John Seton occupies a central place in the history of sixteenth-century English education by virtue of the logic manual he wrote while prelector at St. John's College of the University of Cambridge. Distributed in manuscript around 1538 and first printed in 1545, Seton's Dialectica became a mainstay of Tudor university education for most of the next one hundred years. A midlevel, religiously conservative academic and churchman, Seton pursued a humanist career during a lifetime that almost exactly corresponds to the period of the English Reformation.

Little is clear about Seton's early years; even determining the year of his birth presents difficulties. In his 1551 deposition concerning charges against Bishop Stephen Gardiner, Seton testifies that he is forty-two, which would mean that he was born around 1509; but his tombstone records that he died in his seventieth year in 1567, which would place his year of birth around 1497. Though Seton's testimony could have been...