Katie Little is researching the influence of Northern Humanism on the English Renaissance. Although the impact of the Northern Humanists, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Johannes Sturm, on sixteenth-century education has long been recognized, scholars have tended to neglect their influence when it comes to literature. Instead, the flourishing of poetry and drama in the Elizabethan Age (the English Renaissance) is understood in terms of the individual genius of particular authors (such as Shakespeare) and/ or the influence of Italian Renaissance, such as Petrarch. As the long gap between Petrarch and the Elizabethan Age should suggest, English authors were slow to adopt the Renaissance, the direct embrace of the classical legacy. To do so, they required the kind of explicitly Christian mediation provided by the Northern humanists. This mediation is clearly evident in the 16^th century plays that fuse Roman comedy and biblical topics, such as the plays collected in Nicolaus Brylinger’s anthology, Comoediae Ac Tragoediae Aliquot Ex Novo Et Vetere Testamento Desumptae (1540), held by the HAB.

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