Abstract
The Welsh humanist scholar, poet, and educator Leonard Cox is remembered mostly for his involvement in Erasmian circles in Poland and the Kingdom of Hungary, as well as his contribution to the educational and religious reforms of the 1530s and 1540s in England. During his extended stay in Central Europe, he was instrumental in disseminating Erasmus’s and Melanchthon’s works, and his publications include educational treatises, editions of and commentaries on classical and Neo-Latin authors, and occasional poetry addressed to prominent figures associated with the University of Kraków and the Polish court of Sigismund I. After returning to England, Cox became an evangelical reformer and continued, with lasting effect, popularizing continental humanist ideas in the vernacular through his English translation of Erasmus’s The Paraphrase of Erasmus Roterdame upon the Epistle of Saint Paule unto His Discyple Titus and his The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke, the first English rhetorical handbook based on Melanchthon’s Institutiones rhetoricae. Through his ambitious, though incomplete, translation project which meant to cover other works by Erasmus, Cox intended to expand his educational mission not only to grammar schools but also to the general public of the newly reformed English commonwealth.
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References
Primary Literature
Cox, Leonard. 1518a. De laudibus celeberrimae Cracouiensis Academiae oratio. Cracow: Hieronymus Vietor.
Cox, Leonard, ed. 1518b. Hieronymus, Epistola ad Rusticum monachum qua vivendi formam praescribit, per Erasm. Rot. diligentissime recognita, by Desiderius Erasmus. Cracow: Hieronymus Vietor.
Cox, Leonard, ed. 1519. Diui Eusebii Hieronymi Stridonensis epistola ad Eustochium de custodia uirginitatis, by Desiderius Erasmus. Cracow: Hieronymus Vietor.
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Cox, Leonard, ed. 1527a. Epistola Martini Lutheri ad Henricum VIII. Responsio dicti inuictissimi Angliae ac Franciae regis, defensoris fidei, ac domini Hyberniae etc, by Martin Luther and Henry VIII. Cracow: Hieronymus Vietor.
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Juhász-Ormsby, Á. (2022). Cox, Leonard. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14169-5_478
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