SOURCE: Cochrane, Kirsty. “A Civil Conversation of 1582: Gabriel Harvey's Reading of Guazzo.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 78 (November 1992): 1-28.

In the following essay, Cochrane discusses Harvey's response to Stefano Guazzo's A Civil Conversation, a Renaissance work of moral philosophy, and argues that Harvey considered the work an ideal text for life in the civil service and hoped to use it to achieve his own social success.

Gabriel Harvey (c.1546-1631), Professor of Rhetoric in Cambridge in 1575, friend of Spenser and Gascoigne, enemy of Nashe, Greene and Lyly, object of satire, industrious scholar in the humanities, believed that reading created the man. In Cambridge he preached the new eloquence, but in his life he was disappointed of preferment. His devotion to classical learning created a fine scholar and teacher. However, the books he annotated most assiduously were not, in general, the classical and contemporary...