The Yorkshireman Roger Ascham (c. 1515–1568) is best remembered as the author of a merry treatise on archery written in his late twenties (Toxophilus) and of a rather stiffer guide to learning Latin written in his late forties (The Scholemaster). This new essay collection, Roger Ascham and his Sixteenth-Century World, edited by Lucy Nicholas and Ceri Law, the most significant work on Ascham since L. V. Ryan's 1963 biography, broadens understanding of the man's life and works.

The book is organized into three parts, with part one focusing on Ascham's scholarly activities. In chapter 1, Law argues that Ascham expressed diverse views on the function of universities (engines of religious reform, nurseries of talent, and pillars of the state) because their purpose was in flux during the Reformation period. Chapter 2, by Richard Rex, is an impressive piece of detective work demonstrating that a disputed election to St. John's College in 1542, where Ascham was a fellow, was contested on religious lines. In the splendidly researched third chapter, Sam Kennerley analyzes Ascham's translations of Greek patristic writings into Ciceronian Latin, arguing that he was angling for patronage rather than promoting a confessional cause. Kennerley also persuasively argues that a surviving Latin translation of the Liturgy of St. James from 1555 may have been prepared by Ascham. In chapter 4, Andrew Burnett reveals Ascham's interest in collecting ancient coins—a hobby he had in common with Thomas Smith and other Cambridge men—and incidentally observes that Ascham clearly had no idea what happened on the Ides of March (86–87).

Part two centers on Ascham's social and intellectual connections. Chapter 5, by the late John F. McDiarmid, is a sensitive discussion of the positive but sometimes fraught relationship between Ascham and the similarly aged John Cheke; McDiarmid notes that the former often deferred to the latter. He also observes that both scholars shared Erasmus's view that the “pure” Latin of the first century BCE had subsequently decayed, but that Ascham was, in practice, the more “flexible and humane” of the two (123). In chapter 6, Tracey Sowerby discusses the tasks that would have been involved in Ascham's role as secretary to Richard Morison, resident ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor, from 1550 to 1553. In chapter 7, Nicholas examines Ascham's correspondence with the German reformer Johannes Sturm, his most regular correspondent. Cyndia Susan Clegg argues in chapter 8 that Elizabeth I was fully on board with the religious settlement of 1559 (an argument she has made elsewhere) and that some of the queen's religious views were inculcated by Ascham during his tenure as royal tutor to the princess from 1548 to 1550. This is a significant challenge to Winthrop Hudson's classic view that Ascham was a feeble Protestant on the periphery of the Cambridge group that helped to shape the Elizabethan settlement (The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 [1980]).

Part three focuses on Ascham's literary career. In chapter 9, J. S. Crown discusses Ascham's Latin annotations to a collection of Greek aphorisms published in 1532, demonstrating that he drew on such sententiae when composing Neo-Latin poetry. In chapter 10, Cathy Shrank analyses Toxophilus, focusing on its print features, the author's use of the dialogue form, and his appeal to the notion of commonwealth. Chapter 11, by Micha Lazarus, is a somewhat overcomplicated discussion of The Scholemaster; Lazarus draws attention to the book's elegiac qualities and analyzes Ascham's theory of imitatio. In chapter 12, Mike Pincombe also discusses Ascham's theory of imitatio, comparing it with that proposed by Johannes Sturm in the Nobilitas litterata (1549); while Sturm stressed the importance of covert plagiarism, Ascham thought it was important to acknowledge one's debts to others. Pincombe generally does a good job of explaining difficult concepts clearly, although his coining of a new derivative from Greek, “cecrymmenal” (253), which he repeats numerous times, does not help the uninitiated reader (perhaps it is a joke at Ascham's expense, who disliked this kind of foreign linguistic import).

There follow two appendices, the first offering a brief biography of Ascham that includes some useful comments on his personal religion. We know that he wrote a treatise attacking the mass in 1547, when the accession of Edward VI made doing so a safe and potentially rewarding enterprise, that he was friends with Protestant reformers, and that, during Elizabeth's reign, he openly supported the new learning. But he also courted conservative patrons in the later reign of Henry VIII, and served Mary I as a Latin secretary. Do all the contributors agree with Nicholas's portrayal of Ascham as a peace-loving Nicodemite (160, 282)? Or might he have been one of those nonideological men who can shift their allegiance easily, as Lazarus seems to suggest (243)? The second appendix discusses the twenty-two books known to have survived from Ascham's library.

The whole book fits together nicely, with the standardization of references to Ascham's letters adding to the overall unity. There is only occasional overlap: for instance, Lazarus's discussion of Ascham's friendships with Cheke and Sturm parallels material in the contributions by McDiarmid and Nicholas. I only spotted a few errors. For instance, Isaac Disraeli (1766–1848) was the father of the Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, not his son, and his Amenities of Literature: Sketches and Character of English Literature was first published in 1841, not 1864 (7).

It is also worth noting that the collection grew out of a 2016 conference held to mark the quincentenary of Ascham's birth. Nicholas and Law say in the acknowledgments that 1516 is the “(generally) accepted year” of his birth (vii). But Rosemary O'Day's 2004 entry on Ascham for the Online Dictionary of National Biography gives the date 1514/15 (tellingly, O'Day's entry is itself incorrectly cited as “ca. 1515/16” in Law and Nicholas's introduction (8n34). O'Day may, of course, be wrong: a junior contemporary of Ascham, Edward Grant, records that he was born in 1515, which might equal a 1516 date before 25 March; and in his biography, Ryan opts for “either 1515 or 1516” (Roger Ascham [1963], 8). Nicholas and Law could have confronted this uncertainty directly; it does not really matter, except that anniversaries ought to happen on the right date.

Although the contributions to the collection are, for the most part, well written, Law and Nicholas's introduction is not: it features unwittingly Freudian phrases (“delving more deeply into Ascham,” 4); tautologies (“overlapping intersections,” 6); clumsy constructions (“slotting these annotations into a broader aim,” 7); and an awkward extended metaphor likening Ascham to a cupboard (1, 9). These should not have been allowed to make the final cut. After all, this is a book about a master of English prose.