Thomas Blundeville

Who was Thomas Blundeville?

Thomas Blundeville was an English humanist writer and mathematician. He is known for work on logic, astronomy, education and horsemanship, as well as for translations from the Italian. His interests were both wide-ranging and directed towards practical ends, and he adapted freely a number of the works he translated. Henry S. Turner writes that

... his work indicates a surprising breadth of expertise and crystallizes with remarkable specificity the combination of fields that were important for the pragmatically oriented humanist reader in the final third of the sixteenth century.

He was a pioneer writer in English in several areas, and inventor of a standard classroom geometrical instrument, the protractor.