SOURCE: Stewart, Alan. “‘Traitors to Boyes Buttockes’: The Erotics of Humanist Education.” In Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England, pp. 84-121. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Stewart considers Ascham's place among pedagogical writers of the period, focusing on the issues of violence and eroticism in the relationships between teachers and pupils. Stewart suggests that the relationship between student and master—and many models were advocated by Renaissance scholars—is a function of humanist learning and its imagined uses in English society.

… whilst I should haue written the actions of men, I haue been constrayned to liue with children.

Samuel Daniel

… a pure Pedantique Schoolmaster sweeping his living from the Posteriors of little children.

Ben Jonson¹

No matter how grand the pretensions of the humanist movement may have been, the harsh reality of the life of the man who tried to...