Authoritative and exhaustive in its scholarship, this superb edition of Wyatt’s prose will be the definitive work of reference for decades to come. Superseding George Frederick Nott’s edition (1816) and Kenneth Muir’s Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1963), it includes the first scholarly edition of The Quyete of Mynde (1528), Wyatt’s translation of Plutarch’s On Tranquility of Mind, dedicated to Katherine of Aragon. Detailed annotations compare Wyatt’s text (which exists in a single printed copy) not only with its immediate source—two contending Latin editions of Guillaume Budé’s Latin translation De Tranquillitate et Securitate Animi, published in Paris (1505) and Rome (1510), respectively—but also with later translations of part or all of Plutarch’s essay into English by Sir Thomas Elyot (1534) and Thomas Blundeville (1561), so as to “set Wyatt’s style and his decisions as a translator more clearly in the context of his moment” (11). Indeed, contextualization is Powell’s mission throughout and something he achieves by means of minute and thorough detail. He collates all eight surviving manuscript copies of Wyatt’s two fatherly epistles to his son (which became exempla of the genre through the next two centuries) to establish a definitive text, for example, where Muir’s Life and Letters draws on only two. Wyatt’s diplomatic correspondence, dating from his two stints as resident ambassador at the court of Charles V (1537–39 and 1539–40), follows the numeration established by Nott and Muir but in addition interleaves the royal instructions Wyatt received in each case (neither are in Muir), making it possible both to compare Wyatt’s (perhaps overly ambitious) brief with the eventual outcome of his endeavors and to measure the relative difficulty of achieving success in a world characterized by chronic insecurity and constantly shifting political allegiances.

Three appendixes (A, C, and D) similarly provide contextual material in the form of memoranda written by Wyatt’s compatriots John Dudley and Philip Hoby, sent separately as special ambassadors to the imperial court during Wyatt’s first embassy, and Wyatt’s own “reckoning,” or expense account, for the same (none of these are in Muir), while a fourth (B) transcribes the holograph copy of Edmund Bonner’s highly critical report on Wyatt to Thomas Cromwell, thereby restoring readings that Muir (who based his text on its first transcription by John Bruce in 1850) had silently emended. We thus learn that Bonner’s most serious accusation—the comment Wyatt allegedly made to the effect that an alliance between Charles V and Francis I would leave Henry VIII isolated and “cast out at the carts tail” (as Muir has it)—in fact first quotes Wyatt as saying that the king would be “last out at the cartes arse.” Not only is Bonner thereby relieved of any anachronistic Victorian propriety, but, more importantly, the restoration of this slip on his part gives Wyatt an opportunity in his Defence to point out how crucial it is for any reported wording to be absolutely precise: “‘fall owte,’ ‘caste owte,’ or ‘lefte owte’ makethe dyfferaunce.” As Bonner actually writes it, Powell notes, the alleged expostulation “is far milder, and nearly indistinguishable in meaning from the phrase Wyatt admitted that he might have said” (291), which was that “the kinge shalbe lefte owte of the cartes arse”: i.e., that Henry’s foreign policy might founder like badly packed luggage that falls off its conveyance (and not, as alleged, that Henry was a like a common criminal who is conveyed to the gallows in a cart).

Wyatt’s attentiveness to language—and the ways in which its slipperiness might be turned to his advantage—is as evident here when he is arguing for his life as it is in his poetry. Accompanied with detailed introductions, exhaustive textual apparatus and descriptions, over sixty biographies of key figures (“with particular focus on those individuals whose lives are not described in the . . . standard biographical sources for the period” [401]), a glossary, and list of OED first citations / antedatings—all efficiently cross-referenced throughout—this volume has everything the student and scholar of Wyatt’s prose could possibly need. It is a masterly example of scholarly editing at its best and an advertisement not only for volume 2 (verse), but for Powell’s edition of the Complete Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, also under contract with Oxford University Press.