or ‘in Latin magistri’, or, quoting the Politics, ‘eyes, ears, hands and legs’, and these must be properly educated.84 Elyot demonstrates that neither humanism nor advocacy of the ‘vita activa’ were the preserve of the critics of monarchy,85 while Case demonstrates that the humanists did not have a monopoly over a concern for the moral reform of society. Nevertheless, there are some hints that Aristotle’s radical potential was articulated in certain circumstances. One of these involves Thomas Cartwright. In 1564, during a philosophy disputation at Cambridge, Thomas Byng delivered an oration on the proposition that monarchy was the best form of government. His arguments draw on several of those historical and analogical examples which we have already encountered in Case’s work. Cartwright gave the first response to Byng. Arguing that ‘bitter’ monarchy too easily slides into ‘loathsome’ tyranny, he advocated instead a ‘middle’ constitution. And he claims that although a regal constitution is commonly termed ‘respublica’, states ruled by ‘the many’ are much ‘sweeter’; for this reason he prefers Aristotle to Homer, who had been recommended by Byng. Cartwright’s precise meaning is obscure, but the reference to Aristotle certainly

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suggests that the ‘middle’ consitution that he had in mind was the non-monarchical ‘politeia’. Finally, then, here is a Tudor advocate of Aristotelian republicanism, and the irony is that this disputation was held in front of Elizabeth I. Clearly, it was a rhetorical performance for a particular occasion; in view of Cartwright’s later career as a radical critic of the Elizabethan settlement, he would have done well to follow two of the other speakers who likewise proceeded to criticize monarchy: they begged licence to do so from their listeners on the grounds that it was the custom of the university to dispute in this way.86 Perhaps this was a hint of things to come. Hobbes, looking back in 1651, is witness to a reassessment of the Politics whose ramifications went well beyond the university walls. Among his well-known attacks on Aristotle is the claim in Leviathan that ‘From Aristotles Civill Philosophy, [men] have learned, to call all manner of Commonwealths but the Popular, (such as was at that time the state of Athens,) Tyranny. All Kings they called Tyrants; and the Aristocracy of the thirty Governours set up there by the Lacedemonians that subdued them, the thirty Tyrants: As also to call the condition of the people under the Democracy, Liberty.’87 A few years after the printing of the English edition of Le Roy’s version of the work in 1598, the Politics turned up as an inflammatory text in the treasonous circles of the Earl of Essex.88 Shortly afterwards, with the accession of James I, elevated notions of monarchy became more prominent; indeed the king’s own manifesto of divine right kingship, Basilikon Doron, reveals a close familiarity with the Politics. It is surely possible that in this period, under a range of political and social pressures, the ambivalence already inherent in Aristotle’s word ‘politeia’ became aggravated, and that a gap was forced open, truer to Aristotle’s own analysis, between monarchy on the one hand and the idea of a mixed constitution on the other. After all, it is the world of patricians and plebs – that is, of Romanized oligarchy and democracy – a world devoid of monarchy, albeit a world which is strife-ridden and explosive, which Shakespeare dares to conjure onto the stage in his Coriolanus of c. 1605–10. Moreover, as we have seen, one of the Latin words used to translate ‘politeia’ was ‘republica’: by 1626 Francis Bacon was able to claim unequivocally that ‘it may be in civil states a republic is a better policy than a kingdom’.89 In the Tudor period, however – and even in a humanistic age – English readers of the Politics worked hard to place notions of political participation within some kind of monarchical framework. In doing so, they partook in one of the medieval and early modern world’s characteristic responses to the philosophical heritage of ancient Greece.

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Notes 1 Much of the research for this chapter was undertaken during a fellowship held at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am grateful to the library staff, and to Carol Brobeck of the Folger Institute, for many favours. I would also like to thank for help of various kinds John Guy, Richard Levin, David Rundle and Alan Stewart. 2 See, for example, Leviathan, ed. R. E. Flathman and D. Johnston (London and New York, 1997), p. 119. 3 Among secondary works most pertinent to this discussion are the following: A. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1999); A. McLaren, ‘Reading Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Apologetic’, The Historical Journal, XLII (1999) 911–40; Q. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978); M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); J. Mueller, ‘Contextualizing Milton’s Nascent Republicanism’, in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton, 1995), pp. 262–82; D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984); P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, LXIX (1987) 394–424; B. Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, London, 1991), pp. 443–75; Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. J. Hankins (Cambridge, 2000); M. Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Alabama, 1985); D. Norbrook, ‘Rhetoric, Ideology and the Elizabethan World Picture’, in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. P. Mack (New York, 1994), pp. 140–64; J. Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–19, 126–49; A. F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth-Century Puritanism (Cambridge, 1928), pp. 133–47; M. Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987); B. Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge, 1982), esp. pp. 80–108; H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Republicanism, Monarchism and Liberty’, in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 43–74; Johann Sommerville, ‘English and European Political Ideas in the Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism’, Journal of British Studies, XXXV (1996) 168–94. 4 J. Catto and T. Evans, eds, A History of the University of Oxford, ii: Late Medieval Oxford (Oxford, 1993), p. 431; Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, ed. S. Gibson (Oxford, 1931), pp. 33, 235. 5 See Duke Humphrey’s Library and the Divinity School, 1488-1988 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 93–5. 6 S. Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 22. 7 Gibson, Statuta, pp. 344, 358. 8 J. McConica, ed., A History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University (Oxford, 1986), pp. 40–1. 9 L. Humphrey, The Nobles (London, 1563), book three, no page no.

216 Jonathan Woolfson 10 It is preserved in two copies in the British Library: MS Royal 12 G. XIII and MS Sloane 1982. See L. V. Ryan, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage into Aristotle’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XII (1981) 73–83. 11 See A. Clarke, ed., Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1888), ii, pp. 170–5. 12 See A. Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London, 2000), pp. 53–61. John Case, also a Christ Church alumnus, was linked to Sidney’s circles. In his commentary on ps. Aristotle’s Economics of 1597 Case praises Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and agrees with him about the moral utility of poetry. See R. S. Knapp, ‘“Is it Appropriate for a Man to Fear his Wife?”: John Case on Marriage’, English Literary Renaissance, XXVIII (1998) 407–8. 13 Stewart, Philip Sidney, p. 109. 14 F. Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. N. Smith (Oxford, 1907), p. 15. Cf. Greville’s own very pro-monarchical verse ‘Treatise of Monarchy’ of c. 1599, in which the Aristotelian categories are strongly present, in his Remains, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford, 1965). 15 For a fuller discussion of Sidney and Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics see A. F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst, 1986), pp. 263–9. For a political reading of the Arcadia see B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, 1996). For the case of Spenser, see W. F. Demoss, The Influence of Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics on Spenser (Chicago, 1918). 16 See Collections of Statutes for the University and Colleges of Cambridge (London, 1840), pp. 7, 290; E. S. Leedham-Greene, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1996), p. 38. 17 See Smith’s De recta et emendata linguae Graecae pronuntiatione, in his Literary and Linguistic Works, ed. B. Danielson (Stockholm, 1978), part 2, p. 173. Smith owned a Latin edition of the Politics and a copy of Louis Le Roy’s translation of book five into French: Traitté d’Aristote touchant les changemens, ruines & conservations des estats publics (Paris, 1562): see J. Strype’s Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford, 1820), pp. 277, 289. 18 For humanistic Aristotelianism in Cambridge see also the remarks of Roger Ascham in his The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. L. V. Ryan (Ithaca, 1967), pp. 131–2; and on the education of Edward see Letters of Roger Ascham, ed. M. Hatch and A. Vos (New York, 1989), p. 181. For Cheke’s remarks see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greke (Urbana, 1944), p. 239. For the subsequent influence of this mid-century group of Cambridge humanists see W. S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980). 19 J. Foorth, Synopsis Politica (London, 1582), fols 3v–4r. See Peltonen, Classical Humanism, pp. 20, 25–6, 45 and 49. 20 F. Stubbings, ed., The Statutes of Sir Walter Mildmay kt for Emmanuel College (Cambridge, 1983), p. 101. 21 G. Harvey, Letter Book, ed. E. J. L. Scott (London, 1884), p. 79. See also A. Grafton and L. Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past and Present, CXXIX (1990) 38, 43, 61–2, which suggests among other things that Harvey himself read the Politics in close juxtaposition with Bodin. Harvey also read John Foorde’s Synopsis politica in 1582, and in his marginalia on that work made the somewhat characteristic

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observation: ‘Aristotelis novit politeumata sed non novit strategemata’. See G. C. Moore Smith, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford, 1913), p. 191. For Cambridge inventories see the bibliography cited in note 24 below. That is not to say that books in English were not read in the universities. They were, as Robert Fehrenbach and Elizabeth Leedham-Green (below, note 24) have demonstrated. On Le Roy and his work see W. Gundersheimer, The Life and Works of Louis Le Roy (Geneva, 1966); D. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970), pp. 81–5; P. Lardet, ‘La Politique d’Aristote en français par Louis Le Roy (1568)’, in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. C. Blackwell and S. Kusukawa (Aldershot and Brookfield, 2000), pp. 126–45. The next few paragraphs draw on a somewhat unsystematic search which derived positive results from the following sources: R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-Green, eds, Private Libraries in Renaissance England (Binghamton and Tempe, 1992-), iii, p. 143; iv, pp. 52, 110, 184, 198, 225, 274, 267; v, pp. 28, 116, 186, 190, 191, 266, 175; vi, forthcoming, sub Robert Dowe (I am grateful to Robert Fehrenbach for this information); M. Smith, ‘Some Humanist Libraries in Early Tudor Cambridge’, Sixteenth Century Journal, V (1974) 20; E. S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, Cambridge (Cambridge and New York, 1986), ii, pp. 51–2; D. R. Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, i (Cambridge, 1988), p. 167; Thomas Chard’s booklist addressed to William Knowsley in Cambridge: Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X d. 168 (1), dated 1583; S. Gibson, Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Binders, Printers and Stationers of Oxford, from 1493 to 1638 (London, 1907), pp. 11–16; A. J. Piper, ‘Dr Thomas Swalwell: Monk of Durham, Archivist and Bibliophile (d. 1539)’, in Books and Collectors, 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson, ed. J. P. Carley and C. Tite (London, 1997), p. 83; W. K. Humphries, ed., The Friars’ Libraries (London, 1990), p. 64; M. Rhodes James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge, 1903), pp. 162 and 169; D. G. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1996), no. 428; F. M. Powicke, The Medieval Books of Merton College (Oxford, 1931), p. 102; J. C. T. Oates and H. L. Pink, ‘Three Sixteenth-Century Catalogues of the University Library’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, I (1952) 338; S. Bush and C. J. Rasmussen, ‘Emmanuel College Library’s First Inventory (1597)’, ibid., VIII (1985) 537; N. Ker, ‘Oxford College Libraries in the Sixteenth Century’, Bodleian Library Record, VI (1959) 504–5. See also n. 17 above. For sixteenth-century editions see F. E. Cranz with C. B. Schmitt, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions, 1501–1600 (Baden-Baden, 1984), pp. 217–18. For details of these authors’ works see C. Lohr, ed., Latin Aristotle Commentaries (Florence, 1988); and for Sepúlveda, see A. Coroleu, ‘The Fortuna of Juan Ginés Sepúlveda’s Translations of Aristotle and of Alexander of Aphrodisias’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LIX (1996) 329–31. See the recent survey by H. Jones, Master Tully: Cicero in Tudor England (Nieuwkoop, 1998).

218 Jonathan Woolfson 28 For the Middle Ages, see C. Flüeler, Rezeption und Interpretation der Aristotelischen Politica in späten Mittelalter (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1992); M. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford, 1999); C. Martin, ‘Some Medieval Commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics’, History, XXXVI (1951) 32–7; W. Ullman, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages: An Introduction to the Sources of Medieval Political Ideas (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), pp. 159, 167–73; C. R. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representations in Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1995); D. Luscombe, ‘The Ethics and the Politics in Britain in the Middle Ages’, in Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages, ed. J. Marenbon (Turnhout, 1996), pp. 337–49. 29 See J. Blythe, trans., On the Government of Rulers (Philadelphia, 1997). 30 See, for example, on Hakluyt’s use of Aquinas, D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 72–6. 31 F. E. Cranz, ‘The Publishing History of the Aristotle Commentaries of Thomas Aquinas’, Traditio, XXXIV (1978) 157–92. Cf. Todd, Christian Humanism, pp. 66–7. 32 On Bruni’s methods of translation see J. Schmidt, ‘A Raven with a Halo: The Translation of Aristotle’s Politics’, History of Political Thought, VII (1986) 295–319; and R. Fubini, L’umanesimo italiano e suoi storici (Milan, 2001), pp. 104–15. 33 See further C. Johnson, ‘Aristotle’s Polity: Mixed or Middle Constitution?’, History of Political Thought, XVI (1995) 189–204. 34 The following analysis concentrates in particular on responses to three parts of the Politics in which different meanings of the term ‘politeia’ are used: book 3, chapter vii, 1279a32; book 4, chapter iii, 1290a13; and book 4, chapter ix, 1294a9–b36. 35 J. Lefèvre d’Etaples, In politica Aristotelis introductio (Paris, 1508), fols 8v–12v. On his Aristotelian work generally see E. Kessler, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century: The Lefèvre Enterprise’, in Blackwell and Kusukawa, Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pp. 1–21. 36 P. Vettori, Commentarii in VIII Libros Aristotelis de optimo statu civitatis (Florence, 1576), p. 216. But cf. ibid., pp. 298–9. 37 BL, MS Royal 12 G XIII, fols 16v–17r. 38 Ethics, book 8, 1160a. See, for example, J. Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588), p. 236. 39 See for example L. Le Roy, Aristotles Politiques (London, 1598), pp. 189, 190, 205. 40 The commentary of Aquinas/Auvergne was first published with the parallel texts of Bruni and Moerbeke together in 1570. See Thomas Aquinas, In octo Aristotelis libros Politicorum expositio (Venice, 1595), p. 42. This part of the work, which is still attributed to Aquinas rather than Auvergne, is a commentary on the Politics, book III, chapter 7, 1279a32: ‘quando multitudo principatur intendens ad utilitatem communem, vocatur Respubl. quod est nomen commune omnibus politiis’. Originally Aquinas had ‘quando multitudo principatur intendens ad utilitatem communem, vocatur politia quod est nomen commune omnibus politiis’. See St Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, iil.A (Rome, 1971), p. 204. 41 Cf. A. Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 3–4. Machiavelli in the Discorsi (for example in book i, chapter 2) makes a

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42 43 44 45 46

47

48

49

50 51

52

53

straightforward distinction between republics and principalities; this kind of distinction appears to have been much more common in Italian than English political thought. See E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969), p. 125. Cf. Politics, book 2, chapter vi, 1265b26. Ibid., book 4, chapter ii, 1289a26. Ibid., book 3, chapter vii, 1279a38; book 3, chapter xvii, 1288a8–15; book 3, ch xiii, 1284a3; and book 3, chapter xiv, 1285b3–20. E.g. ibid., book 3, chapter xv, 1286b22; book 3, ch xvii, 1287b36. Ibid., book 4, chapter xi, 1295a25–1296b34. It may be that the specific ‘politeia’ is called by the same name as the general ‘politeia’ because it is the most authentic – because most pluralistic – of the right constitutions. Cf. F. D. Miller, Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics (Oxford, 1995), pp. 164–5, 252–69. But see also an argument for Aristotle’s ‘pambasileia’ as a brand of aristocracy, in L. A. Alexander, ‘The Best Regimes in Aristotle’s Politics’, History of Political Thought, XXI (2000) 189–216. See for examples book 3, chapter xiii, 1283b13; and book 7, chapter xiv, 1332b12. And cf. B. Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), pp. 85–7; Miller, Nature, Justice and Rights, pp. 234–9; and the extremely valuable study of W. R. Newell, ‘Superlative Virtue: The Problem of Monarchy in Aristotle’s Politics’, in Essays on the Foundation of Aristotelian Political Science, ed. C. Lord and D. O’Connor (Berkeley and Oxford, 1991), pp. 191–211. On the medieval responses, see especially N. Rubinstein, ‘The History of Word Politicus in Early Modern Europe’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 31–62; and N. Rubinstein, ‘Marsilius of Padua and the Italian Political Thought of his Time’, in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. R. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield and B. Smalley (Evanston, 1965), pp. 50–3. For Calvin see his Institutes (from the 1541 edition onwards), in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. H. Höpfl (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 56–7, 82–3. For Travers see his A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline (no place, 1574), pp. 158–61, 177–9. Particularly striking is Travers’ comparison of his proposed Assembly of Elders for the church with the councils of ancient Greek states, and his use of the term ‘kingdome and commonwelthe’ where he might have used ‘commonwelthe’ alone, perhaps indicating that he thought the two things mutually exclusive. For Cartwight, see pp. 206, 210–14. Ethics, book 8, 1160a. See A. Sammut, Unfredo duca di Gloucester e gli umanisti italiani (Padua, 1980), p. 150: ‘Legitimarum vero specierum praestantissima omnium est rex dignitate ac bonitate, post regem optimates, post optimates respublica.’ R. Dees, ‘Bruni, Aristotle, and the Mixed Regime in “On the Constitution of the Florentines”’, Medievalia et humanistica, XV (1987) 1–24; Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism, pp. 174–5. See also Hankins’ important study, ‘The Baron Thesis after Forty Years and Some Studies of Leonardo Bruni’, Journal of the History of Ideas, LVI (1995) 327–30. See for examples ‘Admonition by the father of FA to him being a burgesse of the parliament for his better behaviour therein (1579)’, in An Account of a

220 Jonathan Woolfson

54

55 56

57 58

59 60 61

62 63 64

65

Quarrel between Arthur Hall, esq., and Melchisedech Mallerie, gent. (London, 1815), p. 79; R. Dallington, The View of Fraunce (London, 1604 (written in 1598)), sig. D4v. The edition of Polybius published in English in 1568, translated by Christopher Watson, does not include book six, containing the relevant material. On Polybius’ contribution to this tradition see especially K. von Fritz, The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity (New York, 1954); and A. Momigliano, ‘Polybius’ Reappearance in Western Europe’, in his Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford, 1977), pp. 79–98. Discorsi, 1.2. Cf. Cicero, De republica, 2.41 as found originally in Nonius Marcellus, De conpendiosa doctrina (Leipzig, 1903 [first printed Venice, 1471]), ed. W. M. Lindsay, p. 542. See also M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism, p. 50. For Sturm, Ascham and Pole see R. Ascham, Complete Works, ed. J. A. Giles (London, 1864–65), i, part 2, p. 324; and Hatch and Vos, Letters of Roger Ascham, p. 209. For sixteenth-century reconstructions of De republica through Nonius and others, see E. Heck, Die Bezeugung von Ciceros Schrift De re publica (Hildesheim, 1966), pp. 270–82. For the English fortuna of that part of De republica which was fully known in the Renaissance, the Somnium Scipionis, see D. R. Carlson, ‘Morley’s Translations from Roman Philosophers and English Courtier Literature’, in ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court, ed. M. Axton and J. P. Carley (London, 2000), pp. 131–51; and Cathy Curtis’s discussion in this volume. For discussion and bibliography see J. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1992), pp. 39–59. See in particular the classic work of J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). For Foorde see his Synopsis politica, fols 14v–15r. On Starkey’s debt to Aristotle, see T. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 147–51. See G. Paia, Marsiglio da Padova nella riforma e nella controriforma: fortuna ed interpretazione (Padua, 1977), pp. 143–66; S. Lockwood, ‘Marsilius of Padua and the Case for the Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, I (1991) 89–119. Cf. G. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 213–16. Merbury, A Discourse of Royal Monarchy (London, 1581), p. 20. This unduly neglected work deserves a full study, but see J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), pp. 367–70; J. McConica, ‘Humanism and Aristotle in Tudor Oxford’, English Historical Review, XCIV (1979) 310–13; C. Schmitt, ‘John Case and Machiavelli’, in Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, ed. S. Bertelli and G. Ramakus (Florence, 1978), i, pp. 231–40. On Case and his milieu generally (excluding his political thought), see Charles Schmitt’s fundamental John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston and Montreal, 1983). Case, Sphaera civitatis, p. 9.

Between Bruni and Hobbes 221 66 67 68 69 70

71

72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80

81

Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., pp. 1–6. See also C. Schmitt, ‘John Case and Machiavelli’. Case, Sphaera civitatis, p. 31. J. Knox, Political Writings, ed. M. A. Breslow (Washington, 1985), p. 43. Case, Sphaera civitatis, p. 34: ‘Haeres est Angliae iam una faemina, nega si audeas; per multos annos regnavit beata, faeminarum imperio ergo subscribas’. See also pp. 18, 32–3, 40–1. Case developed his view on women further in his 1597 commentary on the Economics. As a defence of Elizabeth’s rule, there are some striking resemblances here to the earlier thought of John Aylmer, although their conclusions about English government are quite different. See McLaren, Political Culture, pp. 59–69. On this aspect of Burley’s work see S. H. Thomson, ‘Walter Burley’s Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle’, in Mélanges Auguste Pelzer (Louvain, 1947), pp. 577–8; and C. Nederman, ‘Kings, Peers and Parliament: Virtue and Corulership in Walter Burley’s Commentarius in VIII Libros Politicorum Aristotelis’, in his Medieval Aristotelianism and its Limits (Aldershot and Brookfield, 1997), essay no. xiv. The analogy with bees was very common indeed. See for examples T. Elyot, The Book named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), p. 7; and Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 94. See also Norbrook, ‘Rhetoric, Ideology and the Elizabethan World Picture’, in Mack, Renaissance Rhetoric, p. 143; T. Raylor, ‘Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees’, in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. M. Leslie and T. Raylor (Leicester and London, 1992), p. 111. Case, Sphaera civitatis, pp. 233–42, 261–8, 282–300, 306–10. Cf. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I. John Whitgift, The Defence of the Answer to the Admonition, in his Works, ed. J. Ayre (Cambridge, 1851–53), i, p. 393. [R. Doleman], A Conference about the next Succession (no place, 1594), pp. 3, 9–17, 134–6. Case, Sphaera civitatis, p. 238. See also his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, Speculum moralium quaestionum (Oxford, 1585), p. 558. Smith, De republica anglorum, ed. M. Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 1. See also Grafton and Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”’, p. 41. See for examples Elyot, The Book named the Governor, pp. 6, 11; William Thomas, Works, ed. A. D’Aubant (London, 1774), pp. 161–7; Merbury, Discourse, pp. 11–12; Philip Sidney, Works, ed. A. Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922), iii, p. 127; Richard Beacon (drawing on Machiavelli’s Discorsi), Solon his Follie, ed. C. Carroll and V. Carey (Binghamton, 1999), p. 20. Case, Sphaera civitatis, p. 265: ‘Venetorum status hodie aristocratia dicitur, at quaero an sine duce floreat.’ For the myth of Venice in England generally see A. Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 17–68, and H. Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics, Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford, 1996), pp. 115–32. T. White, ‘Aristotle and Utopia’, Renaissance Quarterly, XXIX (1976) 635–75. Utopia, ed. E. Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven and London, 1965), p. 122. For More as ruler of Utopia, see his letter to Erasmus, in Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1906-58), ii, no. 499. There are sentiments more clearly hostile to monarchy in More’s early poetry. See, for

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82

83 84

85 86

87 88

89

example, More, Latin Poems, ed. C. H. Miller, L. Bradner, C. Lynch and R. Oliver (New Haven and London, 1984), pp. 228–30. For the doge as a prince see, for example, M. M. Newett, ed., Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494 (Manchester, 1907), p. 127. Cf. for Cambridge L. Jardine, ‘The Place of Dialectic Teaching in SixteenthCentury Cambridge’, Studies in the Renaissance, XXI (1974) 31–62. And also E. J. Ashworth, ‘Logic in Sixteenth-Century England: Humanist Dialectic and the New Aristotelianism’, Studies in Philology, LXXXVIII (1991) 224–36. Schmitt, John Case, p. 178. Elyot, The Book named the Governor, p. 13. Cf. Politics, book iii, chapter xvii, 1287b25; P. Hogrefe, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot’s Intention in the Opening Chapters of The Governor’, Studies in Philology, LX (1963) 133–40. Cf. the remarks of J. Pocock in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), p. 395. J. Nichols, Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I (London, 1788–1805), iii, pp. 61–76; A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 419–21. See also Norbrook, ‘Rhetoric, Ideology and the Elizabethan World Picture’, in Mack, Renaissance Rhetoric, p. 146. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 242. See Grafton and Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”’, p. 33; Norbrook, ‘Rhetoric, Ideology and the Elizabethan World Picture’, in Mack, Renaissance Rhetoric, pp. 140–64. Bacon, ‘An advertisement touching the controversies of the Church of England’, in his Works (London, 1879), i, p. 347.

11 Humanism and Science in the Elizabethan Universities1 Robert Goulding

In 1584, John Blagrave published an ingenious work entitled The mathematicall Iewell, in which he described a version of the universal astrolabe.2 For the design of this instrument, and for many of its applications, Blagrave drew on the printed works of several continental instrument-makers; above all, Gemma Frisius. There is much in this work, however, which is entirely original with Blagrave. In the fifth book, for instance, he promises that his Jewel will demonstrate the whole art of spherical triangles without any whit of that great toyle by synes supplementes, tables, proportions, Arithmeticall calculations, and such like: by which Ptolomeus, Regiomontan, Copernicus, and all other Authors before me, have wrought them.3 He fulfils this promise amply, using his Jewel as a calculating machine to solve every type of spherical triangle – even those whose solution had defeated such great mathematicians as Regiomontanus and Copernicus. The Jewel provided answers which were only approximate, as he himself admits; yet the operation of the Jewel was so simple, in these and many other astronomical problems, that he thought it worth while to publish his results in order to help many willing and forwarde wits hereafter to prosecute rare inventions and conclusions, for divers Astronomicall and Cosmographicall matters, who before tyme have been stalled and myred with the tedious science of Synes, and their appurtenances: beyng indeed as I may terme it, another kinde of Geometrie and a darke and intricate art.4 223

224 Robert Goulding

This criticism of past mathematicians and their dark practices was based on an intimate knowledge of their works: Blagrave demonstrates throughout his Mathematicall Iewell that he had read Regiomontanus and Copernicus in Latin, and had thoroughly understood their mathematics. He had also studied the staple textbooks of the university astronomy curriculum: Sacrobosco’s Sphaera and Peurbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum.5 And Blagrave did indeed attend university: he spent two years at St John’s College, Oxford, but left the university without a degree.6 Yet in the Iewell, he takes pains to dissociate himself from the universities and their brand of learning. He proclaims, almost proudly, his lack of education, and confidently expects his work to be attacked by the more formally learned. At one point, imagining those who will snicker at his book and at his ‘rusticall education and simple capacitie’, he responds angrily with a string of equally rustical proverbs: Well, bee as be may is no banning, such a ones words are not worthie the scanning, hee that feareth every grasse must not pisse in every medow. Babling tongues be hanging rype, I wey not theyr glavering …7 Such outbursts are rare, however. Usually, Blagrave maintains an ironically modest demeanour, begging the indulgence of those readers who possess a wider education than he can admit to. In his prefatory poem, for instance, he predicts the reaction of a university don, whom he calls ‘Zoylus’, after the pedantic ancient Greek grammarian: Though that my name be not Among the learned rolde, Let that not bee a blot, Ere that my tale be told. Yet Zoylus seemes to say, Why? what? and whence is he? A childe but yesterday, And now to scale the skie? Where gathered he his skill? What tutor tolde him in? The Vniversities denill That ere he dwelt therein.8 We know of one university educated contemporary who studied Blagrave’s accomplished work with great care, and took seriously his claims to have obtained his expertise in the sciences outside of the university system. Gabriel Harvey’s copy of the Mathematicall Iewell is held in the British Library, and contains copious annotations in his hand.9 These fall into two main classes. First, there are many notes on the mathematics of the work itself, including paper models of the Jewel. Of more interest, however, are Harvey’s comments on the relative state

Humanism and Science in the Elizabethan Universities 225

of mathematics in London and at the universities. Next to Blagrave’s poem, with its claim that the universities would not recognize him, Harvey writes: ‘An Youth: & no University-man. The more shame for sum Doctors of the Universities, that may learn of him’. Later in the book (at p. 19), when Blagrave describes how he came to design the Jewel after reading no more than one or two astronomical textbooks, Harvey notes: ‘His sole, or principal Autors. Schollars have the bookes, & Practitioners the Learning.’ Elsewhere in the book, Harvey names half a dozen practitioners of London – ‘mathematical mechanicians’, as he calls them – who have provided him with geometrical and astronomical instruments. ‘I esteem those men most highly’, he writes, ‘who are able to do the most. The empirical world cares only for empirical things.’10 In comparing London with the universities, Blagrave and Harvey paint an unflattering portrait of the state of the sciences at Oxford and Cambridge. Their view has persisted to this day, dominating the historiography of English science in the Elizabethan period. Modern critics cite both the testimonies of contemporary critics like Blagrave and the statutes of the universities, which rarely mention instruction in the sciences when specifying the course of study for the arts degree.11 Frances Yates made perhaps the most forceful indictment of scholarship at Oxford, taking her cue from Giordano Bruno’s tirades against Oxford in his Cena de le Ceneri and De la causa, principio, e l’uno, works written during his English residence. Yates (and Bruno) characterized Oxford dons as pedantic Ciceronian humanists and narrow-minded Aristotelians, who had abandoned the university’s medieval philosophical tradition, and replaced it with a sterile linguistic exegesis of the Greek text.12 James McConica questioned her assessment, describing the intellectual world of sixteenth-century Oxford as a ‘deep and eclectic culture’.13 The university’s teaching had changed over the course of the sixteenth century, to take account of the new humanist approaches to learning; for example, scholastic logic was marginalized (though not entirely abandoned) in favour of a new humanist dialectic ‘directed no longer to technical achievements, but to pedagogical simplicity and to a training for public debate on public issues’.14 But, as McConica’s examination of the writings of John Rainolds and John Case demonstrated, even if Bruno and Yates were correct to identify a shift in the intellectual life of post-medieval Oxford, their accusations of the shallowness of thought at the university were untenable. Nevertheless, despite his much more positive assessment, McConica still saw the universities as ‘not … notably propitious’ environments for the sciences, and even ‘odious to the single-minded, whether of religious or scientific bent’.15

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Mordechai Feingold, however, has challenged the traditional negative view of science at the universities. The statutes, he argues, described only what was (in principle) required by the university. They referred, moreover, only to the teaching which was provided in the university’s name, and had no bearing, for instance, on instruction provided at the college level. Furthermore, Feingold has identified dozens of members of both universities who had interests in the sciences, and argues that there was, in fact, a vital scientific culture at Oxford and Cambridge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Extra-curricular scholarly activity, centred mainly in the colleges, was at least as important as the official course of study laid down by the university. Even the arts degree itself had de facto taken on an encyclopaedic character, surveying all the arts and sciences (even those, such as astronomy, which the statutes assigned to the MA course) in the first two years, for the benefit of those many students who left the university without a degree.16 Even if the statutes did not seem to provide for significant instruction in the sciences, all students could expect to receive at least an introduction; and there was, most importantly, a ‘parallel academy’ at the colleges where those whose interests lay in this direction could find teachers and colleagues. What, then, are we to make of the criticisms of Blagrave and others? They could be dismissed as ill-informed carping by outsiders, were it not for contemporary voices from within the academy who complained in similar terms of the university’s failings, and attributed the decline of the sciences, at least in part, to the single-minded pursuit of the humanistic disciplines: grammar, rhetoric and the study of classical languages and literature. The same internal critics drew attention to problems with the provision of teaching at the university level. There seems to have been a perception not only that the system of university teaching was failing in the sciences, but that this failure was lamentable and required a remedy. The repeated reforms of the teaching system also suggest that the provision of university-level education was perceived to be inadequate, and that this inadequacy was a subject of concern to university administrators. Indeed, it is clear from the university registers that the traditional form of arts teaching at Oxford and Cambridge, which had served the universities since their foundation, was close to collapse by the end of the sixteenth century. The decline was particularly severe in the quadrivial arts (that is, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), despite several reforms intended to shore up the system. I shall discuss the situation in Oxford only; the teaching system in

Humanism and Science in the Elizabethan Universities 227

Cambridge, although originally very similar to Oxford’s, was more thoroughly reformed in the early modern period, and many elements of the professorial system were already in place in the late sixteenth century.17 The reforms at Cambridge had been forced by the same pressures as the later ones at Oxford; they did not, however, affect the teaching of the sciences until the seventeenth century. At Oxford, until the early Stuart period, all university-level teaching in the arts was provided by newly created Masters of Arts. It was, in fact, a condition of the MA degree, from the very foundation of the universities, that the masters should remain at the university for two years after inception, or award of the degree, delivering ‘ordinary lectures’, during which time they were called ‘regent masters’; these compulsory lectures consisted of reading out a text set by the university and commenting upon it. This system, at least at the time it was founded, had some advantages for the university. First, the teaching cost the university nothing; the lecturers were paid directly by the students, each undergraduate surrendering a shilling or two to his teacher at the start of the year’s course. There was also a guaranteed pool of teachers at the start of each academic year.18 The university thus kept itself at arm’s length from the provision of teaching; all of the expense and labour was borne by the undergraduates and graduates. These very strengths of the system (at least from the university’s point of view) also created problems, which arose long before the system had reached its crisis in the late sixteenth century. In the teaching system’s original form, regent masters were free to choose the art on which they wished to lecture. Inevitably, this often led to an uneven distribution of teachers among the arts. To remedy this, a statute of 1431 at Oxford stipulated that each year’s new supply of regent masters should be divided into ten subject groupings (for the seven liberal arts and the three philosophies, moral, natural and metaphysical); each regent master was permitted to deliver ordinary lectures only on his allotted discipline.19 Originally, the university had not even provided accommodation for the lectures; it was the regent master’s responsibility to find a space – often only a shopkeeper’s spare room – in which to deliver his lectures. A document from 1300 records 54 such ‘schools’ scattered throughout the city of Oxford.20 At around the same time that the subject-division reform was implemented, the university and its benefactors built the Divinity School and Arts Schools in order to provide a central location for the delivery of ordinary lectures.21 But there were more fundamental problems in the system which were not so easily fixed. For some regent masters who aspired to a career outside of the university, two years spent in compulsory service

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was an unwelcome deferment of their ambitions. And for some, it meant virtual penury. While good teachers could attract enough students to make a decent living, those who were not so gifted found themselves lecturing to an empty room – satisfying the letter of the statutes but receiving no payment whatsoever in return.22 It is not surprising, then, that throughout the sixteenth century we read in the university register of masters asking to be excused from their teaching duties, pleading the pressure of ‘business concerns’ or illness.23 Some simply refused to satisfy their obligations; on these, the university imposed fines, which must have seemed a small penalty to avoid a two-year burden of teaching.24 The situation was exacerbated by the unwillingness of many students to attend the ordinary lectures. They were obliged to attend, and a fine was levied on those who missed lectures; but the long lists in the register of fines received from undergraduates show that the students were as reluctant to learn as the masters were to teach. The fault, it seems, lay with the form of the teaching itself. Before the advent of printing, it had made perfect sense for a master to read out a manuscript of a set text and append his own observations upon it. But when printed texts were readily available, along with commentaries by noted scholars, this method of teaching must have seemed tedious and irrelevant.25 A series of de facto reforms were introduced early in the sixteenth century, which were intended to stem the flow of defaulting regent masters. It became almost automatic to excuse regent masters from their duties as soon as a new class of MA graduates incepted, in effect reducing the period of regency from two years to a single year. Moreover, only a small number of the masters were chosen to lecture in each subject; those who were excused paid the customary ‘fine’, which was passed directly as a stipend to the masters ‘actually regent’ (as they were called), who delivered the ordinary lectures for that year. These reforms were made official, and written into the university statutes in the 1550s.26 The removal of competition for students, however, seems to have hastened the decline of the system. In the second half of the sixteenth century – despite frequent committees appointed to investigate the state of teaching – the university register continues to record defaulting lecturers and non-attending students, especially in the quadrivial arts. The music lecture fell almost entirely into disuse; lecturers continued to be appointed, but rarely fulfilled their duties. Matthew Gwinne, for instance, was appointed music lecturer at Oxford for the year 1582–83. The university accepted his petition to be released from his duties

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because, as he put it, ‘this subject, if not entirely useless, is at least little practised’.27 The appointment of this lecturer had, in fact, become little more than a formality; the university register reveals that lecturers were automatically excused from teaching this subject, no further reason being needed than ‘students are not interested’.28 The haphazard provision of lectures was bound to have the most profound effect on the sciences. A proper understanding of astronomy depended upon a good grounding in arithmetic and geometry. This was recognized in the statutes, which originally required all students to study arithmetic for one term and geometry for two, before they were permitted to attend the two terms of astronomy lectures; the statutes of 1564-65 increased the arithmetic requirement to three terms.29 To give but one example of how this sensible arrangement could be undermined, the following petition was allowed by Congregation in 1580: It is requested that those bachelors who are obliged to attend the geometry lecture be promoted to the astronomy lecture while the aforementioned lecture is intermitted. The reason for this is that Mr Wignall, the public lecturer in geometry, has left Oxford, called away on important business.30 On the face of it, then, it is easy to see how the sciences – at least as they were ‘officially’ taught by the university – could have suffered during this period. Undergraduates were permitted to reach the higher levels of the science curriculum without a sufficient grounding in the essential preliminaries, and were taught in a stilted, old-fashioned manner. It was a system, moreover, that did not reward innovation or originality in its lecturers; the temptation must have been to fulfil the university’s requirements as minimally as possible and spend the year of regency expounding the simplest possible text. These preliminary conclusions – and their implications for the relationship of humanism and science in the universities – are confirmed in the manuscript documents which I shall now examine. In 1570, Henry Savile was chosen to be one of the ordinary lecturers in astronomy. The text of his lectures survives in manuscript in the Bodleian Library.31 They can be divided into three main sections. The first consists of a praise of the sciences in general and an exhortation to their study, to which are appended separate descriptions of each of the mathematical arts. The second main section is a history of mathematics, from Adam to Ptolemy. The final section takes up the bulk of the lectures: two and half of the three volumes. This is a book-by-book

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exposition of Ptolemy’s Almagest, in great mathematical detail. Savile does not restrict himself to the ancient astronomer, however; the greater part of his exposition is devoted to the achievements of ‘modern’ astronomers: the Arabs, Regiomontanus and, above all others, Copernicus. In the first of these lectures, he alludes to the unpopularity of ordinary lectures; that few of those appointed entered the lecture room willingly; and that as an ordinary lecturer he was, by common opinion, ‘almost less than nothing’.32 Yet, he says, he has taken on the task willingly for, despite his lowly status, his ambition was nothing less than ‘to restore dignity to the mathematical lectures’.33 Had Savile actually delivered the complete series of lectures – there is some doubt whether he actually taught for more than two terms34 – and had his students understood his advanced material in detail, he would certainly have succeeded in his ambition. But, even without prejudging the level of science at Oxford, there can be no doubt that Savile’s lectures on astronomy far exceeded the capacity of his students; perhaps only half a dozen people in England at this time would have had the technical competence to follow them. They compare favourably with the work of theoretical astronomers on the continent. Indeed, when Savile travelled through Europe in the early 1580s, he collaborated with European astronomers as an equal on refinements to the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems.35 And despite the very ambitious material he had chosen for his lectures, it seems that Savile himself had few illusions about the competence of his audience. Savile opens his lectures with the story of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus, shipwrecked with his companions on the shore of Rhodes. As Vitruvius36 told the story, Aristippus saw geometrical figures drawn into the sands, and was thus able to announce to his friends that other human beings could not be too far away. Savile’s immediate source for this story, however, was not Vitruvius but a preface written by Philipp Melanchthon to a geometry textbook.37 According to the reformer, Aristippus concluded from the diagrams not just that there were men on the island, but that there were men who were humanely educated and who would show kindness to destitute strangers. Melanchthon concludes the story with these words: How I wish that those footprints of men which Aristippus marvelled at on the shore were more frequent in our schools. For these arts have lain deserted and neglected for many centuries now.38

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Savile echoes Melanchthon: And how I wish that, just as Aristippus predicted accurately about the men of Rhodes, so too could I guarantee to myself, by the same signs, the humanity of the men of Oxford.39 But this is only the beginning of Savile’s sustained criticism of science at Oxford, which he returns to several times in the preliminary lectures. At one point, he connects the decline in mathematics with the vogue for humanist learning. Oxford, he says, in its pursuit of ‘eloquence, the Greek language and civic philosophy’ is ‘now more Attic than Athens herself’.40 Once, he says, the whole world looked to Oxford for instruction in mathematics, astronomy and physics; for a long time, however, there has not been a single student with even an adequate grasp of these disciplines.41 Every section of the university, it seems, must bear the blame for this neglect of the sciences: the students themselves, who are too lazy to exert themselves in learning a subject they dismiss as useless and difficult; the teachers, who ‘day and night harp on at the same old erroneous ideas’;42 and the university itself, which prescribes in its statutes books which are wholly inappropriate for the teaching of the subjects. Only remedy these faults, he says, and then indeed we shall have very many mathematicians. And not Oronce Fines as in France, nor Sebastian Munsters as in Germany, but Archimedes and Ptolemies, or rather Swinesheads, Bacons and Wallingfords, as there were in that long ago Oxford so different from our own.43 But it will not be an easy task to return Oxford to its former glory; and Savile’s more immediate problem was with the young men seated in his auditorium. In his lecture on the nature of arithmetic, Savile warns them of the rigours ahead. He is intending to expound to them the whole of Ptolemy’s Almagest, and some mathematical grounding will be assumed. Those who cannot count, or add and subtract simple numbers, he says, would be best advised to leave immediately.44 He will also require a thorough knowledge of the first six and last three geometrical books of the Elements and recommends that they refresh their knowledge of these books in the evenings. He imagines some of his students complaining that Oronce Fine or Sacrobosco would not have required so much homework; these were the elementary authors which, by the statutes, the astronomy lecturer was allowed to substitute

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for Ptolemy, and from this remark we might infer it was the usual practice to do so. But so that no one will feel shortchanged, he promises to cover everything in these authors in a single lecture – ‘for [he says] it is completely absurd to waste an entire year in mere definitions and divisions of circles’.45 Somewhat disingenuously, he predicts that none of his students will have the slightest difficulty with the more advanced material he has chosen to present, ‘since they have profitably devoted three terms to arithmetic and two to geometry, not only attending ordinary lectures but also pursuing private study – they should have done so, and indeed I hope they have’.46 Savile returns to the customary teaching of astronomy at Oxford several times in these lectures. At one point, for instance, he says that some may not even recognize the subject, as he will teach it, to be astronomy at all. ‘They think that the only kind of astronomy is the one that they themselves have learnt; and because they find nothing of this type in Sacrobosco or Oronce Fine, they consider that it is not astronomy at all, making their judgement not from reality but from their own laziness.’47 Elsewhere, he condemns those who believe that astronomy consists in the sterile drawing of circles, in which no mathematical reasoning, or even understanding of the phenomena, has a place.48 Real astronomy is not available from simplified handbooks, but demands the study of the greatest works in the genre, Ptolemy’s Almagest and the writings of his modern follower (as Savile saw him), Copernicus: But someone will say, did Copernicus not add something to astronomy? And what about the countless other books written about astronomy? All the others I will not hesitate to reject out of hand. For what is in all these little books on the sphere that is not already treated much more abundantly and clearly in Ptolemy? As for Copernicus, he has indeed earned immortal fame; but he has not added anything new to astronomy that was not already thoroughly discussed by Ptolemy. Instead, he has clarified the same problems by means of a new method, with different hypotheses.49 By chance, another ordinary lecturer at Oxford has left evidence in manuscript of his teaching, which represents the more usual form of astronomy teaching in the university, at least as Savile portrays it. In 1591, Francis Mason of Merton College delivered the ordinary lectures in astronomy, and the notes he made in English in preparation for these lectures are extant.50 These consist of an elementary precis of Sacrobosco’s Sphere and the medieval Theoricae planetarum. The system of concentric

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spheres for the sun and moon is explained in some detail, and the circles carefully drawn; but no mathematics whatsoever appears in these notes – not even the numerical parameters for the spheres of the luminaries. Nor, incidentally, is there any mention of Copernicus; there is, in fact, no mention of any author outside of the texts which Mason had chosen to expound. This is precisely the ‘sterile drawing of circles’ which Savile had decried in his ordinary lectures some twenty years earlier. One part of Savile’s proposed remedy for the decline of the sciences was, as we have seen, simply that the students of Oxford should study some real astronomy, without relying on simplified and, ultimately, barren handbooks. The other part involved the humanism of Oxford. Savile himself was an accomplished humanist; in fact, one of the most skilled Greek scholars in Elizabethan England. Yet, as we have seen, he connected the decline in the sciences with Oxford’s much boasted ‘Atticism’. The problem, however, was not with humanism per se, but with a narrow, exclusively literary understanding of the humanist enterprise: ‘If I asked Cicero to translate Archimedes’, he says at one point, ‘I believe he would make many errors.’51 But Archimedes was no less fit a subject for a humanist than Cicero; and from the very first page of his lectures, Savile insists that ‘these sciences of ours should be considered, and in fact are humanities’, and can be embraced only by a humanely educated person.52 He gives many examples – both in the introductory lecture and, especially, in the later history of mathematics – of ancient figures, heroes of the humanist movement, who had devoted themselves to the study of the sciences. But his central thesis in the early lectures is that mathematics is an essential part of philosophy – Platonist philosophy in particular. Complementing this is an insistence that mathematics has nothing whatsoever to do with merchants and common craftsmen; as modern scholars have suggested, one of the most significant obstacles for the sciences at Oxford may have been the perception that they were not suitable subjects for a gentleman.53 In his discussion of astronomy, for instance, he touches very briefly on navigation, but abandons it with the remark: ‘I know most of you despise it.’ Mathematics, he insists earlier in the lectures, is a pure philosophical art; more certain in its conclusions than physics or even theology, and itself a ‘path to God’. His audience, he says, knows how much effort he has expended in mastering these arts; do they think he would really have spent so many sleepless nights poring over Archimedes and Ptolemy if he had wanted simply to be able to measure the height of a tower, or build an astrolabe?54 These practical tasks do involve mathematics, he admits;

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but the theoretical mathematician descends from his contemplation to instruct and guide the hand of the unlettered craftsman; he does not dabble in such things himself.55 Savile’s remarks on the practical sciences seem curiously disconnected from the realities of English science, at least as it was practised outside the academy. Unlike Harvey, Savile nowhere lists his favoured London instrument-makers. It is clear from his early notebooks and annotations in printed books that his interests were (as he claimed in these lectures) purely theoretical and, most importantly, drawn only from continental sources. But another surviving introductory lecture on the sciences shows a much closer engagement with Tudor science outside the universities. In 1588, Henry Briggs delivered a set of ordinary lectures on arithmetic at Cambridge. The first of these survives in manuscript in the British Library, and provides a vivid account of the state of the sciences and the threat which Briggs, at least, perceived in the superiority of science as it was practised outside the university – and, especially, in London.56 Briggs delivered his lectures almost two decades after Savile and, as far as we know, the two men had not yet met. Yet there are striking similarities between their lectures. Like Savile, Briggs uses predominantly Platonist arguments to justify the study of the sciences. Mathematics, says Briggs, should be valued as a propaedeutic and, in fact, the only gateway to philosophy and the other liberal arts.57 He allows that this may seem a paradoxical statement to those who know only rudimentary arithmetic and a little Euclid (or, worse still, a smattering of geometry from Ramus); but, just as grammar – the means by which we can express any thought that occurs to us – is built on the uninspiring foundation of declensions and conjugations, so too are profound mathematical truths constructed upon the elementary truths of geometry and arithmetic. It is only ignorance which has led his contemporaries to believe that these trivial propositions are all there is to mathematics. Elementary geometry and arithmetic are not intrinsically interesting, but are nevertheless essential groundwork for such advanced subjects as spherical geometry, conic sections and algebra.58 Like Savile, Briggs was also an admirer of Copernicus, though his enthusiasm for the new astronomy and rejection of the traditional Ptolemaic system went far beyond Savile’s cautiously conciliatory approach: [Astronomy] has corrected the error of our senses, and removed the clouds of vulgar credulity from our eyes, so that we affirm that the

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terrestrial globe (usually thought to occupy the central and lowest place and to remain stationary) in fact moves constantly, and by its several movements creates all of those forward and backward courses which the ignorant ascribe to the heavens themselves.59 Briggs diverges markedly from Savile only in his treatment of mechanics. While Savile had hardly been able to contain his displeasure at having to mention this science in his survey of the mathematical arts, Briggs praises it highly. It is, he says, an art as yet only in its infancy, which concerns itself with every kind of motion, both natural and violent. The grounds for the science were laid in antiquity by Aristotle, Archimedes and Pappus, added to in the more recent past by Jordanus Nemorarius and Nicholas of Cusa, and developed further by such modern writers as Federigo Commandino and Guido Ubaldo. No doubt, he remarks prophetically, great things are to be expected from this art.60 Like Savile, Briggs intends his lecture to convince arts students that mathematics is worthy of their attention. And not only arts students: in a rather wearying and very long digression, addressed to members of the higher faculties of theology, medicine and law, he insists that mathematics is as central to their disciplines as it is to the arts course.61 He concludes that no member of the university, from any faculty, can be allowed to neglect mathematics, the art on which (he claims) all the other arts and sciences are based.62 Yet the centrality of this art is not at all perceived in Cambridge whereas, he says, it is a commonplace abroad: ‘The French see it, the Italians see it, the Germans see it, and in all their countries mathematics flourishes and is held in great honour.’63 He asks his audience to imagine, for a moment, what a visitor from one of these countries would think, who happened to attend a lecture in mathematics – or, for that matter, in any of the arts: At this university, there are separate lecturers in rhetoric, dialectic, philosophy and mathematics; but they are all so destitute of students, that they seem to have been appointed entirely in vain. The lecturer in mathematics, above all others, finds that he is not overburdened with throngs of students: more than half of the time allotted for his lectures he spends pacing up and down and staring into space, while he waits for students to arrive. Finally one or two do arrive; but even they may not be there on purpose, but, once they accidentally stumbled into the room, were too overcome with embarrassment to slink out again. And if more turn up – five or six, that is – a complaint is made to the Senate that the auditorium was overcrowded that day.64

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Perhaps, for all of his comic exaggeration, Briggs’ description of the neglected lectures in the sciences contained an element of uncomfortable truth. Certainly, he goes on to berate the university in all seriousness for its obsession with one subject above all others: grammar. In a phrase which recalls Savile’s similar complaint, Briggs asks: ‘Has a university which once flourished so conspicuously really descended from serious philosophical discourse to the empty study of words?’65 But whereas Savile had contrasted the Oxford of his day with its heyday centuries before, for Briggs the comparison is more immediate. Learning Latin and Greek, he tells his students, is not learning per se; these languages are only useful tools for obtaining learning. This is a fact which the university will ignore at its own peril: If there were to emerge from our cities and villages men who could speak only one language – and that only English – but, in mathematics, were the equals of Archimedes, Hero, Archytas, Ctesibius and Vitruvius, then I would esteem them more learned than any of our university who, apart from speaking two or three languages, knew nothing else. And in fact many such men have indeed started to appear, and, as I hear, grow more numerous by the day.66 And, continues Briggs, there is more at stake than a few Cambridge graduates being shown up by unlettered, but mathematically proficient Londoners. In what seems to be a reference to Gresham College (then not yet established, but provided for in the will of Thomas Gresham a decade before), Briggs warns of a serious institutional challenge to the universities: Once English professorships have been set up in all the liberal arts – and this is going to happen in London within a few years – and when men see that the study of philosophy is dormant in the universities, that the finest arts are despised, that mathematics is neglected, what do you think will happen then?67 Briggs ends his introductory lecture by answering this question: the universities, he warns, having outlived their purpose, will close and their scholars and books will be scattered. His dire predictions did not, of course, come to pass. In 1597, Gresham College was finally opened in Bishopsgate, and Briggs gladly accepted the position of its first professor of geometry. Later, to complete the circle, Briggs returned to the academy, appointed by Savile as his first professor of geometry at Oxford.

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We do, perhaps, have to make some allowances for the rhetorical functions of both men’s lectures. Unlike most ordinary lecturers, both had ambitions of a career within the academy. No doubt they exaggerated a little the scale of the task they had taken on in order to magnify their own reputations. Yet clearly there must have been more than a little truth in their criticisms of the universities; if there had been a thriving scientific culture at Oxford and Cambridge, then their remarks would have provoked only derision. This is not to deny the existence of scientifically-minded men who provided parallel instruction within the colleges; but it is significant that both Savile and Briggs lament the decline of the compulsory education in the sciences which the university once provided, and the consequent loss of the sciences as part of the intellectual makeup of all undergraduates. There is some overlap between the remedies the two men suggest. Both develop a highly Platonizing account of the sciences and their final ends. But, in his introductory lectures at least, Savile does not go much further than this. He suggests that the style of humanism at Oxford had to change if it was truly to embrace the entire ancient legacy, of which the sciences were an essential part. But Briggs went much further than this, ridiculing the students at Cambridge for their petty obsession with grammar. Mathematics, even – or especially – of a practical kind, had to become part of the Cambridge curriculum if the university was not to be eclipsed by the new educational institutions in London. Savile laid the ground for a renovation of the sciences through the foundation of his two professorships at the end of his life, exactly half a century after he delivered his ordinary lectures. In the statutes he wrote to guide the teaching of his successors,68 he insisted that they should, as he had done, expound the mathematics and astronomy of the ancients; and, also following in his footsteps, incorporate into their expositions the discoveries of the moderns, especially Copernicus. But now, it seems, he realized that a ‘new kind of humanism’ was not sufficient to guarantee the survival of the sciences in the university: his professors were also expected – as Briggs had urged – to be proficient in the practical mathematical sciences and to teach them to their students.

Notes 1 Research for this chapter was supported by a generous Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. 2 J. Blagrave, The mathematical Iewell (London, 1584). 3 Ibid., p. 75. 4 Ibid., p. 92.

238 Robert Goulding 5 Book 5 (on the solution of spherical triangles) contains frequent references to the trigonometry of Copernicus and Regiomontanus. Near the beginning of his work (p. 11), Blagrave explains the ‘theorickes of the planets’ (the assemblage of nested solid spheres which explain the motions of the planets). He presents the traditional Ptolemaic models, drawing on Sacrobosco and Peurbach, but adds: ‘of late yeares that singuler man Copernicus affirmeth that the sunne is the fixed centre of the world, about whom the earth moveth (not the sunne about the earth) and that all the rest of the planets move regularly about the centre of the sunne saving the moone which like an epicicle moveth about the earth in the spheere of the earth 13 times in his yearly motion. But omitting the inventions of Copernicus and a number of the rest, I will only heere shew a figure out of those which have alwayes bene before his time most in use.’ 6 A. à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. E. Bliss (London, 1813–20), ii, pp. 96–7; M. Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge and New York, 1984), p. 106. 7 Blagrave, The mathematical Iewell, p. 64. 8 Ibid., sig. P3r. 9 Shelfmark C. 60. o. 7. 10 Blagrave, The mathematical Iewell, p. 11: ‘eos probo maxime, qui possunt maxima. Empiricus mundus sola curat Empirica.’ 11 For a critical survey, see Feingold, Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, pp. 1–7. A typical assessment, from a very influential study (C. Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1980), p. 15): ‘The science of Elizabeth’s reign was the work of merchants and craftsmen, not of dons; carried on in London, not in Oxford and Cambridge; in the vernacular, not in Latin.’ Also, at p. 301, criticizing the more positive view expressed in M. H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558–1642: An Essay on Changing Relations between the English Universities and English Society (Oxford, 1959): ‘The function of the universities during Mr Curtis’ period was twofold: to produce clerics for the state Church, and to give a veneer of polite learning to young gentlemen, few of whom had any intention of taking a degree.’ See also F. R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England: A Study of the English Scientific Writings from 1500 to 1645 (Baltimore, MD, 1937), which is concerned almost entirely with ‘London science’; see especially pp. 11–13 for his dismissal of the universities as scientific centres. 12 F. A. Yates, ‘Giordano Bruno’s Conflict with Oxford’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, II (1938–9) 227–42. 13 J. K. McConica, ‘Humanism and Aristotle in Tudor Oxford’, English Historical Review, XCIV (1979) 291–317; passage quoted is at p. 302. 14 Ibid., 294. 15 Ibid., 315. 16 Feingold, Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, chapter 1; Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in The History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 211–357, esp. pp. 211–20. 17 Feingold, Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 31. 18 J. M. Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University, ed. J. K. McConica (Oxford, 1986), pp. 157–99.

Humanism and Science in the Elizabethan Universities 239 19 S. Gibson, Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1931), p. 235. 20 W. A. Pantin, Oxford Life in Oxford Archives (Oxford, 1972), p. 34. 21 J. Harvey, ‘Architecture in Oxford, 1350–1500’, in The History of the University of Oxford, ii: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and R. Evans (Oxford, 1992), pp. 747–68, at pp. 750–1. 22 On these so-called ‘wall lectures’, see C. E. Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, i: The Mediaeval University and the Colleges Founded in the Middle Ages (London, 1924), p. 199. 23 Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in McConica, History, p. 186; A. Clark, Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1887), i, pp. 96–9. 24 A decree condemning masters and students who missed lectures was issued in 1556–57 (Gibson, Statuta, p. 369). Another decree, of 1566–67, laid down a fine of a shilling for each lecture omitted by an ordinary lecturer (ibid., p. 398). 25 Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in McConica, History, p. 187. 26 Ibid., p. 186. 27 ‘Praxia eius scientiae si non inutilis at inusitata reputatur’ (Clark, Register, i, pp. 145–6). 28 Ibid. Music students were often transferred to the ‘more useful’ arithmetic lectures (Feingold, Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 28, n. 14). 29 Gibson, Statuta, p. 390. 30 Clark, Register, i, p. 99: ‘Supplicatur ut baccalaurei qui teneantur interesse lectioni geometriae promoveantur ad audiendam astronomiam pro tempore intermissae praedictae lectionis. Causa est quod Mr Wignall, publicus geometriae praelector, necessariis avocatus negotiis profectus est.’ 31 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Savile 29, 31 and 32. For a more detailed description of these lectures, see R. D. Goulding, ‘Testimonia humanitatis: The Early Lectures of Henry Savile’, in Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. F. Ames-Lewis (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 125–45. On Savile, see also Feingold, Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, pp. 47–8 and 124–31; R. D. Goulding, ‘Henry Savile and the Tychonic World-System’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LVIII (1995) 152–79. 32 MS Savile 29, fol. 3v: ‘ut praelector ordinarius, id est paene minus quam nihil …’. 33 Ibid., fol. 3r: ‘Sed O me somnio nescio quo felicem, qui hoc seculo, his hominum moribus scholis mathematicis dignitatem restituere sperarem!’ 34 The lectures in MS Savile 29 are divided by Savile into two terms (the ‘novus terminus’ beginning at fol. 109r). In the years 1570–71 and 1571–72, however, Oxford was repeatedly evacuated because of plague, and Savile was given permission to cancel his lectures after only two terms. At the same time, however, he was required by the university to continue his lectures into a second year, because of the difficulty in finding a lecturer in astronomy. For a discussion of the chronology of the lectures, see R. D. Goulding, ‘Studies on the Mathematical and Astronomical Papers of Sir Henry Savile’ (PhD dissertation, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1999), pp. 42–5. The praise of the sciences and exhortation to their study (MS Savile 29, fols 2r-8r) are edited in Goulding, ‘Studies’, pp. 144–55. 35 Goulding, ‘Henry Savile and the Tychonic World-System’, passim.

240 Robert Goulding 36 Vitruvius, De architectura, vi, preface. 37 Johannes Vögelin, Elementale geometricum (Vienna, 1528) and reprinted several times. The preface was reprinted in P. Melanchthon, Mathematicarum disciplinarum tum etiam astrologiae encomia (Strasbourg, 1537). 38 Melanchthon, Encomia, sig. B3r: ‘Vtinam vero haec hominum vestigia quae ibi in littore miratus est Aristippus, in scholis etiam frequentiora essent. Iacent etiam deserta et neglecta hae artes multis iam seculis.’ 39 MS Savile 29, fol. 2r: ‘Atque utinam quam est hoc vere praedictum ab Aristippo de Rhodiis, tam mihi certo ex iisdem signis de Oxoniensium humanitate possim polliceri.’ 40 Ibid., fol. 3r: ‘eloquentiae, graecae linguae, philosophiae civilis studia vigent apud nos tanta, ut ne ipsas quidem Athenas magis umquam Atticas extitisse putem.’ 41 Ibid.: ‘Ac mihi profecto saepe in Academiae nostrae leges et hominum nostrorum ingenia intuenti, quaerendum esse visum est, quid esset cur plurimi in reliquis artibus excellentes, in mathematicis nulli perdiu tollerabiles extitissent? … Quocumque te animo ac cogitatione converteris, permultos et excellentes videbis in quocunque genere artium maximarum, philosophos, medicos, theologos; in hac itaque literarum luce, in hac Academia, unde tamquam ex equo troiano principes logicis, physicis, mathematicis instructi totam sui nominis gloria Galliam, Italiam, Europam compleverunt …’ 42 Ibid.: ‘eandem mendam diem noctemque tundentes …’ 43 Ibid.: ‘Nae permultos habebimus, non Orontios quales Gallia, non Munsteros quales Germania, sed Archimedes, Ptolemaeos, vel quales illud Oxonium huic nostro dissimillimum, Swinsetos, Bacones, Wallingfordos …’. 44 Ibid., fol. 9r: ‘Nam neque conamur eum docere Ptolemaeum, qui numerare nesciat, nec speramus qui addere, subducere, multiplicare, dividere numeris huiusmodi non possit, eum aliquando planetarum epochous, eccentrotates, apogea perite numeraturum.’ 45 Ibid.: ‘Quae tamen omnia, ne quis desit ad artis integritatem, una lectione comprehendi audietis. Perridiculum autem est, integrum annum in definitionibus et divisionibus circulorum, id est terminorum sola cognitione consumere.’ 46 Ibid.: ‘Nec tamen, quamvis Sacroboscus vel Orontius forte non peraeque requirant, summam ideo rationem auditorum meorum non habeo, cum ii sint, aut esse debeant, et extitisse sperem, qui tres terminos Arithmeticae, duos geometricae, cum publicis in scholis, tum privatis meditationibus fructuose impenederint.’ 47 Ibid., fol. 13v: ‘Sed homines eam solam opinantur astronomiam, quam ipsi didicerunt, et quia nihil tale videant in Sacrobosco vel Orontio, nec esse quidem arbitrantur non ex rei natura, sed ex propria ignavia iudicantes.’ 48 Ibid., fol. 20v: ‘[ars] quam plerique solam esse opinantur, qua circuli definuntur, describuntur, exemplis illustrantur, quae cum video, tantum absum ab ea quam extuli providentiae cogitatione, tantum ab admiratione fabricae divinae, ut nihil pene admirer, quam eorum impudentem vanitatem, qui frugibus inventis tantopere glandibus delectarentur.’ 49 Ibid., fol. 23r: ‘Quid igitur, inquiet aliquis, nihilne adiecit Copernicus, nihil tot de astronomia perscripti libri? Caeteros quidem omnes non dubitabo mea sententia condemnare. Quid enim tot sphaericis libellis continetur,

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50 51

52

53

54

55 56

57

quod non extet apud Ptolemaeum multo uberius, multo illustrius? Copernicus, quem laudes immortales meruisse constat, non aliquod novum caput ad astronomiam adiecit, quod non esset a Ptolemaeo pertractatum, sed ipse easdem res nova quadam ratione variatis hypothesibus illustravit.’ BL, MS Harley 6494, fols 57r–77v. MS Savile 29, fol. 64r: ‘Et credo si Ciceroni dedissem Archimedem convertendum, non potuit non saepissime decipi’. Savile is criticizing the translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest by George of Trebizond. Ibid., fol. 2r: ‘Quid enim in hisce nostris studiis, quae humanitatis esse et haberi volunt, quid aget animus humanitate non praeparatus et quasi informatus?’ On humanism and Platonism in Savile’s lectures, see Goulding, ‘Testimonia humanitatis’, passim. Feingold, Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, pp. 190–2; E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 4–5. MS Savile 29, fol. 5r: ‘Equidem nec Euclides mihi unquam tot noctes insomnes duxisset, si ab eo nihil expectassem praeter turriculae dimensionem, nec in intelligendis Archimedis inventis tantos labores excepissem, si nihil aliud quaererem, quam ut architectus esse possem, nec tu Ptolemaee duplicem et intelligendi et interpretandi molestiam facesseres, si illud tantum spectassem, ut astrolabum conficerem, de futuris divinarem.’ Paradoxically, these are precisely the accomplishments which gentlemen did find attractive in the sciences; if anything (according to Feingold, as in the previous note), the theoretical pursuit of the sciences was considered unbecoming. Savile, it seems, is deliberately inverting the expectations of part of his audience. MS Savile 29, fol. 5r: ‘In quibus si quando versantur, nec tamen ipsae ut efficiant sed alienam in opere efficiendo manum regant …’ BL, MS Harley 6796. This is a miscellaneous manuscript, containing notes and treatises largely of a scientific character, and in the most part dating from the seventeenth century. The introductory lecture (which occupies fols 147r–54r) is dated 1588, and the detailed critique of Ramus’ geometry which precedes it (fols 81r–146r) is written in the same hand; according to Cambridge University records, Henry Briggs was mathematical lecturer in 1588, and it was on this basis that Feingold attributed both to him (Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 51). The hand in which the lectures are written can be confirmed as Briggs’ by comparison with a letter he wrote to Henry Pell in 1628 (BL, MS Additional 4398, fol. 137). Even though the two documents were written forty years apart, the hand in the two documents is clearly that of the same person: the forms, especially, of the majuscule letters T, A, D and N are written in the same, idiosyncratic way in both manuscripts. At one point, for instance, he advises his listeners to take another path to learning, if they can find it. BL, MS Harley 6796, fol. 148r: ‘But if the opposite is the case, if this is the only gate to the whole of humane and liberal learning, if, lacking mathematics, no one has ever become even a mediocre philosopher, or a passable physician, or somewhat learned in the law and justice, or a noted theologian, or outstanding in any other field at all; if reason urges this and the unanimous testimony and opinion of the whole of erudite antiquity confirm it; then I hope by God that no one will think

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58 59

60 61 62 63 64

65 66

67

68

himself a student of learning and wisdom, who does not know that [art] in which all the treasures of wisdom are hidden …’ (‘At vero si totum contra est, si ad omnem ingenuam liberalemque doctrinam haec sola ianua est, hic aditus; si sine mathematicarum artium perceptione nemo unquam philosophus vel mediocris, medicus tolerabilis, iuris iustitiaeque paulo peritior, theologus insignis, in ullo denique genere clarus et illustris extitit; si hoc et ratio suadet, et omnis eruditae antiquitatis consentientes voces sententiaeque confirmant: spero hercle neminem fore doctrinae sapientiaeque studiosum, qui non id in quo omnes sapientiae thesauros reconditos esse norit … iudicabit.’) Ibid., fol. 148v. Ibid., fol. 150r: ‘Haec nobis sensuum correxit errores, et plebeiae credulitatis tenebras amovit ab oculis, ut hinc ipsum terrestrem globum, qui medio et infimo loco situs esse, immotusque quiescere plerisque putatur, et moveri assidue et motu suo multiplici cursus illos omne et conversiones quas caelo stellifero ascribent imperiti, efficere confiteremur.’ Ibid., fol. 150r. Ibid., fols 151r–3v. Ibid., fol. 153v. Ibid.: ‘Vident id Galli, vident Itali, vident Germani, apud quos omnes viget et floret Mathesis, magnoque in honore est.’ Ibid.: ‘Esse quidem in ea Rhetoricae, Dialecticae, Philosophiae, Matheseωs, distinctos professores, sed eos omnes quidem ita desertos ab auditoribus, ut frustra pene videantur instituti: Mathematico vero praecipue praelectori adeo non esse molestam discipulorum turbam, ut cum temporis plusquam dimidium praelectionibus destinati, deambulans, circumspiciens, et auditores exspectans consumpserit, tum demum adveniat unus, atque alter, ac ne ii quidem fortassis ex proposito, sed quod semel accesserint, pudore deterriti pedem referre non potuerint; sin paulo plures, hoc est quinos vel senos, aliquis casus ad subsellia detulerit, frequens sane eo die auditorium fuisse.’ Ibid., fol. 154r: ‘Siccine florentissimam olim Academiam a seria philosophandi ratione ad verborum inane studium devolutum esse?’ Ibid.: ‘Si igitur erunt ex pagis et municipiis nostris homines una tantum, eaque vernacula lingua loquentes, sed in Mathematis Archimedes, Herones, Architae, Ctesibii, Vitruvii, eos ego bilinguibus aut etiam trilinguibus Academicis nostris, si praeter linguas habuerint nihil, doctiores semper existimabo. Atque ii quidem iam multi coeperunt esse, et efflorescunt indies, ut audio, plures …’ Ibid.: ‘Post institutas enim Anglicas omnium liberalium artium professiones (id quod hic paucis annis Londini futurum est) cum videbunt homines in Academiis iacere studia philosophiae, contemni praeclarissimas artes, Mathemata negligi, quid tandem?’ Gibson, Statuta, pp. 528–40.

12 Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais1 Warren Boutcher

Kristeller’s model of Renaissance humanism What does the study of Tudor and early Stuart humanism amount to for the period between the pre-Marian heyday of High Renaissance Latinity and the emergence with Marvell and Milton of a respectable neoclassical tradition in the vernacular, by which time ‘humanism’ has transmuted into something else?2 The figure who instituted modern Anglo-American study of Italian Renaissance humanism, Paul Oskar Kristeller, built its foundations from a sure mix of abundant primary materials and solid historiographical data on long-term social change amongst the élite. His was nevertheless a corrective emphasis. His distinctive contribution was to show that the activity of Italian humanists was neither limited to classical scholarship nor equivalent to a general transformation of the spirit of the age. It consisted also of an educational ideal centred on the learning of classical Latin. A new programme of studies (the studia humanitatis) slowly took root in institutions and curricula and eventually yielded the modern humanities. The programme was directed to the future secretaries, chancellors and teachers who would fulfil the roles in fifteenth-century society and culture that the medieval dictatores had fulfilled in their time. There were corresponding changes in literary production. Kristeller identified in the archives a rich vein of manuscript texts consisting, generically, of letters, orations and poems. These texts related to new demands for literary services linked to specific social contexts and civic occasions, and shared above all else an adherence to a humanistic model of elegant Latinity. Where vernacular literary products could be seen to be emulating the same 243

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classicizing ideals and to be serving similar functions on similar occasions, the by-product was an interest in ‘vernacular humanism’.3 As it stood in 1962, Kristeller’s synthesis also accommodated Hans Baron’s ideas about Florentine ‘civic humanism’. Baron had argued for the importance of a group of humanists centred on Leonardo Bruni who, in early fifteenth-century Florence, ‘formulated an ideal of republican liberty and of a classical and literary culture useful for the active life of the educated statesman and businessman’.4 Kristeller’s insistence in relation to this thesis was not, as is sometimes stated, that humanism was about philological study rather than politics, but that ‘civic humanism’ was in danger of being universalized by modern scholars as the fundamental model of Renaissance humanism. Kristeller accommodated Baron’s more cautious description of his thesis (as it appeared in the New Cambridge Modern History)5 as an account of one of many local episodes in which humanism had served purposes of widely varying kinds. For Kristeller did not reject the idea that the humanistically educated could be driven by serious intellectual and political purposes; he rejected the idea that there was a simple, identifiable ‘humanism’, a single uniting philosophy that drove the humanistically educated on all occasions in all places. The problem for scholars of Tudor humanism is that any attempt to take this essentially corrective emphasis from Quattrocento studies and apply it to the Tudor and early Stuart periods turns out to be too limiting.6 Kristeller’s approach has been successfully imported into English historical studies and has been used to correct the distortions introduced by earlier scholars working with idealized or universalized models. Since the classic article by Denys Hay and later interventions by Alistair Fox and others, a Kristeller-like synthesis (allowing for disagreements, of course, on individual matters of interpretation and emphasis) has looked increasingly possible for the period beginning in the early fifteenth century (c. 1410) and culminating around 1525. The literary, scholarly and educational ideal described by Kristeller does take root in English Latinate culture over this long period. A literary education made available by private tutors to gentlemen and aristocrats in their households slowly develops an institutional base in foundations that make it more widely available, even to poor scholars. Humanist scholarship is imported into England from Italy and elsewhere. The humanistically educated find employment as secretaries, diplomats and propagandists on an increasingly regularized basis. Literary compositions in the humanistic genres were presented or published in increasing numbers and in a widening variety of formats;

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towards the end of this period, printed copies provided humanists with a third option (alongside de-luxe and more ephemeral manuscripts) – an option that precluded, however, the kind of control over manufacture and distribution to which they and their patrons were accustomed. The climax of this scholarly, institutional and literary development comes in the reign of Henry VII and the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. It reaches maturity in the circles of Sir Thomas More and in his internationally publicized intellectual collaborations with Desiderius Erasmus.7 However, it seems that once we begin to move into the second half (c. 1525–c. 1680) of the longue durée that sees the emergence of the humanities in early modern education, we run into difficulties. The confined social and cultural movement of Latin ‘humanism’ as defined by Kristeller no longer provides a plot that can account for the central developments in the ongoing history of humane learning,8 which spiral out of its control. A number of completely new developments originate in the early sixteenth century. After William Tyndale and the early Reformation, there is, first, a new politics of print controversy, accompanied by more heavily applied approaches to study, reading and translation; deriving originally from divine learning, the politics of print come to have an effect on humane learning as well. The most authoritative intellectual historian of the later period, Francis Bacon, traces the origins of the ‘revival of learning’ he understood himself to be living through, not to fifteenth-century humanism but to the role of literary scholarship in religio-political controversy. Luther had been forced to ‘awake all Antiquitie … to call former times to his succors, to make a partie against the present time’. He read and utilized ancient authors as weapons against the Church. Exegetical skill in the original languages of these authors therefore became fundamental for the ‘better advantage of pressing and applying their words’.9 It is the pressing and applying of ancient texts to the service of modern needs and controversies that is intensified dramatically by Reformation cultural politics and by the expansion in textual resources made widely, often illicitly, available by commercial printers. At the same time, as Alan Stewart makes clear in his contribution to this volume, the expanding market in imported printed books and its links with the new international industry of vernacularization created by bible translation, tended to expose and explode the ‘deliberately trans-national Latinate culture witnessed by, or perhaps confected by, the canny use of Latin print’ by humanists. Second, in a distinctive way, sixteenth-century developments both combined and opposed a formally instituted arts education with an

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intensification of informal, ‘household’- or ‘grand tour’-style tertiary education.10 The principal fruit of fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury humanism for later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture was an institutionalized programme of language study. Highly selective routines and methods of literary analysis and ratiocination, divorced from philological scholarship and the ideals of classicizing humanitas, developed an institutional life of their own. The pedagogical foundations of this programme lay in grammar, rhetoric and – above all at the university level – dialectic.11 In the long term, other subjects, such as history, modern languages, geography, and – much later and to a more limited degree – mathematics and scientific studies, began to develop informally on the margins of the formal arts curriculum. With private and unofficial tutorials, especially in the colleges, supplementing and adapting the institutionalized programme, the result was an eclectic range of studies in the humanities built – socially and intellectually – on shared foundations, but in practice constructed in diverse ways.12 Within this more broadly conceived humane learning the humanist arts of discourse began to lose their ideological privilege as a route to antiquity’s ideals and canons of taste, and were increasingly perceived as pedantic or conventional routines.13 As J. W. Binns demonstrates (this volume, chapter 9), Latin culture in the round continued to be fundamental to intellectual life, and composition in the humanistic genres likewise continued. Humanist influence on Latin theologians (as yet inadequately studied) was still of vital importance in the second half of the sixteenth century. But after Roger Ascham in the mid-Tudor and early Elizabethan periods, it is difficult to name an intellectual who had any impact nationally and internationally (as opposed to, say, a lowly teacher of vernacular grammer to court ladies and gentlemen) whose range of activities and compositions are identifiably ‘humanist’ in Kristeller’s sense. After Ascham, indeed, there is little that smacks of what from a Quattrocento point of view might have been deemed authentic humanistic transmission of classical letters – either in Latin or in the vernacular, which becomes all important.14 This may be in part a historiographical problem. In Tudor studies, the Latin humanist tradition has not accounted for the emergence of a ‘national’ vernacular literature and philosophy as satisfactorily as it has in Italian studies, although a vanguard action is currently being fought on the ground of Tudor rhetoric.15 Pre-Romantic claims that Shakespeare had been a classically learned poet foundered when new scholarship demonstrated his reliance on translated sources.16 In short, if one is interested in authentic humanist

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Latinity on the Italian Renaissance model, then one is largely confined to the circles of More and Erasmus. If one is interested in vernacular humanism, then one has to admit that the groundwork has not been radically changed since T. W. Baldwin. He relied heavily on the programmatic foundations of early Tudor humanism and on the notion of Shakespeare’s putative education as an individual in his account of what one needed to know about sixteenth-century humane learning in order to read Shakespeare’s plays in their intellectual-historical context.17 Rather than continue to rely on these foundations of early Tudor Latin humanism, should we not experiment with different models, more appropriate to the changing social and institutional conditions of the later sixteenth century, and more attuned to the possibilities of new combinations of sources? Until new approaches are found to the question of Shakespearean drama’s relationship to the thought and learning of the late Tudor and early Stuart period, we will not be judged to have made much progress by the wider community of intellectual and cultural historians. This will mean shaking off any residual sympathy for Thomas More’s anxieties about ‘vulgarization’. Since the mid-1990s it has been possible to purchase an (admittedly expensive) Latin text of More’s Utopia. The most important vernacular product of late Tudor humane learning and the traditional starting-point for inquiries about Shakespeare’s mature thought, John Florio’s English edition of Montaigne’s Essais, has been out of print for twenty years.

Late Tudor humanism and its context What counts as historical evidence of the learning and thought that inform writing? For later Renaissance England the answer has generally been twofold. On the one hand, historians look at textbooks, curricula, library catalogues and other evidence to show that particular books were materially ‘available’ in the culture. On the other hand, they identify ‘currents’ or ‘languages’ of political and other kinds of thought in terms of which they can trace relationships between and across particular (usually printed) texts. However, in relation to the first procedure, textbooks, curricula and library catalogues do not in themselves tell you how people read, thought or experienced learning. And, in relation to the second, identifying a current called the ‘new humanism’ with an abstract blend of Stoicism, Scepticism and Tacitism (or ragion di stato), and with an exclusive social circle (for example the Essex circle), and then checking for its themes and attitudes in particular lines of Shakespeare’s early plays and poems, is an exercise which relies

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distantly and weakly on Hans Baron’s method and tells us little either about humanism or about Shakespeare.18 Both angles of approach to the problem (history of the book and ‘intellectual currents’) have to be put to work with evidence that produces qualitatively richer and more substantial conclusions. We need to ask: How and why were particular books acquired by whom? To what uses were textbooks and their extracurricular complements pressed and applied in the classroom or the private household between the student, his friends and servants? Whose extra-curricular ‘readings’, offering specific directions beyond the commonplace study routes, were valued, assimilated and acted upon in what social and political circumstances?19 Moreover, in relation to material sources such as textbooks, printed treatises and curricula, there is a methodological problem regarding the study of humane learning in the later Tudor period. In the pre-Tudor phase of the longue durée which defines this field as a whole (c. 1410– c. 1680) the problem is simply that documentation of humanistic activity in private households, schools and colleges is relatively scant. Partly because it was not institutionalized or monitored, it shows up fragmentarily in the records. By the mid-Tudor period, the increasing regulation of the universities and the improvements in the extent and quality of the available evidence means that we can establish the existence of an institutionalized arts course with recognized textbooks, methods and goals. Whether or not we can continue to talk of an ‘influx’ of undergraduate gentlemen commoners and poorer scholars between the 1550s and 1570s, the long-term trend is clear.20 Increasing numbers of undergraduates needed and were offered a training in professional, persuasive thinking suitable for careers in law, the Church or the royal court. But the evidence that tells us this does not tell us how this formal programme was informally interpreted and supplemented at the point of delivery and application, in personal, tutorial and advisory contexts. There is, furthermore, another major development which Kristeller’s model does not accommodate: the intensifying relationship between humane learning and the intimacies and fluid hierarchies of household service.21 The most important single social trend over this period was the intrusion of the poor and the humble into education, and the opportunities this provided for service, social mobility and advancement.22 Over our longue durée the landed classes and aristocracy began to use schools and colleges in place of, or in addition to, traditional household education, and at the same time initiated the charitable financing of education for the poor. The crowding together of old nobility/gentry and old money, new nobility/gentry and new money,

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and the aspiring middling and poorer sorts, created new problems and new opportunities for class differentiation. On the one hand, humane learning helped open up career and financial opportunities that resulted rapidly in the gentrification of families of modest pedigree and fortune. On the other hand, the élite household moved into the colleges and college towns, bringing with it wealthy individuals less likely to follow the formal curriculum and take a degree. Crucially, these individuals were served in the context of ‘familiar’ relationships by tutors and other learned servants. Whether as aspirants or as old aristocracy, élite and wealthy families saw an arts education as a means to consolidate their class position and differentiate themselves from the less fortunate.23 Whether or not their offspring were likely to go on into professional occupations, parents from superior backgrounds sought to customize and informalize, but also to control and monitor the outcome of an arts education with special arrangements. These could include everything from accommodation and choice of hand-picked companions for shared study and amicitia, to the use of private tutors and especially purchased and prepared extra-curricular materials. The newly gentrified Bacon brothers, recently descended from a sheepreeve, were sent up to Cambridge in 1573 in a little tutorial group with one of their father’s wards to lodge with the Master of Trinity, John Whitgift. Whitgift purchased their books and all sorts of other accoutrements for them and supervised their study. When Philip Sidney – in strict heraldic terms an ordinary gentleman – was sent to Shrewsbury School, he entered with Fulke Greville and James Harrington, was lodged separately in the town and provided with a number of extra-curricular materials, including a French translation of the Italian works of Matteo Bandello that bears the marks of his developing amicitia with Greville.24 By the 1560s, when Sidney was at school, the acquisition of a humanistic education in the arts was firmly and widely integrated into élite family strategies and élite household culture across a wide range of the nouveaux riches and established families. This meant that the manner of acquisition and use of the programmatic, methodical arts education on offer in schools and colleges had become a means of social differentiation and an instrument of family strategy. The élite young, even when they went away to school or university, were being educated as part of the gentle or aristocratic household, by ‘governors’ or tutors who were allies and famuli, and who tailor-made the education on offer according to the needs and the imagined future of that household. This, of course, was even more literally true of gentlewomen and noblewomen, who were educated within – and as ornaments for – the élite household. For

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young élite men, the imagined future would include continued employment of scholars and readers. As they undertook travels accompanied by scholarly friends, their early ‘institution’ blended into a continued relationship to learning and the services provided by the learned in adulthood. The other side of the coin, of course, was that men from relatively inferior backgrounds were more likely to follow the formal curriculum. Where they did acquire humanistic cultivation for the purposes of tutoring their betters, they were acquiring it for different reasons: the context and rationale of learning was conditioned by the realities of the social hierarchy. Learning to profess, to teach and to serve, and learning to judge, to know and to govern were quite different things; or so it was repeatedly insisted by those who had an interest in promoting learning to the nobility, or in basing their nobility on learning. At the same time, masters and servants were brought into close and intimate contact by the experience of education.25 The consequence of this is that the socially and culturally reproductive relationship between the would-be or established gentleman dynast and his successfully cultivated heir(s) increasingly provided the institutional – the social, the financial, the ethical, the ideological – foundations of humane learning, not Kristeller’s programme of university study. As applied in service, humane learning increasingly sought to realize its raison d’être in authentic noble agency; that is, in the sayings and deeds of a noble philosophical life in the Tudor present. The figures of the wise dynast (accompanied by his dynastic adviser) and the successfully educated son (or, in exceptional cases, daughter) became the ultimate guarantors of humane learning’s value and purpose; not classical philology, not antiquity, not the canonical author and not the literary values of the individual humanist (though all, of course, continued to have a vital role in the process). It was through élite agency that the learned literary ‘conference’ or ‘readings’ of gentle and noble persons and their learned friends and servants were to be realized as autonomous actions and words performed in the sphere of politics, war and business.26 For the wealthy late Tudor élite, humanist education now developed as an informally delivered and specifically designed ‘approach’ and supplement to the formal arts curriculum. Particular tutors in the arts were increasingly sought for their individualized and mediated versions of the standard programmes. This centrally involved wider use of the international European vernaculars and their modern literature (for example, Sidney’s Bandello). In the late sixteenth century, John Hoskyns’ manuscript directions for speech and style mention the

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standard European Latin textbooks for classical letters and rhetoric as background. But they refer principally to a personalized, marked-up copy of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, intended for Hoskyns’ personal tutorials at the Middle Temple with sons of the Herefordshire gentry (with whom he had a reputation).27 With the advent of the printed templates of humanist pedagogy and the formalization of school and university arts education came a new definition of the élite ‘individual’. This was the persona whose compellingly informal, free-ranging, occasion-specific mode of appropriation of classical wisdom aimed to define itself against and above the systems, types and routines of institutionalized arts pedagogy. This was, of course, attractive even to the aspiring mercantile family or to the élite scholar who was in practice dependent on a profession or on selling or bartering his skills.28 If you were an élite parent, you would attempt to buy and control this process of self-definition for your offspring by acquiring the right experts and the right extra-curricular books. At the same time, as I shall argue below, this trend in élite education was intimately related to the top end of the commercial market for continental and translated books.

Montaigne: a printed template for élite individualism There was one imported extra-curricular book in particular which crystallized this trend in élite English households. It did so all the way through from the 1590s, when copies began to arrive in numbers from France and when a major English translation was commenced, until the eighteenth century, when the post-Restoration translation of Charles Cotton, together with Pierre Coste’s monumental London edition of the French text, reconfirmed its place in English élite letters. The book was the Essais of Montaigne; the key essay was that on noble education (book one, chapter 26). It is Montaigne above all who forces the distinction between, on the one hand, the practical motives and routine methods of Latin humanist pedagogy and, on the other hand, the reading of texts for the élite consumer’s true and present needs. His deliberately unscholarly work consumes a vast battery of texts without regard for origin, context or language. The state of being he portrays in print assumes – because it contrasts in every way with – the fixed norms and forms of humanist textbooks.29 At the same time, the printed persona of Montaigne somehow sits at the crossroads of early modern élite identity and has something to say to all comers. He seems at once a noble lord, a bourgeois citizen and a humanistically trained lawyer; he

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was at once ‘retired’ on a country estate and experienced in court business and politics. He is at once in (unpaid) service to higher masters, and an employer of scholars in his own household. He is at once an advocate for the preservation of élite society’s norms and mores, and a cuckoo in the nest of morally safe social and dynastic reproduction. In the 1650s, William London issued a catalogue of ‘vendible books’ available to the northern county élite. He quotes various English and translated guides to the ‘stock of choice Books’ he deems appropriate for a scholar-gentleman who is aiming to ‘discourse in company, or frequent wiser society’, to undertake ‘publique Service’ or to seek ‘private retirement’.30 The principal translated guide is Florio’s Montaigne, ‘[o]ne that knew how to use them [books]’; Samuel Daniel’s prefatory poem in the Florio edition is quoted without acknowledgement; many other passages from the main text are openly cited.31 Some time after 1706, Alexander Pope read, in Charles Cotton’s translation, one of the passages in book one, chapter 26, in which Montaigne described how a formal arts education had corrupted his informal household education; Pope placed an ‘X’ against it and wrote in the margin: ‘mutato nomine/ de me/ Fabula narratur’ (‘with the name changed, he is telling my story’).32 In other words, the Essais paradoxically offered a printed template for a personal, ‘household’ formation which, while apparently rooted in an unsatisfactory experience of formalized humane learning, clearly betrays a relationship to institutionalized rhetoric, dialectic and philosophy. Montaigne’s father – himself a wealthy but uneducated merchantbourgeois and soldier – had purchased ‘a most exquisite and readie way of teaching’, a household institution in pure Latin. Before he could speak Montaigne’s wet-nurse was substituted by a Latin-speaking German humanist who, aided by two assistants, had the child continually in his arms. But Montaigne’s father eventually yielded to common opinion and sent him to college, though he continued to demand (in Florio’s words) ‘the best and most sufficient Masters’ and to institute ‘particular rules’ (‘façons particuliéres’) for his son, against the ‘usuall customes of Colleges’. Soon, the formal arts curriculum began to corrupt Montaigne’s Latin. But the carefully chosen precepteur de chambre indulged Montaigne’s tendency to duck the ‘prescript lessons’ and allowed him to read the humanist classics – Vergil, Terence, Plautus – alongside vernacular ‘Italian comedies’. Indeed, as he tells us at the beginning of the other essay on education, these comedies provided him with derisory images of humanist pedants against which to measure his personal tutors.33

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In the essay on books (II. 10) and elsewhere, it becomes apparent that Montaigne learned to judge Virgil and Ovid by comparison with Ariosto; Seneca in Latin by comparison with Plutarch in French; modern Italian and French historians (Guicciardini, Commines, the Du Bellay brothers) by comparison with Tacitus; Catullus and Martial by comparison with the ‘fantastiques elevations Espagnoles et Petrarchistes’; and ancient epistolae by comparison with a hundred volumes of Italian letters (most of which, including those he names by Annibale Caro, will have been in the vernacular).34 In his own personalized prescriptions for a noble institution, Montaigne makes it clear that it is not a perfect knowledge of Latin that he wants to preserve from the example of his own education, but, via whatever language and example is needed, the special, freeranging, vernacular informality of approach to the regular curriculum. In this, he was crystallizing in personalized form a Europe-wide trend in élite humanist education that we can date approximately to the period between 1580 and 1620.35 In England, from 1603, Florio’s Essayes offered the first printed vernacular and therefore public representation of the fruits of this trend in the individualized private culture of one member of the élite. The closest, fully indigenous equivalent was the Arcadia (with which Florio associates the Essayes in his dedications); and the late humanistic culture to which I refer was associated above all with the iconic figure of its author, Philip Sidney. The English Essayes, and the prominence they gave to Florio, a modern language teacher, publicized the de-centring of Latin and the pure classical model; in the context of élite humanist education Latin was becoming just one of a number of related languages you would need some knowledge of, and for most of the time it would not matter which language you were working in. Ancient language editions of classics were increasingly used alongside – or were even supplanted by – larger numbers of vernacular texts, translations, comments and glosses.36 Examples and themes from ancient poetry and history were increasingly mixed pell-mell with others from modern vernacular histories, novels and poems. Montaigne both typified and advocated this change, though he did so on the ground laid out by institutionalized humanist education. If we view the entrance to the translated Essayes with the period’s own eye, we find ourselves ushered by Florio and the experts in humane learning who assisted him into an informal, semi-independent culture of extra-curricular, non-philological, socialized learning derived from a father’s ‘institution’ and shared privately with friends and aristocratic betters such as Montaigne’s great friend La Boëtie. Wittingly or not, for

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different readers and producers at different moments, it could be seen to dramatize (especially in, again, I. 26) both Elizabethan confidence in and Elizabethan uncertainty about the contribution made by the secularized, privatized and pragmatized study of humane learning to élite family strategies for dynastic and social reproduction. How strong an institutional foundation did the relationship between the lord of Montaigne and his heir appear to provide? The essay on noble education does seem from one angle to record a failure on the part of the lord of Montaigne. Montaigne’s father buys the best Italian advice, then changes his mind and sends him for formal training, then is disappointed in his son, who does not go on to have a brilliant and learned career in the national establishment. One can read into it specific tensions surrounding the indeterminacy of the character (or ‘humour’) and action (or other outcome) that might be produced by ever-shifting educational and political ideas, as well as the general social anxiety as to whether the fruits would correspond to the intentions of parents and to socially and politically acceptable norms (the drama, also, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet). At the same time, one can read Montaigne in that essay and in general as a very positive model of an autonomous and learned member of the noble élite who traverses the routine pathways of humanist Latin pedagogy with informally added value and sophistication. He powerfully holds his moral and intellectual balance and retains an authoritative presence in the midst of shifting ideas and factions, whilst preserving the traditions of his father, the friendship of the members of his familia, and conformity to the religious and political establishment of France. In the final part of this chapter I will suggest that it makes more sense to associate the presence of copies and translations of the Essais in England from the 1590s to the 1620s with both the potential power and the potential uncertainty surrounding the intellectual-dynastic household institution of humane learning, than with a more abstractly conceived rise of scepticism or individualism.

Translations and continental books First, though, let us return to the general issue of sources and the kind of questions that can be brought to them. We are looking for qualitative evidence of how people thought and how they learned. We are looking, in particular, to consolidate approaches to the interface between institutionalized arts education and informal humanistic services supplied at the point of delivery and application. We have acknowledged that text-

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books, curricula and library catalogues, and a sense of intellectual currents, are not enough on their own. More evidence is needed of the particularities and practicalities of interactions in households and on specific occasions between humanist tutors and advisers, élite men and women, and the extra-curricular, often vernacular printed materials which were understood to be mediating and imitating classical philosophy and literature in relevant, accessible and practical forms. There is a major body of documentary sources that provide qualitatively valuable evidence in this area and that have as yet barely been tapped, despite great progress in the last twenty years. They are of two principal kinds. On the one hand, there is the evidence of private ownership or possession of continental books whose intended and/or actual uses point to informal humanistic contexts of book collection, glossing, teaching, reading and advising. Writing to Claude Saumaise in 1636, the great scholar, book collector and networker Peiresc names the Low Countries and England as the largest net importers of continental books in Europe. He asserts Italian books to be easier to find in England than in Italy.37 It was work in this area that first revealed the existence of a canon of mostly Latin textbooks regularly used by mid-Tudor university men in the acquisition of an arts education. But the central and provincial libraries and antiquarian booksellers of England are full of continental books that bear the marks of early modern ownership and use, which associate them with the formal and informal cultures of humane learning. The scholarly literature has for the most part concentrated on the period up to 1550, for understandable reasons. In the early period of printed book importation from the continent, it is easier to isolate the prestigious incunabulum or early sixteenth-century copy produced by a humanist printer and track its arrival and use in Tudor England. There are tighter, more contained connections between the humanist movement, particular influential northern European humanists, printers and booksellers, and court consumers.38 After 1550, the floodgates are increasingly open, despite the trade regulations, and such connections, bound by an identifiable general ethos of continental Latinate ‘humanism’, begin to dissolve. The ‘humanist book’ – the book produced, acquired and used within the context of humane learning – does not present itself so obviously to the eye. The other, potentially richer kind of source is directly related to the first but is not usually acknowledged to be so. The large body of printed and manuscript vernacular translations of literary, historical and philosophical texts, classical and modern, produced between the

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1560s and the 1620s is usually addressed in relation to the emergence of the vernacular, cultural nationalism, and theoretical and textual issues particular to the trans-historical field of translation studies. It can also, however, if carefully handled and interpreted, be treated as documentary evidence for the scenes, occasions and purposes of reading, commentary and teaching, and for the use of continental books in élite households. Translation in Tudor England was closely related to the whole business of importing continental books, judging their credibility, and applying and domesticating their contents.39 Manuscript translation was an integral part of élite household culture, but has not been systematically studied for the period after 1550. Although the majority of the sources are likely to be printed publications, translators often reveal that their work has originated in a partial translation presented in manuscript. A printed translation, naturally, is not just being offered as a gift to the households with which it is associated, but as a commodity for wider sale. Scholars of the history of the book have recently been revealing that these are not mutually exclusive but rather overlapping contexts for the production and circulation of the early modern book. We still need to be aware, however, that what we are told about the origins and circumstances of composition of a translation in the para-textual materials may have been manipulated in line with a marketing design or projected ethos of reception. Nevertheless, translations can yield a potentially vast amount of information about imported continental books in use in humanistic contexts in Tudor England, about the purposes for which they were read, and about the role of experts in humane learning in guiding such reading. Faced with the task of introducing Boccaccio’s novels in a suitable form to English élite households such as that of the Herberts, one translator (probably John Florio) chose two corrected continental editions and blended them together. We see translators interpreting and making decisions about not only the text itself, but also the format and paratextual materials offered in specific continental editions. In his translation of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, Thomas Chaloner incorporates some of those elements in Gerardus Listrius’ commentary on the work that attempt to hedge Erasmus’ more controversial points. William Jones makes some quite intricate decisions about the format of his edition of Lipsius’ Politica. Thomas Lodge’s Seneca is actually an English edition of Lipsius’ edition of Seneca. When John Harington came to make an English life of Ariosto for his translation he adapted for his own purposes elements of the paratext from two Italian editions.40

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With regard to the collections into which translations were incorporated and the uses to which they were put there were no hard-and-fast marketing distinctions. The typical humanistic translation was marketed both for inclusion in libraries dominated by continental books but including a significant proportion in vernacular languages (including English), and for purchase by those of less learned capacity who were collecting a European library in English. Both kinds of collector were of course aware of the forms of ‘popular culture’ – romances, ballads, proverbs – and would incorporate its products in their collections and works. At the same time there is a clear trend amongst the humanistically educated (though not necessarily amongst the landed power élite) to define ‘civility’ as a matter of artistic taste and decorum, and to distance themselves accordingly from unreformed popular culture and from ‘crude’ translations. In looking at literary and philosophical translation from the 1560s to the 1620s, we are dealing, then, with a literary field of cultural production still centered on experts in humane learning, patrons, and their books, a field which spans both kinds of collection mentioned above and which has an increasingly ‘civilized’ relationship to the forms of popular culture. There is evidence that translations could be compared and used in conjunction with the original and other foreign texts by these particularly ‘civilized’ readers. Drummond of Hawthornden’s copy of Edward Fairfax’s translation of Tasso has detailed annotations comparing it with the original Italian, together with cross-references to other classical-continental and English authors such as Vergil, Heliodorus, Montemayor and Spenser.41 Thomas Tresham’s library included a copy of Thomas Hoby’s English translation of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, but it also included copies of the work in French, Spanish and Italian.42 The library implies a polyglot, eclectic mode of study across classical and modern languages. Gentlewomen and less educated male readers might, equally, use only vernacular works, both ‘original’ English texts and ones translated into that language. Lastly, we need not limit ourselves to translations per se, but mine the study of the sources of all sorts of vernacular compositions for concrete evidence of the informal application of humanistic approaches to continental printed books or particular combinations of continental and English books. One spectacular example is Thomas Palmer’s manuscript emblem book presented to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The manuscript includes cut-outs from printed emblem books and draws on continental editions of Alciato, Aneau, Coustau, Paradin, Valeriano, and Erasmus.43 One Henry Constable sonnet from the 1594 ‘Diana’

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sequence has the title ‘To his Mistresse upon occasion of a Petrarch he gave her, shewing her the Reason why the Italian commentres dissent so much in the Exposition thereof’ (Diana, I. iii. 4). In Stephen Clucas’ view, this shows that copies of Petrarch were available – indeed common enough to be given as gifts – and that English readers like Constable had seen enough of them to form an opinion on how their interpretations differed.44 When George Chapman was confronted with the task of completing Marlowe’s Ovidian amplification of Musaeus’ story of Hero and Leander he chose to use selections from a copy of Vincenzo Cartari’s Le imagini de i Dei de gli Antichi.45 Some of the scenes of reading and study revealed by this material were highly ‘personal’ to the individual translating and to the needs of related individuals and friends; some were more ‘serviceable’ in relation to the needs of employers and others. To be sure, there were a number of literary translations explicitly composed as ‘cribs’ for formal classroom purposes; others were more closely related to university study. A large number related to the contemporary methods and concerns of bible and patristic study. Many others were commissioned by printers; some to answer a market demand for continental news, some a demand for particular imported books from élite customers. Indeed, we should perhaps think of humanistic translations in this period as constituting a stratified market targeting at one end the ‘popular’ audience for humanistic educational manuals and at the other end a wealthier, less profession-oriented educated élite who were taking possession of the vernacular in more ‘illustrated’ or ‘civilized’ forms.46 What is being sold to them is an Englished copy of an imported continental book, ‘prepared’ and read with their expectations and needs in mind. Other translations may, of course, represent or attempt to redeem the clandestine reading-for-pleasure which Montaigne’s college tutor indulged him in. All are documents in one sense or another of Tudor and early Stuart habits of glossing, commentary, reading and teaching. These documents have to be related to the diverse institutional and cultural contexts from which they emerge, combined with other forms of historical evidence, and not treated as a single category of ‘translations’ all attempting the same thing (i.e. a ‘faithful’ version of a source text in a single target language, English). Nevertheless, if translations of literary, philosophical, historical and religious books reveal a habitual culture of approaches to foreign or ancient language texts, they also provide a major body of sources for the study of Tudor practice in humane learning. For literary translation was an inherently humanistic activity throughout this period. Literary

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translation was an integral part of grammatical and rhetorical studies and of exegesis and composition more generally. Indeed, like other rhetorical practices, it linked reading and composition. Its particular ideological context is the importation of the modes and motives of Reformation bible study into humane learning: the vernacular application of a text to specific occasions, problems and needs. Its comparative literary context is the international struggle for intellectual property deriving from the Latin-Italian heritage and for the most powerful instances of vernacular domestication of that heritage. (This was an arena dominated by French national culture and by the Spanish and German/Dutch/Flemish cultures of the Habsburg Empire).47 Generally speaking, there has been a surprising paucity of scholarly work addressing the historically-specific mediations of continental and classical works in early modern England.48 We need to recover what is at stake in the reproduction and circulation of these works before we can find new approaches to the relationships traditionally described as a matter of ‘sources’, ‘currents’ and ‘influences’. It is above all not translation studies per se but the combined study of English translations, imported books (which include European vernacular translations), and other sources for the history of the book, which can help the historian produce a more applied version of intellectual history. This combined form of study can make firmer links between the priorities, pressures and expectations evident in the contexts of reception and application of imported ideas, and specific forms, features and preoccupations of ‘original’ vernacular works which domesticate classical/continental material. In the process, English Tudor translations might emerge from their isolation and rejoin the ‘original’ works and the imported books from which they were segregated by modern canon-builders.

Montaigne, Shakespeare and late Renaissance humanism in England Consider how much John Florio knew about French editions of the Essais when he was commissioned to translate the work.49 In the town and country households of the noble families where he was serving as a modern language teacher he had seen numerous copies in a variety of formats from octavo to folio. He had compared them and discovered that some had more, some less text. He had compared the longer and the shorter versions of Mademoiselle de Gournay’s preface and concluded that she need not have retracted the former. He knew that the Essais had been licensed for publication at Geneva. This was clearly a

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book regularly seen and handled in the noble households he served and one about which much was known. It was received, furthermore, as a book with a role in household education, though it was not (as it is now) part of a formally prescribed arts curriculum. In this precise respect, there is a special relationship between the circumstances of the arrival and use of Montaigne’s book in England and the institutional configuration of humane learning in the late Tudor period.50 The evidence all shows that Montaigne’s book was imported and translated as part of a noble household institution that retained the institutionalized ‘core’ of humanist rhetorical and dialectical study but informally extended itself across an eclectic, Latin-and-vernacular range of languages and studies. The particular form in which this institution was delivered depended on the status of the tutor and the status and gender of the student. In a general context that involved not only John Florio as modern language tutor, but also more senior scholarly figures such as Gabriel Harvey, whose response to the Essais in the 1590s is well documented, Montaigne’s French book joined an informally developing humanistic curriculum structured around the mediation of classical learning by modern Italian (and Spanish) books. This is borne out in the way that, in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Lady Politic Would-Be mentions Montaigne as one of many modern authors (the others are Italian) whom the English habitually pillage for material; the use of Montaigne in Robert Tofte’s commentary on a work translated from the Italian of Benedetto Varchi is testimony to the same phenomenon.51 Beyond this, however, the special relationship to which I refer lies in the fact that the first chapter to be translated, started by Florio at the request of a high-ranking scholar-statesman (Sir Edward Wotton), was the essay on the institution of young noblemen discussed above. It is, of course, this chapter that uncannily describes and realizes precisely the institutional developments which were conditioning the Essais’ reception in England. The chapter even describes the employment in the household of a hierarchy of learned servants headed by a ‘gouverneur’, a gentlemen whose learned services are ‘freely’ offered and not paid for. Documents show that the Harington household in which much of the rest of the translation was performed was full of learned servants of different ranks jostling for the prime positions as tutors to the eldest son and the eldest daughter. Our reading of the translation should, indeed, take more account of the fact that it was ultimately the cultural product of a number of individuals – learned servants and their superiors – whose relationships, functions and purposes with respect to humane learning were structured by their

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positions in the noble or gentle household. Florio matriculated from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1581 as servitor to Emmanuel Barnes. He was at the time a lowly college servant with very little chance of pursuing a degree. His position as private Italian secretary to Queen Anne in the early Stuart period was the fulfilment of an aspiration pursued over a period of at least twenty-five years. In a manuscript dedication to the friend of Sidney, Edward Dyer, Florio recounts how he was constrained by necessity to join the ranks of the private language teachers at Oxford, and to become a professional reader concerned with the collection of Italian copia for his gentleman pupils and patrons.52 This lowly social role is continuous with the limited grammatical and rhetorical extent of Florio’s vernacular learning. The evidence provided by the dedications and the translation itself is that he understood his task in relation to his function: grammatical and stylistic analysis and translation of fragmented textual themes in the context of private tutorials not with the eldest son or the head of the household, but with the young noblewomen. The book, though, assumes a different status and a different meaning when placed in the context of a higher tutorial or advisory relationship: one pertaining between one of the household’s higher-ranking scholars and the head or eldest son of the house. Matthew Gwinne was involved in the translation and ranked more highly as a provider of intellectual services; he puts Montaigne’s work alongside Marc-Antoine Muret’s annotations on Seneca in a lecture he gave at Gresham College.53 Samuel Daniel’s introductory poem, printed with the translation, clearly places Montaigne’s text in relation to the higher ratiocinative art of dialectic. He describes Montaigne as a sceptic, in the mould of Cicero’s Academica, one who may not reach truth but who can judge probabilities more wisely than most. In another poem, Daniel describes the intellectual qualities of one of his noble masters, Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire, in similar terms.54 According to Daniel, the principal evidence of Blount’s dialectical mastery is the degree of annotation in his books, which reveal the point of his conceiving thoughts. One extant Blount family book which does contain such annotations is a copy of Sextus Empiricus (though the annotations are probably not by Charles but by his brother William, seventh Lord Mountjoy). It interestingly reveals common ‘noble’ ground with Montaigne’s approach to Sextus. In both Essais II. 12 by Montaigne and in these annotations, emphasis is placed on the same passages from the openings of the main text of Sextus and the attached ‘Life’ of Pyrrho. Nobles were directed to their dialectical scepticism in routinely selective ways across Europe.55

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Finally, this briefly outlined perspective might suggest new approaches to an old crux in the study of Shakespearean drama’s relationship to the humane learning of the day. I refer to the allusions to classical and humanistic texts to be found in The Tempest. The point in analysing the relations between The Tempest and humanism has traditionally been to recover a hidden intellectual relationship between the author Shakespeare and the source Vergil or the source Montaigne. The goal has been to reveal the bard’s ‘reading’ of these authors as an aspect of the humanistic development of his mind and of the literary genesis and meaning of a particular work. We can now suggest that this approach needs to be complicated by a sense of the play’s staging of ‘learning’ as an aspect of aristrocratic culture, a sense to be underpinned by a specific cultural-historical connection between dramatic process and social process. The connection lies in the cultural conditions – household tutorial or advisory conference – shaping the purposeful appropriation from elsewhere of themes and precedents which were then directed to new uses. At stake in both the drama and in the social history are the expression and recognition of aristocratic virtue, power and legitimacy in constantly shifting and unstable circumstances. For a Jacobean audience of The Tempest many things are in play at once – dynastic politics, the representation of aristocratic emotion and charisma, the precedents of learning and the uses of knowledge, the operation of power over domestic household and distant spaces.56 The point for us though is that the dramatic (not the authorial) process of mediating the use of the text from Florio’s Montaigne matches the aristocratic household process of ‘institution’ of the nobility that mediated the reception of Montaigne’s imported book in late Renaissance English culture. Consider two consecutive scenes (I. 2 and II. 1). In the first, Prospero, a powerful and learned dynast, actualizes an implicit and authoritative ancient precedent for his own purposes. These purposes are at once educative, political and dynastic. We have heard how he has been educating his daughter Miranda for the moment of her meeting with Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, a meeting that will restore Prospero’s political and dynastic authority. Prospero’s own authority and presence as father and ruler are resubstantiated by means of the assimilation of the hidden ancient precedent to his family strategy, as, under his direct sway, the heir of Naples falls for Miranda, the heiress of Milan, in the manner of Aeneas’ vision of Venus, as recounted by Vergil. The process is also, of course, ‘spiritual’ or emotional; Ferdinand’s spirits are diverted away from grief at his father’s apparent loss in the shipwreck

Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England 263

(‘he’s something stained With grief’) to admiration for the goddess he now wants to make his queen, just as Aeneas is diverted from his woes by the goddess-like maid who crosses his path (Aeneid, I. 305–34). The next scene is recognizably one of informal learned conference, which draws both on a canonical commonplace from the core arts curriculum and on a supplementary, extra-curricular theme. The dramatic point is the danger that arises from the lack of direction, which can come only from a contingent and active combination of literary precedent, governor/adviser and master. As the scene begins, Alonso, King of Naples, silent and grief-stricken at the apparent loss of his son Ferdinand, is behaving in anything but the manner of Aeneas shipwrecked on the shore of Carthage. He will not listen to Gonzalo, his learned counsellor, who, with the assistance of their friends Adrian and Francisco, attempts to divert him from his inactive melancholy by reactualizing another Virgilian theme and then a modern vernacular comment (Montaigne’s), on the way in which the classical commonplace of the Golden Age has been excelled by experience of New Worlds. Gonzalo is trying to make the occasion speak to Alonso in language other than that of the devastating loss of a son, to correct an imbalance of humours in the royal and in the political body (by diverting him, again, from woe and sorrow to comfort). In the process, he uses ancient themes and modern applications that are to hand in his invention and that can be beneficially applied to the present occasion: the theme of Dido and Carthage, to bring Alonso spiritual comfort by reminding him that he has made a great marriage for his daughter, now Queen of Tunis; the theme of the excelling of the Golden Age, to remind Alonso that he is a king, and to spur him to take action to search and assert sovereignty over the invitingly temperate island. In both cases it is the present emotional and political needs of his master’s situation which force the particular application of the borrowed theme. Gonzalo puts the emphasis on widow Dido to force the parallel with the married Queen Claribel, the daughter whose recollection he thinks (wrongly) will comfort the king. Montaigne uses the real experience of the New World to reply to Plato’s poetic Golden Age (‘T’excel the Golden Age’).57 Gonzalo re-applies Montaigne’s reply as a challenge to Alonso, a would-be Utopian project to wake him up to his fortune and to make him resolve what actions he will take in the immediate future. But without any response or direction from Gonzalo’s master, who dwells unhealthily on the loss of his children, these applications have no force or authority and Gonzalo becomes just a lord prating ‘amply and unnecessarily’. This lack of royal protection opens opportunities for two other

264 Warren Boutcher

lords to ‘comment’ on Gonzalo’s discourse in sniping and satirical fashion. Indeed Antonio, Prospero’s brother, will in turn apply some of its themes to his chosen lord’s present needs by making the occasion speak to Alonso’s brother Sebastian, rather than to Alonso himself. It is Sebastian who accepts the invitation to bypass his ‘conscience’ and contemplate seizing the occasion of Ferdinand’s and Claribel’s ‘loss’ to establish sovereignty over both the island and the kingdom at home. Just as he seems persuaded to apply the precedent of Antonio’s usurpation in his own case, the art of a greater master (Prospero) intervenes, by means of its instrument Ariel, to achieve in symbolically actual terms what Gonzalo had been attempting earlier in the scene. Ariel awakens Alonso, who immediately resolves to search for his son. It is not, then, Shakespearean allusion to or imitation of Virgil and Montaigne that is at stake in these scenes. What is at stake is the cultural relationship between élite power, moral legitimacy and advised mediation of continental literary precedents. We see the discussion, circulation and application of ideas lose direction and begin to spin out of control, because the aristocratic master does not command and protect the process and its outcome. This almost results in conspiracy and regicide. What is at stake, in other words, is also at stake in the whole cultural process whereby classical and modern themes and histories were applied humanistically as precedents in the resolution of the emotional and political needs of the élite and the constant reformulation of their family strategies in very uncertain moral, political and dynastic circumstances. This process at one and the same time comprehended and found a key focus in the circulation, translation and appropriation of the Essais in late Tudor and early Stuart England.

Notes 1 In the present chapter I aim to offer no more than a programmatic synthesis of some general issues in the field, formulated from the point of view of a text historian with wide experience of the secondary literature. (For general orientation, see the editor’s Introduction.) I have therefore kept footnotes to a minimum. The programme of a more applied intellectual history, slanted here according to my particular concern with translation and the continental book, is one shared with many other scholars working in similar directions since the mid-1980s. 2 My point is that there is as yet no general consensus as to what we are talking about when we address English humanism in this later period; whereas scholars of early Tudor humanism have a field – broadly defined by Paul Oskar Kristeller – within which they can disagree.

Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England 265 3 P. O. Kristeller, ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’, Byzantion, XVII (1944–45) 346–74; J. Monfasani, ‘Towards the Genesis of the Kristeller Thesis of Renaissance Humanism: Four Bibliographical Notes’, Renaissance Quarterly, LIII (2000) 1156–73. 4 P. O. Kristeller, ‘Studies on Renaissance Humanism during the Last Twenty Years’, Studies in the Renaissance, IX (1962) 7–30, quotation at p. 14. 5 H. Baron, ‘Fifteenth-Century Civilization and the Renaissance’, in The New Cambridge Modern History, i: The Renaissance, 1493–1520, ed. G. R. Potter (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 50–75. 6 A good example is Mike Pincombe’s recent study, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow and London, 2001). Though he explicity rejects Kristeller’s approach (p. 40), his revisionist emphasis on the ‘belletristic view of Elizabethan humanism’, on the fact that ‘what was probably most important in a sonnet or so many other literary compositions’ was ‘wit, charm, ingenuity’ (p. 12), is directly descended from Kristeller’s deflation of the highly idealistic philosophical claims being made for Italian Renaissance humanism in the mid-twentieth century. This is most obvious in the way that he takes his cue from Elizabethan (largely pejorative) definitions of a ‘humanist’ as one who takes a superficial courtly interest in literary style in general and in poetic ornamentation specific to the ideology of Elizabethan civility in particular. But the resulting impression of later Tudor humanism is also the inevitable consequence of (a) continuing to isolate the retrospectively gathered canon of ‘original’ high-cultural English vernacular literary compositions from all the other (and often more important) intellectual activities pursued by their authors; (b) isolating that canon, also, from the European multilingual context of humane learning in England; and (c) confining the inquiry to the question of what it is, in literary terms, that these compositions universally share in relation to learning. The results of such a procedure reveal little that is of broad or positive historical interest about the relationship between humane learning and literature in the Elizabethan period. 7 Denys Hay, ‘England and the Humanities in the Fifteenth Century’, in Itinerarum Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformations, ed. H. A. Oberman and T. A. Brady Jr (Leiden, 1975), pp. 305–67; A. Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, in A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 9–33; D. R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto, 1993), pp. 4–19. 8 I prefer the term ‘humane learning’ to either ‘humanism’ or ‘the humanities’ because it was in use in England in the period itself (unlike the other two terms). Also, it denotes the whole range of non-‘divine’ learning, and not just poetry, history, moral philosophy, grammar and rhetoric. When I use the surely indispensable term ‘humanism’, I refer to the broad culture of humane learning. 9 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. M. Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, iv (Oxford, 2000), pp. 21–2. 10 See W. Boutcher, ‘Pilgrimage to Parnassus: Local Intellectual Traditions, Humanist Education and the Cultural Geography of Sixteenth-Century

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11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

England’, in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Ancient Learning, ed. N. Livingstone and Y. L. Too (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 110–47. A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 1986); L. Jardine, ‘Humanism and the Sixteenth-Century Cambridge Arts Course’, History of Education, IV (1975) 16–31. K. Sharpe, ‘The Foundation of Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge: An Episode in Jacobean Politics’, History of Universities, II (1982) 127–52; W. Boutcher, ‘“A French Dexteritie, & An Italian Confidence”: New Documents on John Florio, Learned Strangers and Protestant Humanist Study of Modern Languages in Renaissance England from c. 1547 to c. 1625’, Reformation, II (1997) 39–109; L. B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago, 1997); V. Morgan, ‘Approaches to the History of the English Universities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Bildung, Politik und Gesellschaft: Studien zur Geschichte des europäischen Bildungswesens vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. G. Klingenstein, H. Lutz and G. Stourzh (Wien, 1978), pp. 138–64, at pp. 155–6. Morgan, ‘Approaches’, pp. 150–51. I intend ‘letters’ in the broader sense here, but the paucity of printed collections of generically classical letters (i.e. ‘familiar’ letters) to and from English humanists (vernacular or Latin) after Roger Ascham’s Familiarum epistolarum libri tres of 1576 is a case in point. See Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996) and P. Mack, The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Prose (Cambridge, 2002). R. Farmer, An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1767). T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944). M. Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. D. Scott Kastan (Oxford, 1999), pp. 100–16. Questions first encouraged by A. Grafton and L. Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, CXXIX (1990) 30–78. Morgan, ‘Approaches’ defends the notion of a mid-sixteenth century influx despite the important reservations expressed in E. Russell, ‘The Influx of Commoners into the University of Oxford before 1581: An Optical Illusion?’, The English Historical Review, XCII (1977) 721–45. Russell supports the general thesis concerning the rise (between the early fifteenth and seventeenth centuries) of the undergraduate college as an institution catering for undergraduate gentleman commoners and poor scholars, especially in the area of humanistic education. She emphasizes, however, that the advent of documentation arising from the mid-Tudor regulation of undergraduate education – the culmination of a trend beginning c. 1410 – can account for the illusion of a sudden influx at that point. I am grateful to Jonathan Woolfson for his advice on this point. See in general A. Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1997). Morgan, ‘Approaches’ provides the best synthesis of the work carried out by Lawrence Stone and others in this field between the 1950s and the 1970s. See also J. K. McConica, ‘Scholars and Commoners in Renaissance Oxford’, The University in Society, ed. L. Stone (Princeton, 1974), i, pp. 151–81;

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23

24

25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32

33

34 35 36

37 38

39 40

McConica, ‘The Social Relations of Tudor Oxford’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, XXVII (1977) 115–34; The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University, ed. J. K. McConica (Oxford, 1986). See K. J. MacHardy, ‘Cultural Capital, Family Strategies and Noble Identity in Early Modern Habsburg Austria’, Past and Present, CLXIII (1999), 36–75 (pp. 47–8 and passim). L. Jardine and A. Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561–1626 (London, 1998), pp. 34–7; A. Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London, 2000), pp. 40–9. MacHardy, ‘Cultural Capital’ and Morgan, ‘Approaches’, pp. 145–8. Grafton and Jardine, ‘Studied for Action’. Boutcher, ‘Pilgrimage to Parnassus’. See the brilliant short piece by Margaret McGowan, ‘1549: A New Intellectual Élite’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. D. Hollier (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 194–8. See E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 230–1 – still two of the best pages ever written on Montaigne. William London, A Catalogue of the most vendible books in England (London, 1607), sig. I3r. London, A Catalogue, sigs B2r, C2r–v, E1v, F1v, G1r, I2r. M. Mack, Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (East Brunswick, London and Toronto, 1982), p. 426. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, tr. John Florio, Everyman’s Library (London, 1910), i, ‘Of the institution and education of children’ (esp. pp. 186–8) and ‘Of Pedantisme’ (pp. 134–5). For the French text, see Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. P. Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris, 1965). Montaigne, Les Essais, pp. 253 and 412. MacHardy, ‘Cultural Capital’. W. Boutcher, ‘Vernacular Humanism in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. J. Kraye (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 189–203. Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage (1620–1637), ed. A. Bresson (Florence, 1992), pp. 355–6. M. L. Ford, ‘Importation of Books into England and Scotland’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1400–1557, ed. L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 179–201. Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. P. France (Oxford, 2000), pp. 45–55. H. G. Wright, The First English Translation of the ‘Decameron’ (1620) (Uppsala, 1953); Desiderius Erasmus, The praise of folie, trans. Sir Thomas Chaloner [first edition 1549], ed. C. H. Miller (Oxford, 1965); Justus Lipsius, Sixe bookes of politickes or civil doctrine, trans. William Jones (London, 1594), sigs A3v–4r; J. H. Salmon, ‘Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, L (1989) 199–225, at p. 200; J. Scott-Warren, ‘Sir John Harington’s “Life of Ariosto” and the Textual Economy of the Elizabethan Court’, Reformation, III (1998) 259–301.

268 Warren Boutcher 41 See The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. R. H. Macdonald (Edinburgh, 1971). 42 British Library, MS Additional 39 830, fols 167–214. 43 J. Manning, ‘Continental Emblem Books in Sixteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Sloane MS 3794’, Emblematica, I (1986) 1–11. 44 I am grateful to Dr Clucas for this reference. 45 See D. J. Gordon, ‘The Renaissance Poet as Classicist: Chapman’s Hero and Leander’, in his The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures, ed. S. Orgel (Berkeley, 1975). 46 See M. Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge, 1998). 47 McGowan, ‘1549: A New Intellectual Élite’, in Hollier, A New History, p. 196; E. MacPhail, ‘1553, June: Antiquities and Antiquaries’, in Hollier, A New History, pp. 209–13, at pp. 209–10; G. P. Norton, ‘1541, July: Translation as Literature’, in Hollier, A New History, pp. 180–4; R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954), Appendix II (which gives an approximate, sometimes inaccurate, basis for estimation of the relative rates of English, Italian, French, German and Spanish vernacularization of the classics – for corrections to the column for England see H. Nørgaard, ‘Translations of the Classics into English before 1600’, Review of English Studies, IX (1958) 164–72). 48 Some of the work that has appeared is cited in the notes above. 49 See especially the prefatory and dedicatory materials to book I of his translation. 50 In what follows I am drawing on work in print or in press. See Boutcher, ‘A French Dexteritie’; ‘Vernacular Humanism’; ‘Michel de Montaigne et Anthony Bacon: la familia et la fonction des lettres’, Montaigne Journal, XIII (2001) 241–76; ‘Learning Mingled with Nobilitie: Directions for Reading Montaigne’s Essais in their Institutional Context’, in ‘The Changing Face of Montaigne’: Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Exeter, September 2000, ed. K. Cameron (2002). 51 Ben Jonson, Volpone, III. 4; B. Varchi, The blazon of iealousie, trans. Robert Tofte (London, 1615), sigs D1v, F3r, E3v, E4r, G1v, K1r. 52 F. A. Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 1934), p. 53; BL, MS Additional 15,214, fol. 8r. 53 Warren Boutcher, ‘Florio’s Montaigne: Translation and Pragmatic Humanism in the Sixteenth Century’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1991), p. 202. 54 Samuel Daniel, A funerall poeme uppon the death of the late noble Earle of Devonshyre (London, ?1606). 55 Sextus Empiricus, Med. Sexti philosophi Pyrrhoniarum hypotypwsewn libri III (Geneva, 1562), Oxford, Bodleian Library, pressmark 8o D 58(2); Montaigne, Essais, II. 12. 56 On the play’s dynastic politics see D. Scott Kastan, ‘“The Duke of Milan / And His Brave Son”: Dynastic Politics in The Tempest’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, ed. V. Mason Vaughan and A. T. Vaughan (New York, 1998), pp. 91–103. 57 See Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, pp. 213–4.

Select Bibliography Primary sources Ascham, Roger. The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. L. V. Ryan (Ithaca, 1967). Babington, C., ed. The Benefit of Christ’s Death (London and Cambridge, 1855). Blagrave, John. The mathematical Iewell (London, 1584). Budé, Guillaume. Epistolae (Paris 1520; repr. Basel 1521). Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere (London, 1862–1919). Calendar of State Papers Relating to England in the Libraries of Venice and Northern Italy, ed. R. L. Brown (London, 1864–97). Caponetto, S., ed. Benedetto da Mantova: Il Beneficio di Cristo (Florence, 1972). Carley, J. P. ed., The Libraries of King Henry VIII (London, 2000). Case, John. Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588). Christie, R. C. Letters of Sir Thomas Copley (London, 1897). Clark, A., ed. Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1887). Cranmer, Thomas. Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, ed. J. E. Cox (Cambridge, 1846). Elyot, Thomas. The Book named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962). Erasmus, Desiderius. Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1906–58). Erasmus, Desiderius. Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. J. C. Olin (New York, 1965). Fehrenbach, R. J., and Leedham-Green, E. S., eds. Private Libraries in Renaissance England (Binghamton and Tempe, 1992–). Firpo, M., and Marcatto, D., eds. Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone (Rome, 1981–95). Flaminio, Marcantonio. Apologia del Beneficio di Cristo e altri scritti inediti, ed. D. Marcatto (Florence, 1996). Foorde, John. Synopsis politica (Cambridge, 1581). Foxe, John. Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (London, 1563 and 1583). Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs, ed. S. R. Cattley, 2nd edn (London, 1843–49). Frulovisi, Tito Livio. Vita Henrici Quinti, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1716). Gibson, S., ed. Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1931). Giles, J. A. The Whole Works of Roger Ascham (London, 1864–65). Hatch, M., and Vos, A., eds. Letters of Roger Ascham (New York, 1989). Heumann, J., ed. Documenta literaria (Altdorf, 1758). Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, ed. R. E. Flathman and D. Johnston (London and New York, 1997). Knighton, C. S., ed. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Reign of Mary I (London, 1998). 269

270 Select Bibliography Leedham-Green, E. S., ed. Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book Lists from ViceChancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods (Cambridge, 1986). Legge, Thomas. The Complete Plays, ed. and trans. D. F. Sutton (New York, 1993). Leland, John. Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum, encomia, trophaea, genethliaca & epithalamia, ed. T. Newton (London, 1589). Leland, John. Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, ed. A. Hall (Oxford, 1709). London, William. A catalogue of the most vendible books in England (London, 1607). Manzoni, G., ed. Estratto del processo di Pietro Carnesecchi (Turin, 1870). Melanchthon, P. Mathematicarum disciplinarum tum etiam astrologiae encomia (Strasbourg, 1537). Merbury, Charles. A Discourse of Royal Monarchy (London, 1581). Montaigne, Michel de. Essays, trans. John Florio (London, 1910). Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais, ed. P. Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris, 1965). More, Thomas. The co[n]futacyon of Tyndals answere (London, 1532). More, Thomas. Complete Works (New Haven, 1963–). More, Thomas. Utopia, ed. E. Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven and London, 1965). Nichols, J. G., ed. Literary Remains of Edward VI (London, 1857). Ochino, Bernardino. Fourteen Sermons concerning the predestination and election of God, trans. Anne Cooke, Lady Bacon (London, 1551). Ochino, Bernardino. Seven Dialogues, ed. R. Belladonna (Toronto, 1988). Pace, Richard. De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. F. Manley and R. S. Sylvester (New York, 1967). Robinson, H. Original Letters relative to the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1846–47). Rogers, E. F., ed. St Thomas More: Selected Letters (New Haven and London, 1967). Strype, J. The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (Oxford, 1821). Townsend, A. Writings of John Bradford: Letters, Treatises and Remains (Cambridge, 1853). Tyndale, William, trans. The fyrst boke of Moses called Genesis (Malborow [i.e. Antwerp], 1530–31). Tyndale, William. An answer vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge made by Willyam Tindale (Antwerp, 1531). Tyndale, William. An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, ed. A. M. O’Donnell and J. Wicks, The Independent Works of William Tyndale: iii (Washington, DC, 2000). Vives, Juan Luis. Early Writings, ed. C. Matheeussen et al. (Leiden, 1987). Wilkins, A. ed. Concilia magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (London, 1737).

Secondary materials Alford, A. The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998). Axton, M., and Carley, J. P. eds. ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court (London, 2000). Bainton, R. H. Bernardino Ochino (Florence, 1940).

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274 Select Bibliography MacCulloch, D. ‘Two Dons in Politics: Thomas Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner, 1503–33.’ The Historical Journal, XXVII (1994) 4–17. MacCulloch, D. Thomas Cranmer: A Life (London and New Haven, 1996). MacCulloch, D. Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999). MacHardy, K. J. ‘Cultural Capital, Family Strategies and Noble Identity in Early Modern Habsburg Austria.’ Past and Present, CLXIII (1999) 36–75. Mack, P., ed. Renaissance Rhetoric (New York, 1994). Mann, N. ‘La prima fortuna del Petrarca in Inghilterra’. In Il Petrarca ad Arquà, ed. G. Billanovich and G. Frasso (Padua, 1975), pp. 279–89. Mann, N. ‘Petrarch’s Role in Humanism.’ Apollo, XCIV (1971) 176–83. Mayer, T. F. Thomas Starkey and the Common Weal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989). Mayer, T. F. Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000). McConica, J. K. English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965). McConica, J. K. ‘Humanism and Aristotle in Tudor Oxford’, English Historical Review, XCIV (1979) 291–317. McConica, J. K., ed. The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University (Oxford 1986). McLaren, A. Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1999). McNair, P. ‘Ochino on Sedition.’ Italian Studies, XIV and XV (1959–60) 36–49. Miller, F. D. Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics (Oxford, 1995). Morgan, V. ‘Approaches to the History of the English Universities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.’ In Bildung, Politik und Gesellschaft: Studien zur Geschichte des europäischen Bildungswesens vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. G. Klingenstein, H. Lutz and G. Stourzh (Wien, 1978), pp. 138–64. Nixon, H. M. ‘Early English Gold-Tooled Bookbindings.’ In Studi di Bibliografia e di Storia in onore di Tammaro de Marinis (Verona, 1964), iii, pp. 283–308. Nixon, H. M. Sixteenth-Century Gold-Tooled Bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, 1971). Nixon, H. M., and Foot, M. M. The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England (Oxford, 1992). Norbrook, D. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984). O’Sullivan, W. ‘John Manyngham: An Early Oxford Humanist.’ Bodleian Library Record, VII (1962) 28–39. Olsen, V. N. John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973). Overell, M. A. ‘Peter Martyr in England 1547–1553: An Alternative View.’ Sixteenth Century Journal, XV (1984) 87–104. Overell, M. A. ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera.’ Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVI (1995) 619–37. Peltonen, M. Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). Peritore, C. ‘Influenza dell’Umanesimo nel programma di riforma ecclesiastica di Giovan Matteo Giberti.’ In Civiltà dell’Umanesimo, ed. G. Tarugi (Florence, 1972), pp. 285–97. Pincombe, M. Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow and London, 2001).

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Index Abell, John, 161 Abingdon, 57 Acciaoli, Donato, 201 Accursius, 64 Adelmann, Bernard, 65, 67 Adrian VI, 100–1 Aesop, 47, 123 Agricola, Rodolphus, 74, 89 Albertus Magnus, 201 Alciato, Andrea, 257 Aldrich, Robert, 84 Alford, Stephen, 9 Allison, A. F., 190 Amaseo, Romolo, 122 Ambrose, 177 Amerbach, Bonifacius, 130–1 Amerbach, Bruno, 55 André, Bernard, 112 Aneau, Barthélemy, 257 Anne of Denmark, 261 Antwerp, 186 Anwykyll, John, 30 Apollonius Dyscolus, 54, 72 Aquinas, Thomas, 198, 201–4, 206, 210–12, 218 Archimedes, 231, 233, 235–6 Archytas, 236 Ariosto, Ludovico, 253, 256 Aristippus, 230–1 Aristophanes, 72 Aristotle, 36, 47–8, 54, 72, 110, 155, 187, 197–222, 235 Ascham, Roger, 72, 159–60, 186, 188, 206, 246 Athenaeus, 58 Augsburg, 161 Augustine, 54, 154 Aulus Gellius, 58, 75 Aurispa, Giovanni, 32 Auvergne, Peter of, 198, 202, 212 Aylmer, John, 221 Babington, Churchill, 156, 161

Bacon, Francis, 10–11, 214, 245, 249 Bacon, Anthony, 249 Bacon, Roger, 231 Bainbridge, Christopher, 47, 69, 70 Baker-Smith, Dominic, 89 Baldwin, T. W., 247 Bale, John, 97 Bandello, Matteo, 249 Banister, Edward, 138 Barbaro, Ermolao, 48 Barlowe, Jerome, 80 Barnes, Emmanuel, 261 Barnes, Robert, 83 Baron, Hans, 244, 248 Barzizza, Gasparino, 25 Basel, 46–7, 50, 54, 56, 130–1, 133, 160, 176, 191 Basil, 102, 154 Bateman, John, 77 Bayfield, Richard, 181 Beccaria, Antonio, 28 Bedouelle, Guy, 104 Bekynton, Thomas, 28, 40 Bembo, Pietro, 68 Benedetto da Mantova, 153, 165 Bere, Richard de, 47, 68 Berthelet, Thomas, 108 Bessarion, Johannes, 123 Bianchini, Scipio, 154 Bildeston, Nicholas, 25 Binns, J. W., 5, 11, 16, 246 Birkhead, Edmund, 76 Bizzarri, Pietro, 158–9, 160, 164, 169 Blagrave, John, 223–6 Blaurer, Ambrose, 66 Blaurer, Thomas, 66 Blount, Charles, 261 Blount, William, fourth Lord Mountjoy, 44 Blount, William, seventh Lord Mountjoy, 261 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 176, 256 277

278 Index Bodin, Jean, 200, 216 Bodley, Thomas, 106 Boethius, 59 Bole, Richard, 40 Boleyn, Anne, 103–5, 110, 125, 128 Boleyn, George, 110 Boleyn, Thomas, 106 Bologna, 47–50, 69 Bombace, Paolo, 44, 47–50, 53–4, 56, 62, 65, 69–70 Bomelius, Henricus, 81 Borrhaus, Martin, 201 Botzheim, John, 44, 66 Boulers, Reginald, 31 Bourbon, Nicholas, 132, 136, 142 Bourchier, John, 111 Boutcher, Warren, 9, 14–15, 16 Bracciolini, Poggio, 25, 37 Bradford, John, 159, 162 Bradner, Leicester, 132, 138, 150 Bradshaw, Brendan, 7–9, 64 Briggs, Henry, 234–7, 241 Bruges, 56, 73, 89 Bruni, Leonardo, 25, 28, 31, 197–8, 201–3, 205, 244 Bruno, Giordano, 225 Brussels, 89 Bryan, Francis, 101 Bucer, Martin, 55, 101, 109, 189 Budé, Guillaume, 55, 58, 64, 72–4 Bugenhagen, Johann, 84 Bullinger, Heinrich, 111 Buonaccorso da Montemagno, 34 Burckhardt, Georg, 110 Buridan, John, 201 Burley, Walter, 198, 201, 210 Burton, Robert, 77 Bury, Richard de, 187 Bushnell, Rebecca, 7, 13 Busleyden, Jerome, 73, 79 Byng, Thomas, 213 Cabot, Sebastian, 158 Calais, 43 Calvin, John, 154, 204 Cambridge, 17, 50, 64, 72 132, 159, 162, 178, 200, 213, 225–7, 234–7; Corpus Christi College, 106; Emmanuel College, 200; King’s

College, 28; St John’s College, 159, 200; Trinity College, 249 Campeggio, Lorenzo, 124 Campensis, Johannes, 109 Canterbury, 162; Christ Church, 30 Capella, Martianus, 59, 75 Capito, Wolfgang, 81 Capua, Pietro Antonio da, 169 Caraffa, Gian Pietro (Pope Paul IV), 102, 103, 183 Cardano, Girolamo, 160 Carley, James, 12, 16, 131 Carlson, David, 15, 84 Carmeliano, Pietro, 29 Carnesecchi, Pietro, 153–4, 158 Caro, Annibale, 253 Carr, Nicholas, 189 Cartari, Vincenzo, 258 Cartwright, Kent, 7 Cartwright, Thomas, 204, 206, 210, 213–14 Casale, Gregorio, 101 Casaubon, Isaac, 59 Case, John, 194, 198–9, 203, 208–13, 216, 221, 225 Castellio, Sebastien, 160 Castiglionchio, Lapo da, 32 Castiglione, Baldassare, 161, 257 Castiglione, Giovanni Battista, 158, 164 Catero, Scipio, 47 Catherine of Aragon, 101–4, 111–12, 128 Catullus, 253 Cawarden, Thomas, 107 Caxton, William, 35 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 126, 160, 188, 198 Chalcondylas, Demetrius, 47–8 Chaloner, Thomas, 188, 256 Chapman, George, 258 Charles I, 129 Charles II, 135 Charles V, 79, 104, 186 Charles VIII, 123 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 35, 182 Cheke, John, 106, 110, 151, 159–60, 186, 189, 191, 198, 200 Chrysostom, 100–2, 104, 123, 153, 177, 179

Index 279 Cicero, 11, 25, 49, 53, 61–2, 72, 75, 89, 110, 155, 160, 198, 201, 205–6, 213, 233, 261; Ciceronianism, 10, 12 Claudius, 60 Clebsch, William, 84 Clement VII, 101–4, 99–100, 122 Clement, John, 46 Clement, Margaret, 132 Clerk, John, 100, 122 Clerk, William, 47 Clucas, Stephen, 258 Cochlaeus, John, 111 Colet, John, 8, 43, 45–6, 48, 50–2, 61, 66–7, 75–6, 79, 136–8, 144, 175 Collinson, Patrick, 164 Cologne, 178, 187 Commandino, Federigo, 235 Commines, Philippe de, 253 Constable, Henry, 257–8 Constance, 44, 48–9, 56, 66 Contarini, Gasparo, 206 Cooke, Anne, Lady Bacon, 159, 162, 175 Cooke, Anthony, 159 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 223, 230, 232–4, 237–8 Copley, Thomas, 106–7, 126 Coste, Pierre, 251 Cotton, Charles, 251 Courtenay, Edward, 151–2, 154–9, 161, 163–5, 169 Coustau, Pierre, 257 Coverdale, Miles, 178 Crane, Mary, 11 Cranmer, Thomas, 47, 76, 106, 111, 152, 159, 161–3, 169, 175 Crinito, Pietro, 58 Croke, Richard, 43, 68, 102–3, 123 Cromwell, Thomas, 108–9, 111, 133, 177 Ctesibius, 236 Curione, Caelio Secundo, 152, 160 Curtis, Cathy, 16 Cyprian, 177

Dante, 176 Day, George, 63 Decembrio, Pier Candido, 28 Deleen, Wouter, 128 Demetrius, 70 Demosthenes, 53–4, 72, 82–3 Denny, Anthony, 132 Des Portes, Philippe, 77 D’Estrebay, Jacques-Louis, 201 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 214 Diogenes, 61 Dollimore, Jonathan, 6 Donato, Bernardino, 100–4, 113, 116, 119–20, 122 Donne, John, 193 Dornall, John, 64 Dorp, Martin van, 44, 55, 73–4, 95–6 Douaren, François, 191 Dowling, Maria, 4–5, 8, 164, 177 Drummond of Hawthornden, 257 Du Bellay, family, 253 Dudley, Robert, 257 Duns Scotus, 62 Dyer, Edward, 261

Damascus, John of, 100, 104 Daniel, Samuel, 252, 261 Daniell, David, 89

Fabri, Johannes, 66 Fabricius, Wolfgang, 111 Fairfax, Edward, 257

Edward III, 210 Edward VI, 7, 17, 105–7, 125, 133–5, 143, 151–2, 154–5, 157–64, 177–8, 200 Elizabeth I, 106, 123, 157–8, 162, 165, 174, 176, 198–9, 206, 208–11, 214 Elton, Geoffrey, 3, 8 Elyot, Thomas, 89–90, 132, 213 Erasmus, 7, 8, 11, 14–15, 17, 43–51, 54–60, 62–73, 75–6, 78–99, 112, 122, 130–1, 141, 144, 174–5, 177–82, 245, 247, 256; Erasmianism, 7–9, 18, 45, 64–5, 78 Eton College, 84 Euclid, 234 Euripides, 47, 72 Eusebius, 174, 177 Evesham, 77

280 Index Farnaby, Thomas, 45 Fastolf, John, 35 Feingold, Mordechai, 11–13, 226 Fenlon, Dermot, 153 Ferrara, 33, 45, 47–8, 68–9 Filelfo, Francesco, 58 Fine, Oronce, 231–2 Fish, Simon, 81, 83 Fisher, John, 31, 84 Fitzjames, Richard, 76 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias, 176–7 Flaminio, Marcantonio, 152–4, 158, 163 Flemyng, Robert, 33 Florence, 212 Florio, John, 247, 252–3, 256, 259–62 Florio, Michelangelo, 163 Foister, Susan, 16–17 Foorde, John, 200, 207, 216–17 Foot, Mirjam, 105–7 Fortescue, John, 206, 211 Fox, Alistair, 3, 8, 44, 244 Fox, Richard, 72 Foxe, John, 18, 79, 81, 93, 174–85 Francis I, 128 Frederic the Wise, 180 Free, John, 23, 33–4, 41 Freige, Johann Thomas, 201 Frisius, Gemma, 223 Frith, John, 81, 83–4 Froben, Johann, 43, 46–7, 55–6, 65, 99 Frulovisi, Tito Livio, 26–8, 38 Fulgentius, 58–60, 74–5 Gager, William, 190 Galen, 64, 72, 110 Gardiner, Stephen, 175, 178, 183 Garret, Thomas, 181 Gascoyne, Thomas, 29 Gaza, Theodore, 47, 54, 72 Geneva, 259 George of Trebizond, 241 George, Edward, 62 Gervase of Tilbury, 192 Ghent, 89 Ghinucci, Girolamo, 102–3 Giannetti da Fano, Guido, 158, 164, 169

Giberti, Gian Matteo, 36, 99–104, 106–7, 111, 121–2, 124 Giles of Viterbo, 61 Gillis, Peter, 56, 70, 96, 131 Ginés Sepúlveda, Juan, 191, 201 Goldwell, James, 32 Googe, Barnabe, 188 Goulding, Robert, 17 Gournay, Marie de Jars de, 259 Grafton, Anthony, 6–9, 11, 13 Gray, William, 31, 33 Greenwich, 28, 101, 105 Grenville, Thomas, 76 Gresham College, 236, 261 Gresham, Thomas, 236 Greville, Fulke, 199, 249 Griffolini, Francesco, 34 Grocyn, William, 43 Grossman, Fritz, 138 Grynaeus, Simon, 111 Guarino da Verona, 31, 33, 41 Guicciardini, Francesco, 253 Guildford, Henry, 88, 131 Gunthorp, John, 34 Guy, John, 9 Gwinne, Matthew, 228–9, 261 Haddon, Walter, 189, 211 Hakluyt, Richard, 190, 199, 203 Hampton Court, 101, 105, 107 Hannibal, Thomas, 122 Harington, John, 256 Harpsfield, John, 110 Harrington, James, 249 Harvey, Gabriel, 77, 200, 216–17, 224–5, 260 Harvey, Richard, 77 Hatcher, Thomas, 188, 190 Hatton, Christopher, 187, 198 Hay, Denys, 244 Hayes, Cornelius, 108 Heliodorus, 257 Henry V, 26, 32 Henry VI, 22, 27, 32, 33, 37 Henry VII, 29, 135 Henry VIII, 16, 36, 43–4, 47, 50, 57, 76, 82, 99, 101–6, 108–21, 123–5, 127–8, 133, 136, 138, 142–4, 149, 161, 175, 178, 191

Index 281 Herbert (family), 256 Herbert, George, 193 Herd, John, 190 Hermogenes, 61 Hero, 236 Herodotus, 72 Hesiod, 72 Hexter, J. H., 76 Hilary, 154 Hilliard, Richard, 168 Hippocrates, 72 Hobbes, Thomas, 11, 197, 214 Hoby, Thomas, 161, 164, 257 Holbein, Hans, 17, 129, 130–3, 135–8, 143, 149 Homer, 72, 174, 213 Hooker, Richard, 202, 208 Horace, 43 Horenbout, Lucas, 133 Horman, William, 84 Hoskyns, John, 250–1 Howard, Charles, 106 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 35 Howard, Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk, 132 Howard, Thomas, third Duke of Norfolk, 108 Howard, William, 106–7, 126 Hugh of St Cher, 191 Humanism: and art, 129 –30; and classical scholarship, 11–13; and encyclopaedism, 48; and the studia humanitatis, 2–4, 23–5, 30–1, 33, 36, 65; in Europe, 1–2, 29; in fifteenth-century England, 15–16, 22–42, 35–6, 197; in Florence, 25, 33; in France, 10; in Italy, 8, 10, 24, 30, 45, 47, 53–4, 59, 65, 99–128, 197, 205; in Spain, 35; in Tudor England: and Aristotelianism, 14, 197–222; and art, 14, 16–17, 129–50; and biblical scholarship, 45–6, 78, 85–9, 181; and books, 12, 16, 99–128, 189; and education, 6–7, 9, 16, 43–65; and eloquence, 53; and encyclopaedism, 45, 57–63, 65; and gender, 6; and gift-giving, 89, 91, 107–12; and Greek, 46–7,

51–2, 63–4; and Hebrew, 46; and historiography, 3–13; and Italy, 151–73; and letter collections, 186–7; and literature, 5–7, 16, 186–96, 243–68; and Menippean satire, 45, 57–63; and political thought, 197–222; and politics, 11; and print culture, 78–98; and religion, 7–9, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 52–3, 64, 78–98, 151–73, 174–5, 191–2; and rhetoric, 45, 52–3; and scholasticism, 17; and science, 10, 12, 17, 223–41; and the court, 14, 43, 131, 151–73; and the studia humanitatis, 65, 244–7; and the vernacular, 82–3, 85–6, 88, 90; and translation, 12, 17, 254–9. See also Cicero; Erasmus; patronage; Tacitus. Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, 22–33, 40, 197–8, 205 Hummelberg, Michael, 65–6 Humphrey, Lawrence, 199 Hus, John, 81 Hutson, Lorna, 6 Hutten, Ulrich von, 74 Inghirami, Tommaso, 61 Isidore of Seville, 54 Isocrates, 31–2, 40, 50, 53–4, 61, 88–91, 96–7, 183 Ives, E. W., 105 James I, 64, 214 James, Mervyn, 6 James, Thomas, 187 Jardine, Lisa, 6–9, 11, 46, 73–4 Jerome, 54–5, 75, 78, 142, 174, 177 Jewel, John, 175–6, 191 Jones, William, 256 Jonson, Ben, 260 Joseph, Robert, 64, 77 Joye, George, 84 Jud, Leo, 178 Julian the Apostate, 59 Julius II, 53, 61 King, John N., 18, 89, 78, 91 Kinney, Arthur, 5–6

282 Index Kirk, Eugene, 59 Knox, John, 209 Knyvett, Thomas, 141, 145–6, 150 Kratzer, Nikolaus, 132 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 3, 37, 243–6, 248, 250, 264–5 La Boëtie, Etienne de, 253 Lactantius, 46 Lambert, François, 128 Lambert, John, 80 Lambin, Denys, 201 Landor, Walter Savage, 188 Lang, Theodore, 186–7 Langton, Thomas, 47, 68–9 Languet, Hubert, 199 Lascaris, Constantinos, 72 Lascaris, Janus, 68 Latimer, Hugh, 163 Latimer, William, 43, 47, 55, 79 Lauwerijns, Mark, 56 Le Gal, Patrick, 104 Le Roy, Louis, 200, 203, 206, 214 Lee, Edward, 44, 57 Leedham-Green, Elizabeth, 189 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques, 105, 201, 203 Lefèvre, Raoul, 123 Legge, Thomas, 190 Leland, John, 22–3, 33, 37, 108, 111, 122, 127, 129–50 Leo VI, 191 Leo X, 53 Leoniceno, Nicolò, 47–8, 54, 65 Leonico Tomeo, Niccolò, 47–9, 54, 58, 65, 68, 122 Lily, William, 45–6, 50, 67, 84, 144 Linacre, Thomas, 43, 54–5, 66, 72, 79, 109–10, 128 Lipsius, Justus, 74, 256 Listrius, Gerardus, 55, 256 Little Sodbury, 182 Livy, 11 Lodge, Thomas, 256 London, 17, 79, 88, 132, 136, 162–3, 183, 225, 234, 236–7. See also Greenwich; Gresham College; Hampton Court; Middle Temple; St Paul’s Grammar School; Westminster; Whitehall

London, William, 252 Longolius, Christophorus, 186 Lonigo, Ognibene da, 34 Louis XII, 123 Louvain, 43, 45, 56, 62, 73, 186 Love, Harold, 190 Lucca, 158 Lucian, 32, 34, 48, 54, 59, 61–2, 72 Lumley, John, 47, 76 Lupset, Thomas, 73 Luther, Martin, 73, 79–82, 84, 108, 110, 112, 154, 178–83, 245 Machiavelli, Niccolò , 108–9, 205, 209, 218–19 Macrobius, 58, 75 Magdeburg, 176 Mai, Miguel, 103 Maillart, Jean, 128 Manley, Frank, 44 Manuzio, Aldo, 46, 79 Manyngham, John, 30–3, 36 Marcellus, Nonius, 75, 205 Marlowe, Christopher, 165, 258 Marot, Clément, 128 Marshall, William, 111, 207 Marsiglio of Padua, 111, 175, 207 Martial, 253 Martianus Capella, 58 Marvell, Andrew, 243 Mary I, 105, 107, 109, 156, 158, 160, 169, 174, 177, 183 Mason, Francis, 232–3 Maximilian I, 43, 70 Maximus Planudes, 102 Maximus the Confessor, 110 Mayer, Thomas, 9 Mazzochi, Jacopo, 69 McConica, James, 7–8, 64, 78, 156–7, 177, 225 Melanchthon, Philipp, 72, 112, 132–3, 143, 149, 154, 180, 230 Merbury, Charles, 207–8 Metsys, Quentin, 131 Middelburgo, Paulus de, 109 Middle Temple, 251 Mildmay, Walter, 200 Milton, John, 165, 193, 243 Milward, Peter, 191

Index 283 Moerbeke, William of, 198, 201–4 Molendino, Johannes de, 56 Moleyns, Adam, 22–4, 36 Monmouth, Humphrey, 80, 96 Montaigne, Michel de, 243, 247, 251–4, 258–63 Montemayor, Jorge de, 257 More, Thomas, 5, 7–8, 14–15, 17, 43, 46, 51–2, 54–7, 61, 63, 70, 72–4, 76, 78–98, 130–2, 142, 180–1, 212–13, 221–2, 245, 247 Morison, Richard, 132–4, 159, 160, 164 Morone, Giovanni, 152 Munster, Sebastian, 231 Muret, Marc-Antoine, 261 Museaus, 258 Nangis, William of, 108 Naples, 154 Nazianzen, Gregory of, 102, 125, 177 Nemorarius, Jordanus, 235 Nero, 60 Nesen, Wilhelm, 55 Niccolini da Sabbio, Stefano, 100, 104 Nicholas of Cusa, 235 Nicocles, 89 Niño, Rodrigo, 103 Nixon, Howard, 105–7 Nogarola, Ludovico, 100, 104, 123–4 Norbrook, David, 7, 9 Norris, John, 138 Ochino, Bernardino, 152, 155, 157, 159–65 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 84 Oecumenius, 186 Ogden, J. D., 66, 77 Oporinus, Johannes, 176 Origen, 154 Orley, Barent van, 141 Overell, M. A., 17 Oxford, 11, 17, 28–31, 52, 57, 64, 79, 132, 162, 183, 198–200, 212, 225–33, 236–7, 239, 261; Cardinal College, 52, 100, 122; Christ Church, 199; Corpus Christi College, 72; Exeter

College, 64; Gloucester College, 77; Magdalen College, 199, 261; Merton College, 232; St John’s College, 64, 224; Trinity College, 64, 104–5 Pace, Richard, 16, 36, 43–77, 79, 99–100, 108, 111, 121 Paddy, William, 64, 77 Padua, 25, 33–4, 47, 79, 159–60 Palingenius Stellatus, Marcellus, 188 Palladius, 29 Palmer, Thomas, 257 Papias, 54 Pappus, 235 Paradin, Claude, 257 Paris, 132, 136 Parker, Henry, Lord Morley, 108–10 Parker, John, 125 Parker, Matthew, 125–6 Parkhurst, John, 188 Parks, George B., 44 Parr, Catherine, 109 patronage, 8, 23–5, 29, 33, 43, 107 Paul of Venice, 62 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de, 255 Peltonen, Markhu, 9 Périon, Joachim, 201 Persons, Robert, 211 Perugia, 158 Petrarch, Francesco, 31, 35, 110–11, 175, 179, 258 Petronius, 59, 75 Peurbach, Georg, 224, 238 Philip II, 156 Piccolimini, Aeneas Silvius, 22–4 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 175, 179 Pincombe, Mike, 6, 7, 265 Pius, Baptista, 74 Plato, 28, 54, 63, 72, 74, 186, 199, 205 Plautus, 252 Pliny the Elder, 58, 54, 64, 130 Pliny the Younger, 49, 52, 54, 72 Plutarch, 28, 32, 48, 72, 110–11, 253 Pole, Reginald, 68, 121–2, 124, 152–3, 157–8, 168, 206 Poliziano, Angelo, 13, 48, 58, 74

284 Index Polybius, 205, 220 Ponet, John, 155, 159, 161–2, 170, 200, 207 Pope, Alexander, 252 Pope, Thomas, 105 Probus, 46 Prosper of Aquitaine, 191 Prudentius, 46, 177 Ptolemy, 58, 111, 223, 229–32, 241 Pucci, Antonio, 69 Pucci, Lorenzo, 69 Puttenham, George, 45 Pynson, Richard, 112 Quintilian, 49, 54, 61, 72, 74 Rainolds, John, 225 Ramus, Petrus, 234, 241 Reginald of Durham, 192 Regiomontanus, Johann Müller, 223, 230, 238 Reuchlin, Johannes, 57, 73 Revell, Tristram, 128 Rex, Richard, 8–9 Rhegius, Urbanus, 66 Rhenanus, Beatus, 54–6, 72 Ricci, Bartolomeo, 186 Richardson, Brian, 122–3, 165 Robinson, Ralph, 212 Rodwey, Stephan, 64, 76 Rogers, D. M., 190 Rome, 23, 47, 51, 69 Roye, William, 80–1 Rundle, David, 15–16 Rupert of Deutz, 111 Russell, John, 104 Rusticci, Cencio da, 40 Ryckes, John, 83 Sacrobosco, Johannes, 224, 231, 238 St Mary’s, York, 25 Sauli, Domenico, 122 Sauli, Filipppo, 100 Saumaise, Claude, 255 Savile, Henry, 229–37, 241 Scepeaux, François de, 157 Schedel, Hermann, 36 Schmitt, Charles, 213 scholasticism, 4, 175

Seneca, 55, 59–60, 62, 253, 256, 261 Sextus Empiricus, 261 Seymour, Edward, Protector Somerset, 170, 177–8 Seymour, Jane, 133 Shakespeare, William, 214, 246–8, 254, 259, 262–3 Shearman, John, 131 Shepery, John, 190 Sherman, William, 9 Shrewsbury Grammar School, 249 Sidney, Philip, 5, 29, 199–200, 216, 249–51, 253, 261 Sidney, Robert, 200 Simplicius, 48, 64, 110 Sinfield, Alan, 5, 8 Skelton, John, 84 Skinner, Quentin, 9, 11 Smith, Andrew, 142 Smith, Thomas, 200, 211 Solario, Andrea, 150 Solario, Antonio, 141–2, 145–7, 150 Sophocles, 72, 186 Spenser, Edmund, 5, 193, 257 Spiera, Francesco, 163 St German, Christopher, 83 St Paul’s Grammar School, 45–8, 50, 57, 84, 132, 138 Stafford, John, 27 Standish, Henry, 76 Stanhope, Anne, 151, 155 Starkey, Thomas, 71, 206–8 Stewart, Alan, 6, 7, 245 Stokesley, John, 51, 102–3 Stone, Lawrence, 266 Stow, John, 132 Strabo, 58 Strasbourg, 80, 161 Sturm, Johann, 186–7, 206 Surigone, Stefano, 30 Surtz, Edward, 44 Swineshead, Richard, 231 Sylvester, Richard, 44 Synesius, 34, 55 Tacitus, 11, 253; Taciteanism, 10–11, 247 Tardif, Guillaume, 123 Tasso, Torquato, 257

Index 285 Taxis, Franciscus, 141, 144–7 Terence, 252 Terentiano, Giulio, 162 Theophrastus, 72 Thomas, William, 161, 163–4 Throckmorton, Michael, 168 Thucydides, 54, 72 Tiptoft, John, Earl of Worcester, 23, 30–5 Todd, Margo, 7–9, 11–12, 164 Tofte, Robert, 260 Torrigiano, Pietro, 138 Trapp, J. B., 4, 15 Travers, Walter, 204, 219 Tremellio, Emmanuele, 162 Trent, 160 Tresham, Thomas, 257 Tudor, Arthur, 29 Tuke, Brian, 109, 132, 138, 140–1, 144–7 Tunstall, Cuthbert, 43, 46–7, 55, 63, 79–83, 85, 87–91, 128, 181, 183 Tyndale, William, 17, 78–98, 175, 178, 181–3, 245 Ubaldini, Petruccio, 159, 164 Ubaldo, Guido, 235 Ulmis, Conrad ab, 199 Unton, Henry, 187, 198 Valeriano, Piero, 257 Valerius, Cornelius, 205 Valdés, Juan de, 154 Valla, Giorgio, 48 Valla, Lorenzo, 175–6, 179 Vanni, Pietro, 101, 158, 164, 169 Varchi, Benedetto, 260 Varro, 59–60, 75 Vautrollier, Thomas, 188 Venice, 46, 54, 151, 156, 212 Vérard, Antoine, 123 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 152, 162, 165 Vergil, 51, 74, 252, 257, 262 Vergil, Polydore, 111 Vermigli, Pietro Martire, 152, 159, 160–1, 163–5 Vernam, Richard, 188 Verona, 100 Versor, Johannes, 201

Vettori, Pietro, 201, 203 Villa Sancta, Alphonso de, 112 Virgoe, Roger, 150 Visconti, Galeazzo, 70 Vitelli, Cornelio, 30 Viterbo, 153 Vitruvius, 230, 236 Vives, Juan Luis, 58, 62, 72, 74, 76, 128 Wallingford, Richard of, 231 Walsh, Anne, 182–3 Walsh, John, 182–3 Walter, Lord Hungerford, 27 Warham, William, 81, 131, 138, 141 Warton, Thomas, 188 Watson, Christopher, 220 Wegg, Jervis, 44 Weiss, Roberto, 15–16, 38 Werken, Theoderic, 40 Westminster, 101 Whitaker, William, 191 Whitehall, 135 Whitgift, John, 210, 249 Whittinton, Robert, 84, 109–10 Wignall, Mr, 229 William of Ockham, 62 Wilson, Thomas, 45, 156 Winchester, 47 Winter, Thomas, 104 Withypoll, Paul, 141 Wittenberg, 176 Wolf, Reyner, 132 Wolsey, Thomas, 47, 49, 52, 57, 64, 67, 70, 79, 100–2, 104, 108–11, 121–2 Womersely, David, 9 Wooding, Lucy, 7 Worcester, 163 Worcestre, William, 35, 41 Worde, Wynkyn de, 109 Worms, 79 Wotton, Edward, 260 Woudhuysen, H. R., 190 Wright, Robert, 187 Wyatt, Thomas, 35, 111, 132, 138–9 Wycliffe, John, 82

286 Index Xenophon, 31, 34 Yates, Frances, 225 Yonge, John, 168

Zigabeno, Eutimio, 100, 103 Zurich, 50, 56, 165 Zwinger, Theodor, 201 Zwingli, Huldrich, 81