Thomas Blundeville

Thomas Blundeville (c. 1522 – c. 1606) 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.

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

He lived as a country gentleman on his estate at Newton Flotman, in Norfolk. He inherited from his father Edward Blundeville in 1568, having possibly studied at the University of Cambridge.

He had connections with court circles, and London scientific intellectuals. He was an associate of Henry Briggs, at Gresham College, and enjoyed the patronage of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, among other aristocrats.

Other indications on his life are more tenuous. It has been plausibly suggested that as "T. B." he added a prefatory poem to John Studley's Agamemnon; he was certainly alluded to by Jasper Heywood, in the preface to his Thyestes of 1560, as a translator of Plutarch. From this it is argued that he had connection to the Inns of Court. He may have travelled to Italy, an inference from his familiarity with Italian literature. He was a mathematics tutor, to households including that of Nicholas Bacon and Francis Wyndham; and Cecil may have recommended Blundeville to Leicester.W. W. Rouse Ball gives a date of death of 1595, and possible connections to mathematicians: "Thomas Blundeville was resident at Cambridge about the same time as Dee and Digges—possibly he was a non-collegiate student, and if so must have been one of the last of them."

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