Letters of Roger Ascham

Letters of Roger Ascham makes available for the first time in English some sixty letters from England's most representative midsixteenth-century humanist. The volume includes letters to nearly thirty eminent men and women, including John Cheke, William Cecil, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, Princess Elizabeth, Queen Catherine Parr, and Protector Somerset, to name but a few; also included are all the letters extant from Ascham to the Strasbourg schoolmaster Johann Sturm. Each of these letters has been newly translated from the Latin, and fully annotated and introduced. Vos has organized his selections into seven parts or chapters, corresponding to the major periods in Ascham's life and work; a biographical register provides a sketch of the life of each recipient. In his introduction to the volume Vos elaborates on the way that these unrivalled letters, first published in Latin in 1576, chronicle the story of an educator shuttling between otium and negotium, forced by the realities of the patronage system to play the role of courtier as well.