Preface and Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
(1) Roger Ascham, the Themata Theologica, its formation and composition
(2) The Bible and Patristics
(3) Doctrine and confessionalism
(4) Humanist classical theology
(5) Ascham as Theologian
Conclusion
Text, Translation and Notes
Bibliography
Index of biblical and patristic citations
Index of classical citations
Main Index

Lucy Nicholas is Lecturer in Latin and Greek Language and Culture at the Warburg Institute, UK. She has published on Roger Ascham and Thomas More, and studies on other early modern authors including Walter Haddon and Thomas Nashe are forthcoming. She has co-edited three Neo-Latin anthologies with Bloomsbury Academic.

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.