"By experience," says
Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?
Part III shifts attention from the two-way I/you channel of communication that is an explicit characteristic of the letter genre to the wider canvas of "Networks and negotiations." Thus, paradoxically Rachel McGregor's "Making friends with Elizabeth in the letters of
Roger Ascham" focuses less on Ascham's direct friendship with Elizabeth than on its strategic display to initiate the "male-only cerebral space" (152) of humanist amicitia in his Latin correspondence with the Strasbourg humanist educator, Johann Sturm.
Roger Ascham's 'A Defence of the Lord's Supper': Latin Text and English Translation
Cicero's texts had shaped the approaches to learning and literature by prominent humanists like Thomas Elyot and
Roger Ascham, whose influential works, The Gouernour (1531) and The Scholemaster (1570), (1) had inspired the efforts of Gabriel Har vey, Edmund Spenser, and Philip Sidney towards the strengthening of English letters.
The school metaphor seems all the more adequate here when one recollects that the very term euphuism was first used in a pedagogical tract written by
Roger Ascham, at one time a teacher to princess Elizabeth, the future queen.
In chapter 1 Dickson reviews principal early theories of imitation, with particular attention to Aristotle and Quintilian and to Thomas Wilson,
Roger Ascham, and Sir Philip Sidney.
"
Roger Ascham." Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900.
(3)
Roger Ascham, Toxophilus: The Schole of Shoting, in English Works, ed.
What principles do the most significant guides establish for the ars epistolica; what creedal differences are actually reflected in the various guides; how would an English schoolboy studying
Roger Ascham produce a letter that differed from a German schoolboy studying Johann Sturm; etc.
She describes the use of English in Thomas Elyot's Boke named the Governour and
Roger Ascham's Scholemaster that were based on the theories of humanism; the division between allegiance to home and the attraction to the remote and alien, with the example of Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique; the style of John Lyly in Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit; Edmund Spenser's efforts to invent a poetic diction in The Shepheardes Calendar; and the problem of how to set limits for poetic expression, as seen in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great.