The Hermathena-Authorship and Thomas Elyot: Lexical Evidence for an English Apuleianism

The English humanist anti-scholastic polemic Hermathena (1522), published under the pseudonym ‘Papyrius Geminus Eleates’, has been attributed to Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546), the English prose author and lexicographer. However, comparison of the Latin usage of the Hermathena-author, who also published a letter in commendation of the Propugnaculum aduersus Lutherum of Edward Powell (c. 1478–1540), with that of Elyot, who published Latin letters as well as his Latin-English dictionaries, indicates that Elyot probably did not also write Hermathena. Although both Elyot’s Latin and that of the Hermathena-author are to be affiliated with the late humanist movement known as ‘Apuleianism’, especially in word-choice, the vocabularies are measurably different.