Roger Ascham’s Themata Theologica

Roger Ascham is often classified as ‘a great mid-Tudor humanist’ and he is perhaps best recognised for his role as tutor to Elizabeth I. His most famous works, The Scholemaster and Toxophilus, have been extensively excerpted in studies on prose style and English humanism. By contrast, his Latin works that centred on theology and key Reformation concerns have languished in the shadows of modern scholarship. Ascham’s Themata Theologica (Theological Propositions), composed in the late 1530s and early 1540s, is one of these. This little-known text of eleven ‘themes’ offers a rare opportunity both to trace the course of Ascham’s own religious development and to take the temperature of the confessional climate at Cambridge University during one of the most turbulent periods of the Reformation. The present edition, in addition to producing the first English translation of this text, aims to show the ways in which this work can cast fresh light on sixteenth-century intellectual culture by illuminating a critical phase of religious reform and biblical scholarship in England. The essays set forth in this volume present key insights into what Ascham considered essential in the English Church, and how his Christian compatriots should worship.