| It is the purpose of this study to throw light on the state of classical learning among the humanists by examining the citations of Roger Ascham (1515-1568), indicating the range of his knowledge and the nature of his critical attitudes.;That Roger Ascham is representative of the best of English humanism can hardly be questioned. Throughout his career he was associated with St. John's College, Cambridge, then the outstanding humanistic foundation in England well in advance of Oxford in the new learning. Among his friends were John Cheke, the leading English humanist of his generation, and Johann Sturm, esteemed German scholar. During his travels on the continent Ascham met many other humanists and enjoyed assess to great libraries and collections. He was also in a position to transmit his knowledge to younger scholars at the University and, as tutor to Elizabeth and Latin secretary to Mary, to court personages as well as to readers of his Scholemaster, popular as an early work in the vernacular.;The citations were gathered from The Scholemaster, Toxophilus, A Report of Germany, and the English and Latin correspondence, using John Giles' edition, The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, London, 1864-1865. They cover more than 200 writers including 58 Greek and 56 Latin authors and reflect Ascham's wide reading. Like other writers of his time he continually invoked the authority of Cicero for his opinions (200 citations), Plato (120), and Aristotle (100). Writers most frequently cited are: in oratory, Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Cicero; in history, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Caesar, and Sallust; in rhetoric, Aristotle, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace; in poetry, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Terence, Plautus, Horace, and Seneca; and in philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.;Ascham's attitudes toward the various fields were, for the most part, representative. Oratory and history were the favored forms, and he was especially interested in rhetoric, then in a transitional phase. More liberal than most contemporaries, Ascham acknowledged epics and tragedies as "profitable reading" and granted the poets in these genres a measure of authority. A moralist rather than a philosopher, he collected "golden sentences" but avoided the abstract. The letters of Cicero and others naturally interested one who conducted correspondence for the University and the Crown as well as in pursuit of his own studies. |
