Introduction

John Case (1546–1600) was the most important English Aristotelian of the Elizabethan era. Born in Woodstock near Oxford, he spent his whole life associated with the university. He received his BA and MA from the newly founded St John's College, where his education combined the old scholasticism and the new humanism. In 1572 he took up a fellowship at St John's, which he lost two years later when he married. For the next fifteen years he engaged in private teaching of Oxford students at his home and published a series of textbooks on subjects ranging from logic to moral philosophy. These went through many editions in England and Germany, the latest in 1629, and were printed more often than almost any other sixteenth century British philosophical works. Many of his books were dedicated to figures such as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who were involved in the world of Elizabethan court patronage.

Case's logic textbook, the Summa veterum interpretum (1584), is a beginners' manual, oriented towards the essentially rhetorical task of persuasion, rather than the more technical problems of demonstrative inference explored by Italian philosophers, who were more concerned with the application of logic to natural philosophy. His commentaries, such as those on the Politics (1588), Magna moralia (1596) and Physics (1599), were aimed at an undergraduate audience and his intentions were primarily didactic. Nevertheless, he produced works of respectable scholarship based on an unusually wide range and number of sources: ancient, medieval and contemporary.