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Where scholars frequently claim that ballads emerge primarily from orally transmitted folk and festival songs, evidence shows equally important aristocratic influences on the form during the early sixteenth century. In what has become a well-known innovation among music historians, early English printer John Rastell becomes the first to use a new, influential system for printing music when he publishes the musical notation for a dramatic ballad within his own 1520 play, The Four Elements. Crucially, Rastell takes the musical setting for his ballad from a composition attributed to no less a figure than Henry VIII. But, while Rastell’s dramatic ballad has been well-discussed in relation to Henry VIII’s oeuvre as a composer and lyricist, its broader relationship to early Tudor balladry has not been thoroughly investigated. In fact, despite a surge of new interest in discussing early English ballads both within and without dramatic literature, there exists no serious, sustained study of balladry that focuses on the first half of the sixteenth century. Putting Rastell’s dramatic ballad into conversation with an array of secondary evidence, this article thus works toward addressing an ongoing scholarly gap in the early history of the English ballad, revealing, in its course, the early Tudor court’s extensive, often deliberate, and too-frequently elided influence over the genre’s development.

Shields discusses John Rastell's The IIII Elements. He examines this verse in order to supplant Columbus's visions with those of Cabot to determine the first Anglo imagining of an American possibility. Rastell's poem conveys how America for the English first emerged as a northern realm. It also reveals the Roman Catholic origins of the English colonial enterprise.

The study of repertory has greatly illuminated practices among playwrights and playing companies in the later sixteenth century. The repertory approach has yet to be applied to early and mid-Tudor drama y although this method holds out the promise of recovering the collaborative practices connected with John Rastell's stage — the first public stage in London. This article urges scholars active in repertory studies to take afresh look at Henrician drama and theatrical practices, and employs Hey wood and Rastell's play Gentylnes and Nobylyte as a case study in the forces that shaped repertory in this earlier period.

In the early 1530s, John Rastell, the barrister, printer, and kinsman to Sir Thomas More, converted from the orthodox beliefs of his family to become a religious and political reformer in the service of Thomas Cromwell. Warner shows that at least one work did issue from Rastell's press and does exist, \"A dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde.\"

Although how, when, and where More and Rastell met, their initial reactions to each other, the growth and strength of their friendship, what ideas they exchanged, how well their families got on, and other questions remain matters for speculation, this essay explores what can be known with relative certainty about their relationship. Financial arrangements, shared interests and training in law, participation in government, familial ties and children of similar ages, and involvement in religious controversy provide major junctures from which their relationship can be traced. Other crucial connections between these important men include Rastell's move from Coventry to London, his establishment of a printing house that published some of More's works, his attraction to the More Circle and its humanist ideas, his intended voyage to the New World (perhaps inspired, in part, by More's fictional journey in Utopia), his authorship of interludes and other works, and his conversion to Protestantism. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

John Rastell's \"The Pastyme of People\" demonstrates that English historical writing did not always construct \"its readers as hereditary subjects of the English kings,\" nor did it always endorse the proposition that \"to be English is to be a subject of the English king.\" Rastell's history is more about the customary limits on monarchial power and what happens when monarchs overstep the bounds set for them by English common law.

The thirty-fourth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo featured a special session, \"Thomas More and His Circle,\" on May 9. Evelyn Toft, Department of Spanish, Fort Hays State University, presided at this year's session, and participants enjoyed listening to three papers by Gerhard Helmstaedter, Robert Milliken, and Albert J. Geritz. Among others, Helmstaedter's \"Thomas More's Garden\" considered the principles of the English garden in general, the nature of the garden in More's Utopia, and the garden at More's Chelsea estate--all of which are related to preconceived designs of gardnes found in pertinent treatises.

Warner discusses John Rastell's A New Book of Purgatory, a prose dialogue published in 1530. This literary work is a contribution to the English polemical campaign against the Protestants, campaign led by Rastell's brother-in-law, Thomas More. Its interlocutors are a Turk by the name of Gyngemyn and an \"Almain\" (i.e., a German) named Comyngo, who use only \"natural reason and good philosophy\"--that is, the art of logical argumentation--to prove Book I the existence of God, and in Book 2 the immortality of the soul, in order to arrive in Book 3 at the conclusion that purgatory must necessarily exist, a doctrine then under attack by religious reformers. Among other things, Warner examines the obligations of a Christian prince and concludes that A New Book of Purgatory not only defends Catholic doctrine but also urges Henry VIII to put his duty before his divorce.

Thomas More's English verse corpus consists of the translations and additions appended to his Life of Pico Earl of Mirandula, first printed by John Rastell and subsequently reprinted by Wynkyn de Worde before appearing in the English Works of William Rastell. A. S. G. Edwards, the editor of More's English Poems for the Yale Complete Works, presents Robert Parkyn's transcriptions of More's poems, the only manuscript text of any part of More's Pico verses, collated with the editions of Rastell, de Worde, and Rastell. It contains a range of devotional and didactic material including a brief cluster of More texts copied before 1551. Among these is a copy of More's Prayer of Picus Mirandula vnto god, one of his few direct verse translations in this work, based on Pico's Deprecatoria ad Deum.