Fatherhood Quote by Roger Ascham

Ascham’s sentence lands like a Tudor-era parental advisory label: chivalric romances aren’t merely silly, they’re a training manual for violence and sex. The sting comes from its absolutism. “Nothing was read but…” flattens an entire reading culture into a single corrupting genre, then snaps to two blunt endpoints - “manslaughter and bawdry” - pairing bloodshed with lust as the twin vices literature supposedly engineers. It’s moral panic with a schoolmaster’s confidence.

The specific intent is pedagogical and political at once. Ascham, a humanist and tutor in an England trying to discipline its ruling class, argues for reading as social technology: what elites consume shapes what they become. He’s not debating taste; he’s managing the future of governance. Chivalry, in his telling, doesn’t cultivate honor. It distorts young men into impulsive bravos and libertines, unfit for Protestant sobriety and civic duty.

The subtext is anxiety about imitation. Romance works by seduction - gorgeous exploits, erotic intrigue, the fantasy of consequence-free heroism. Ascham’s fear isn’t that readers misunderstand fiction, but that they understand it too well: they internalize its scripts. His phrasing also quietly attacks aristocratic nostalgia. “Our fathers’ time” signals a break with an older, medieval code now recast as irresponsible. Read the line as an early argument for media literacy, delivered in the language of social control: regulate the stories, regulate the society.