#john cheke

[minervacasterly]

On the 4th of October 1556, Sir John Checke, former tutor of Jane Grey and King Edward VI recanted his faith. He and others were criticized by their former friends and before Jane Grey was executed he called one of them 'imp of the devil'. Sir John wasn't the only one, others did as well, among them John Dudley who had been abandoned by everyone, including the Greys and had all the blame heaped on him. This didn't save him however. The issue of faith and recantations with the Tudor monarchs was not uncommon. During Henry VIII some recanted either faith or kept theirs private to avoid the king's persecution, during Edward VI many ignored their Catholicism and went along with whatever was favorable, with Mary I and Elizabeth I it was no different. There were some however that were not willing to give up their faith and they suffered for it (in all Tudor reigns).

[mostly-history]

The classical scholar Sir John Cheke, a man fluent in Latin and Greek and one of the most learned men of his day, was another to take up the cause of defending the Anglo-Saxon language: 'I am of the opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with the borowing of other tunges.' Cheke produced an edition of the gospel 'According to St Matthew...translated from the Greek' (1550), which was obsessive in its rejection of the Latin original, replacing words such as 'crucified' with 'crossed', 'prophet' with 'foresayer', and 'parable' with 'byword'. Cheke's fate was not to be a happy one.  The man who had been made professor of Greek at Cambridge by Henry VIII, as well as tutor to his son Edward, had no more power to quench the 'inkhorn' words than he had to fight the changes that came with the accession of Mary I, in 1553.  Strongly Protestant, Cheke was imprisoned that year, but was released in 1554 and permitted to go abroad.  He was rearrested in 1556 and imprisoned in the Tower of London.  Forced to denounce his Protestant beliefs, he is said to have died of shame.  Cheke is held to have written some of the best plain prose of his time, and noted for his phonetic spelling.  However, it is for his classical translations that he is most respected.

“The Story of English: How an Obscure Dialect Became the World's Most-Spoken Language”

[nomadchick]

5 Tudor Scholars who changed Learning in England

5 #Tudor Scholars who changed Learning in England

The Tudors lived in a world that was at least several generations ahead of the Enlightenment.  But the seeds of that revolution in scientific thought were being sown in the Renaissance when society started to value classical and secular learning for the first time in a millennium. The Renaissance became firmly established in England when Henry Tudor took the throne in 1485 at Bosworth Field, and…

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[theanneboleynfiles-blog]

13th September 1557 – Death of Sir John Cheke, Tudor scholar, one time tutor to Edward VI, Secretary of State for Lady Jane Grey and the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University. He died at the home of his friend, Peter Osborne, in Wood Street, London, probably from influenza, and was buried nearby at the church of St Alban, Wood Street, in the north chapel of the chancel.