Stephen Bateman (1542–84) is mainly known for his monumental Batman uppon Bartholome, his Booke De proprietatibus rerum, Newly Corrected, Enlarged and Amended (1582 – STC 1538), a work that is only the final culmination of the encyclopaedic and eclectic interests that directed his activities as an author, clergyman and limner. Apprenticed to a scholar rather than university educated, his thought and work are characterised by a peculiar, sometimes idiosyncratic independent-mindedness and eclecticism. Minister of St Mary Aldermansbury in the late 1560s, he entered the service of Matthew Parker sometime in 1569 or '70, becoming instituted to the rectory of St Mary, Newington Butts in January 1570, and holding in plurality a living at Merstham, Surrey, from February 1571.

Bateman's choice of translating de La Marche's Chevalier délibéré must be seen in connection with his antiquarian interests, which must have played a crucial part in his association with Parker. Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime (1569 – STC 1585), for all its debt to Burgundian culture, may in fact be considered as a ‘chivalric’ work only in a metaphorical and antiquarian sense. Bateman concentrates on the allegorical potential of his source, consolidating in particular the psychomachic dimension of the knightly quest, and elaborating the Pauline notion of spiritual battle. The notion of the archetypal Christian pilgrimage, although in its transformed or rather ‘reformed’ sense, thus again becomes the central concern of the work. The precise cultural and political context of the early Elizabethan reign helps to put Bateman's work into clear perspective, while a second, larger context is provided by the Reformation, which also facilitated a transposed revival of the topos of the miles christianus more generally in the period.