It has been estimated that well over half the books published during the sixteenth century were in Latin. Many have never been translated and hence garnered little scholarly attention. However, a good number of them have a direct bearing on the history of the religious Reformation and its actors. One of these is Roger Ascham s Apologia pro Caena Dominica, a theological tract on the Eucharist which trenchantly attacked the Catholic Mass and sacrificing priests. Composed in Cambridge at the start of Edward VI s reign in 1547, it was published posthumously some thirty years later in 1577....

The life of Roger Ascham (1515/16–1568) coincided with the reigns of four Tudor monarchs, the rise and death of Luther, the Council of Trent and the wholesale division of Christendom. He operated in arenas including Cambridge University, the court, the continent and the capital, and his writings engaged with the most important intellectual concerns of his age, including humanism, educational reform, religion and politics. In this volume historians, literary specialists and classicists have worked together both to re-evaluate more familiar territory in Ascham’s life and work, and to...