This section contains 5,000 words (approx. 17 pages at 300 words per page) |
Dictionary of Literary Biography on Roger Ascham
Roger Ascham has earned a place in the history of English rhetoric on several accounts: he was a strong advocate of the central importance of rhetoric not only to the arts curriculum but also to culture as a whole; his letters were widely recognized by his contemporaries as models of epistolary style; and he was the first Englishman from the traditional school to record his critical response to Ramist reform of the arts curriculum, most notably his removal of invention and arrangement from the province of rhetoric. But of chief importance is Ascham's summation, in the vernacular, of the methods for rhetorical instruction espoused by Continental educators, especially Johann Sturm. These methods include "double translation" (from Latin to English and back again) and imitation of the best models, chiefly Cicero. In the years following Ascham's death, such prominent Elizabethan and Jacobean grammar-school educators as William Kempe, John Brinsley...
This section contains 5,000 words (approx. 17 pages at 300 words per page) |