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Aristotle’sPoeticshas been thought to be inaccessible or misunderstood in sixteenth-century England, but this inherited assumption has drifted far from the primary evidence and lagged behind advances in contiguous fields. As a member of thecorpus Aristotelicum, the shared foundation of Western education until the late seventeenth century, thePoeticsenjoyed wide circulation, ownership, and interest in Latin and Italian as well as the original Greek. Placing thePoeticsin its intellectual context suggests a very different narrative for its reception in English criticism, one that accounts for a multiplicity of readings and uses on both sides of the academic divide. Some of those readings—in Cheke, Ascham, Rainolds, Sidney, and others—are considered in this article, and directions are proposed for future research in what remains a rich and mostly unworked vein of literary history.

Amid the devastation of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), Philip Melanchthon and his colleagues at Wittenberg hastily compiled a Latin edition of Sophocles from fifteen years of teaching materials and sent it to Edward VI of England within weeks of his coronation. Wittenberg tragedy reconciled Aristotelian technology, Reformation politics, and Lutheran theology, offering consolation in the face of events that themselves seemed to be unfolding on a tragic stage. A crucial but neglected source of English and Continental literary thought, the Wittenberg Sophocles shaped the reception of Greek tragedy, tragic poetics, and Neo-Latin and vernacular composition throughout the sixteenth century.

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Longinus’ On the Sublime is thought to have been ushered onto the English literary scene by Boileau’s Traité du Sublime (1674). The search for antecedents to Boileau has yielded scattered references in Rainolds, Chapman, Junius, Milton, and a few rhetorical textbooks, but not enough to indicate a school of thought or even particular enthusiasm. The reception of Langbaine’s Latin translation of 1636 hardly predicts the vast literary influence the treatise would wield by the end of the century. A more promising readership may, however, be suggested by a string of citations in seventeenth-century sermons. In Longinus’ quotation from Genesis and praise of Moses’s oratory, clergymen found literary and rhetorical roots for their explorations of divine sublimity. Developing alongside Longinus’ reception in Christian rhetorics, these citations offer an alternative route for the early association of On the Sublime with Milton’s Christian epic, and its eventual entry into the literary mainstream.