He entered Oxford as an undergraduate in 1520, received his B.A. on 30 May 1524, and was elected a full fellow of his college in 1526. Studying first under Thomas Lupset and Vivés, he later became a lecturer in logic and in Greek. The first hint of his Protestantism came in 1528 (according to John Foxe) when Udall was named as one of the Oxford scholars receiving illicit books, which included Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament. He left Oxford in 1529. His first surviving entertainment, written in collaboration with the antiquary John Leland (31 May 1533), celebrates that watershed of the English Reformation, the coronation of Anne Boleyn, with pageants about Apollo and the Muses, St. Anne, the Three Graces, and the Judgment of Paris.
The next year, 1534, marked a turning point in Udall's career. He published the text which influenced school Latin for the rest of the century, teaching its grammar through excerpts from three Terentian comedies. Flowers for Latin Speaking is based upon Flosculi, the 1530 collection by Grapheus, and is amplified by Udall's own wide scholarship. Oxford University opposed Udall's popularization of Terence, stipulating in the supplication for the master's degree which Udall received in 1534 that he translate no more Latin books into English.
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