Sir Thomas Smith is chiefly remembered as a Tudor "commonwealth writer," especially as the author of the first significant study of the English state and constitution: De republica Anglorum (A Discourse on the Commonweal of England, 1583). Indeed, such is its importance as a constitutional classic that F. W. Maitland commented in the preface to the 1906 edition, "No one would think of writing about the England of Elizabeth's day without paying heed to what was written on that matter by her learned and accomplished Secretary of State." But two of Smith's Latin works from the 1540s, on the pronunciation of Greek and the spelling of English, may prove to be of greater significance for the understanding of sixteenth-century literature. Together they provide an illuminating insight into the attitudes and aspirations of mid-Tudor humanism.

Thomas Smith was born on 23 December 1513 in Walden, now Saffron Walden, in Essex. His father was...