Overwhelmed as at present we are by students of humanism in Tudor England – by art historians, literary historians, ordinary historians – we fail to remember how relatively recent that outburst is. Until the 1940s, Frederic Seebohm's barnacle-encrusted study, first published in the year of the Second Reform Bill, was still being cited as not only authoritative but actually dominant; even in 1959 the second edition of Conyers Read's bibliography did not include a section specifically on this topic. Instead it scattered relevant material among such headings as ‘Ecclesiastical history – general’ or ‘Education’. By 1968, the situation had changed sufficiently for Mortimer Levine to devote a section of his bibliography to intellectual history; this accommodated most of the proper studies, by then much increased in number. Until the war, two convictions governed inherited wisdom. One was that English humanism should be approached from Italian origins; the other believed that its career ended with the defeat of the papal church in England. The first notion produced an interest in such lesser figures as William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, generally rather overrated as pioneers; the second resulted from a devout belief in John Fisher and Thomas More as the greatest lights of English humanism, a belief much encouraged by the canonisations of 1935. In his extraordinarily influential biography of More, R. W. Chambers linked both streams: he emphasised More's derivation from Ficino and Pico, and he decreed that with the death of his hero humanism had died in England.