Nicholas Grimald’s translation of Cicero’s De officiis has long been revered as the standard version of one of the most popular Tudor school texts, as well as one of the first contributions towards a theory of translation in English. This article reassesses the work’s cultural and political impact through a close examination of its paratexts within the immediate publishing context at the office of Richard Tottel in 1556. It argues that Tottel’s material presentation of the book in a larger publishing program subtly re-encodes the work’s political, ideological, and religious message for his Marian readership. Tottel’s strategy in publishing Grimald’s Duties at this juncture was both to reclaim Cicero’s authority for the Marian program of Catholic restoration and to invest this program with the humanist credentials of influential early Tudor educational reformers.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Schmidt, G., (2025), "Cicero among the Martyrs: A Reassessment of the First Edition of Nicholas Grimald’s Thre bokes of duties (1556)", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Schmidt, Gabriela. "Cicero among the Martyrs: A Reassessment of the First Edition of Nicholas Grimald’s Thre bokes of duties (1556)." Renaissance and Reformation 43 (2): 2020. 93-118. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v43i2.34793. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.