Debate still surrounds the reputation of John Colet. Recent scholars have questioned earlier claims of his pivotal role in the development of English humanism and the Reformation, but he emerges nonetheless as an important ecclesiast and educator linked to the rising middle class and the Tudor court, as well as one of the earliest English writers to exhibit the influence of Italian humanist themes and Latin style.

Colet's parents represented the nobility and merchant class of late-fifteenth-century London. His father, Henry, moved from a rural area in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, to London, where he thrived financially and politically. By 1466 Henry had increased his status sufficiently to marry Dame Christian Knevet, a nobly connected, literate woman some sixteen years younger than her husband. They moved to Budge Street in Saint Anthony's parish, where John was born in 1467, the only one of twenty-two children to live to middle age. Nothing is...