A Ciceronian Sunburn reconsiders the complexion of Tudor poetics by demonstrating the ways in which poets and pedagogues appropriated the rhetorical brilliance of Cicero to inform their approaches to learning. By recasting the poetic texts of Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney as works that participated in sixteenth-century debates on learning, E. Armstrong challenges conventional views of Tudor poetics. He argues that the poetry of Spenser, Sidney, and others of the period reflects a more fully developed understanding of Ciceronian rhetoric than is found in the lectures, pedagogical...