Acknowledgements
The fons et origo of this volume was a ‘Roger Ascham Conference’ held in 2016 to mark – rather contrivedly, as these things tend to be – the 500th anniversary of the (generally) accepted year of Ascham’s birth, 1516. We would like to register our fulsome thanks again to St John’s College for hosting that splendid event, to Mark Nicholls for his aid in obtaining this venue, and to Cambridge University History Faculty for all their support in organising the conference. We are particularly grateful to the Society for Renaissance Studies and the Royal Historical Society for their generous financial support of the event. As the volume took shape we incurred other debts. We are grateful to Gareth Williams for his lynx-eyed reading of several contributions, to Francis Knikker at Brill for her assistance at many stages of the project, and to Kim Plas and her typesetting team for their patient and careful work in bringing the beast to life. Ceri would also like to thank young Teddy, whose naps occasionally facilitated the editing of this volume.
Our final words of acknowledgement are dedicated to John McDiarmid, one of the contributors of this collection and a stalwart of the entire endeavour, who sadly and unexpectedly passed away in February 2020. John was an inspirational scholar: deeply learned, fastidious to an admirable degree, and a formidable breaker of new ground in the field of early modern studies. We also both remember him as an unstintingly generous individual, so supportive of juniors just cutting their teeth in the academic world, and, perhaps most importantly, as a friend.