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Updated: April 30, 2025
Another scholar in classical rhetoric was Roger Ascham, whose Scholemaster contains the first reference in England to Aristotle's Poetics. But except as a teacher of language and of literature Ascham does not treat of poetry. Following Quintilian, he classifies literature into genres of poetry, history, philosophy, and oratory, each with its appropriate subdivisions.
But of course the humanists pushed the matter too far. Pendulums do not reach the repose of the mean without many tos and fros. Elegance is good, but the art of reasoning is not to be neglected. Of the length to which they went Ascham's method of instruction in the Scholemaster is a good example.
But though he does not postulate pleasurable instruction as the aim of poetry, he clearly implies it in his comment on the use of stories in argument. Nor does Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster, written between 1563-1568 and published posthumously in 1570, concern himself with the purpose of poetry. His interest in poetry seems to be confined to prosody.
Yet had Ascham not been a friend of Sturm's, it might not have been heard of in England as early as 1570, when the Scholemaster was published. Ascham says it is worthy of study, but shows no great familiarity with the text. The De sublimitate of pseudo-Longinus has a similar history in England.
But in England the first reference to the Orator appears in Ascham's Scholemaster one hundred years after its first printing. Thus the Ciceronian rhetoric of the middle ages was derived from the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium and from the youthful De inventione, not from the best rhetorical treatises of Cicero as we know them.
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