John Colet, the Christian humanist and English educator, was the founder of St. Paul's School for Boys, leader of the "Oxford Reformers" Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus, and chief transmitter of Florentine Platonism from Italy to such English Renaissance figures as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton. The son of a London lord mayor, Colet took a master's degree from Oxford (1490) and then explored Plato, Plotinus, and Origen in Latin translation. From 1493 to 1496, he traveled in France and Italy. The appealing tradition that he studied in Florence under Marsilio Ficino was shattered in 1958 when Sears Jayne discovered correspondence between Colet and Ficino in a copy of Ficino's Epistolae (1495) at All Soul's College, Oxford. This correspondence shows that Colet never visited Florence or met Ficino.

Upon his return to Oxford in 1496, Colet delivered Latin lectures on St. Paul's Epistles to the Romans and...