#william cunningham

I wonder everyday about what William Cunningham wrote in his diary about the collision incident...

In 1564 Roger Ascham wrote to Robert deprecating his lack of fluency in Latin and his neglect of other languages, accomplishment in which was vital to a courtier-diplomat. He was scornful of Robert’s preference for geometry rather than rhetoric: ‘I think you did yourself injury in changing Tully’s wisdom with Euclid’s pricks and lines’. Scholars were divided on the value of mathematical studies, or perhaps it would be truer to say they were concerned that such studies should be directed towards useful ends. Geometrical and arithmetical abstractions, according to Vives, ‘withdraw the mind from the practical concerns of life and render it less fit to face concrete and mundane realities’ and were only to be followed if they led to the understanding of ‘measurement, proportion, movement and [the] position of heavy weights’.  (..) Yet, however much the educationalists might pontificate, minds like Robert Dudley’s, which revelled in the divine mysteries of harmony, symmetry and pattern, were captivated by the rediscovered works of Euclid, Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy. Nor need Ascham and Vives have worried: it was interest in the new sciences, coupled with a love of adventure, which inspired Robert’s generation of young gentlemen to be the patrons and captains of the great era of Elizabethan maritime expansion. Indeed, one of the most important English works on navigation was dedicated to Robert Dudley as early at 1559. This was William Cunningham’s The Cosmographical Glass, containing the pleasant Principles of Cosmography, Geography, Hydrography, or Navigation. In it the author thanks his patron for ‘your Lordship’s encouragement of me to knowledge, both in words and most liberal rewards’ and praises him as one ‘which doth not only favour Science, but also [has] given her within your breast a resting place.’