Thomas Elyot, 'The Image of Governance' and Other Dialogues of Counsel (1533–1541)

📖 The Scoop

 Thomas Elyot's Image of Governance is an English-language version of the matter of Thomas More's Utopia: a tract de optimo statu reipublicae, likewise replete with imagined 'dialogues of counsel'; but in an anti-utopian, monarchist perspective, calculated to appeal to Henry VIII. Moreover, Image of Governance is not imaginary but historical, translated from the late antique Latin Historia augusta.

The present book provides critical editions of Elyot's political writings other than the Governour, all of which are or incorporate extensive translations of ancient Greek and Latin writings, like the Image of Governance. In these related 'Dialogues of Counsel', Elyot takes ancient historical cases — Plato's sale into slavery by Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse, for example; or the life of the West Asian emperor Zenobia, a woman under patriarchy; or the advice of the Attic orator Isocrates to King Nicocles of Salamis; or the failed but ambitious late Roman imperiate of Alexander Severus; et cetera — and dramatises them, by means of the sort of Lucianic dialogue that Erasmus had used for the Praise of Folly (More too), except in the vernacular, for a relatively broader, more popular English audience.

Genre: Political Science / Essays (fancy, right?)