Roger Ascham’s ‘A Defence of the Lord’s Supper’: Latin text and English translation

It has been estimated that well over half the books published during the sixteenth century were in Latin. Many have never been translated and hence garnered little scholarly attention. However, a good number of them have a direct bearing on the history of the religious Reformation and its actors. One of these is Roger Ascham’s Apologia pro Caena Dominica, a theological tract on the Eucharist which trenchantly attacked the Catholic Mass and sacrificing priests. Composed in Cambridge at the start of Edward VI’s reign in 1547, it was published posthumously some thirty years later in 1577. Here for the first time Lucy Nicholas offers a modern edition of Ascham’s Apologia that sets forth the Latin original with parallel English translation.