A Ciceronian sunburn

"A Ciceronian Sunburn reconsiders the completion of Tudor poetics by demonstrating the ways in which poets and pedagogues appropriated the rhetorical brilliance of Cicero to inform their approaches to learning. By recasting the poetic texts of Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney as works that participated in sixteenth-century debates on learning, E. Armstrong challenges conventional views of Tudor politics. He argues that the poetry of Spenser, Sidney and others of the period reflects a more fully developed understanding of Ciceronian rhetoric than is found in the lectures, pedagogical handbooks, and treatises of early modern scholars, the sources to which historians of humanistic rhetoric must frequently turn."--Jacket.