The latest title in Tudor & Stuart Translations to be announced is David Carlson's new edition of Sir Thomas Elyot's Image of Governance, an English-language version of the matter of Thomas More's Utopia.

Today Elyot is perhaps best remembered for being a distant ancestor of T. S. Eliot, another Tom, who quoted from him in East Coker, but Elyot with a 'y' was both a scholar of consequence and a man of affairs in his own times. Elyot was High Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1527, and was later Member of Parliament for Cambridge, though his known sympathy for More made his position more precarious than that sounds. In these texts, we see Elyot as political theorist, but he depended on very practical politics for preferment, money and survival: he had been clerk to the Privy Council, and was sent abroad on diplomatic missions. Indeed, he was once sent to arrest William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into English. Happily for literature, Elyot failed.

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