The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder: Volume One: Prose: 1 - Tapa dura

an edition that early modern literary scholarship has been in need of for a long time. We owe Jason Powell a great debt of thanks for this painstaking labor, which will no doubt prove the standard edition of Wyatt's works for decades to come ... it is the ideal blend of scholarly rigor and thought for the reader's experience of engaging with the texts. (William T. Rossiter, Speculum)

This long-awaited, definitive, and brilliantly edited volume ... allows readers to follow Wyatt's career in its intriguing detail. Editor Jason Powell's annotations help us to understand the shifting details of the international political calculus, while his section introductions help those less familiar with the period to grasp larger significances and overarching trajectories. The volume also includes Wyatt's translation of Plutarch's De tranquillitate animi, dedicated to Katherine of Aragon, and two letters of conventional moral advice to Wyatt's son. The latter acquire particular poignancy, since the son - Thomas Wyatt the Younger - went to the block for raising a rebellion against Katherine and Henry's daughter, Mary I. Although produced primarily for a scholarly audience, few volumes will give their readers better insight into the dangers and uncertainties of Tudor political life. (John Watkins, Common Knowledge)

Authoritative and exhaustive in its scholarship, this superb edition of Wyatt's prose will be the definitive work of reference for decades to come ... Wyatt's attentiveness to language - and the ways in which its slipperiness might be turned to his advantage ― is as evident here when he is arguing for his life as it is in his poetry ... this volume has everything the student and scholar of Wyatt's prose could possibly need. It is a masterly example of scholarly editing at its best and an advertisement not only for volume 2 (verse), but for Powell's edition of the Complete Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, also under contract with Oxford University Press. (Catherine Bates, Renaissance Quarterly)

As a result of Jason Powell's meticulous scholarship and superb editing, Sir Thomas Wyatt's prose has become available in ways it never was before. This is a volume much to be commended and the companion edition of the poetry is to be eagerly anticipated. (James Carley, Times Literary Supplement)

Powell's edition is accessible, rigorous, comprehensive, and indispensable, and will not easily be surpassed. (Chris Stamatakis, Northern Renaissance)

Thomas Wyatt (1504?-42) may have written the first sonnet in English. His translation from Plutarch's Moralia was the first publication of a classical moral essay in English. He introduced continental forms such as ottava rima to the language, and his paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms sparked a century of popular psalm translations. Yet while decades of criticism have centered on a handful of his best-known poems, many others are poorly understood, in part because we lack an authoritative edition. This volume―the first in a planned two-volume collection of Wyatt's complete works―comprises scholarly editions of 35 letters or memoranda, Wyatt's Declaration from the Tower and his Defence speech against treason charges. It also includes the first scholarly edition of The Quyete of Mynde. Each text is extensively annotated, each letter has a prefacing headnote, and each grouping of texts is separately introduced. The recipient of one letter is identified here for the first time from new archival discoveries. Two letters of instruction from Henry VIII are included along with four appendices containing related documents. Biographical entries (totalling 17,000 words) identify and introduce 64 persons related to Wyatt's diplomatic service, including every known member of Wyatt's diplomatic household.