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This chapter analyzes Roger Ascham's narration of Turkish conduct in his unfinished 1553 A Report of Germany. It comments on the tone and diction of Ascham in the Black Legend about racialized encounters in the New World and explains how displaced representation of violent hostility circulated. This chapter also compares Ascham's construction of Turks to Michel de Montaigne's famous second-hand report of Brazilians and to images of Central American indigenes in the less-well-known collection of Theodore de Bry.

Chapter Three initiates a two-chapter sequence on the most hotly contested literary genre in early modern England: romance. It offers close readings of two Elizabethan texts frequently cited for their condemnations of romance: Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Critics generally take these texts at face value, citing them as unequivocal Protestant diatribes against the pleasures of romance and arguing that Ascham and Nashe project such pleasures onto the dangers of traveling abroad to Italy. The chapter draws on Paul de Man’s theory of irony in order to think about the disjunction between the texts’ didactic statements, on the one hand, and the mode in which those statements are delivered, or undelivered, on the other. In opposition to conventional readings that recuperate such disjunctions, the chapter analyzes how the rhetorical motions and narrative structures of these texts fail to line up with Ascham’s and Nashe’s more explicit condemnations of romance. Specifically, it show how the texts’ errancy and play, in the forms of digression, alliteration, and narrative interruptions, undercut their pedagogical intentions. Rather than simply celebrating such play, however, the chapter points to its high costs for both writers.

This chapter examines the traces of Petrarchism in England during the early modern period. It discusses Roger Ascham's attack on Petrarch, Elizabeth Tudor's translation of the first ninety lines of Petrarch's Trionfo dell'Eternità, and Arundel Harrington's rewriting of the Vita Solitaria. It suggests that it was Petrarch's versatility and elusiveness that allowed so many different versions of him to circulate in the early modern period.

This chapter focuses on experience—experience as the opposite of school; what school is intended to prepare for, or perhaps to prevent. The occasion is a dispute between John Lyly and the dead schoolmaster Roger Ascham over whether it is possible, or wise, to learn from experience. The fictional terrain is the tangled streets of Naples and an England seen through foreign eyes. Yet the story begins, as it will end, in a hermit's cell. The chapter suggests that in Lyly's attempt to rescue experience from the schoolmasters, and to claim it for fiction, what he sets out to defend can be glimpsed as a kind of shadowy ideal: the power of experience to teach Euphues what he needs to know to live a good life; the power of romance narrative to tell that experience as it accumulates or develops over time.

This chapter forms the first of two within Part One, ‘Contexts of Reading’. It examines the conceptual and cultural frameworks which shaped how Lucan was understood and used by English early modern readers, making use both of English and continental examples, and often looking backwards to developments in sixteenth-century humanist scholarship. Its central task is to convey a number of key themes and ideas for reference and comparison in later sections. In particular it examines how Lucan’s marginal status within the Tudor pedagogical curriculum, due to a grammatical prejudice against post-Augustan poets strengthened by the moral and sectarian prejudices of humanist pedagogues, can actually be used to explain his subsequent growth in popularity.

This chapter returns to the debate about the imitation of Cicero between Pietro Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico in the early sixteenth century, and shows how these two writers’ different approaches to imitatio encouraged subsequent authors to imitate the ‘form’ of earlier texts. This could be a quasi-Platonic abstract idea of an earlier author, or it could encompass the structures of sentences or arguments. This theme was developed by later sixteenth-century Northern European writers on imitatio, principally Philipp Melanchthon and Johannes Sturm. They encouraged imitating authors to attend to the rhetorical structure of the works that they imitated, rather than borrowing their language. Through Roger Ascham these German rhetoricians had a profound influence on later sixteenth-century English writing. The chapter concludes by arguing that their thinking encouraged imitating authors in that period to engage in what is here called ‘stylism’. Many later Elizabethan authors sought not only to imitate a distinctive ‘form’ of an earlier author, but also to establish that they had a ‘form’ or style of their own, which could be identified by their readers, and which subsequent authors might imitate.