My thesis considers the career and writings of Richard Pace. Employed by Cardinal Bainbridge in Rome, then by Thomas Wolsey and Henry VIII as secretary and diplomat, Pace was considered one of England's most illustrious ambassadors and learned men by contemporaries. Erasmus, however, attempted to censor Pace's De Jructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (c.1517) which was written and published in the same period as Utopia. Accepting Erasmus's hostility at face value, commentators have judged Pace's literary works harshly, and his contribution to English humanism and political thought has been underestimated as a consequence. This thesis reveals Pace to be an important pedagogue, conciliarist and satirist who actively sought to further reform in both secular and ecclesiastical realms. Chapter 1 traces Pace's education in the Veneto, Bologna and Ferrara. Taught by famous humanist scholars and translators in the fields of rhetoric, Greek, medicine, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and the natural sciences, Pace was part of the English circle in Italy of Latimer, Tunstall, Linacre, Clerk and (later) Pole and Lupset. In Chapter 2 it is seen that the De Jructu was commissioned for use in the study of Greek and Latin at St. Paul's School by Erasmus on behalf of John Colet. In Chapters 3 and 4, I argue that Erasmus' s hostility to the De Jructu stemmed not from any aesthetic reservations. Pace claimed authorship of one of the most notorious satires of the sixteenth century, the anonymously issued Julius exclusus, which at that time was being attributed to Erasmus despite his vehement denials. Chapter 3 focuses on Pace 's discussion of counsel and council in the De Jructu. Based in classical rhetorical theory, and fused with the Christian ideal of piety and virtue, Pace fashions the ideal orator and counsellor of early sixteenth-century Europe. Chapter 4 is concerned with Pace's experience of, and reactions to, Italian and English sacred oratory, and includes a study of his own oration delivered on the occasion of the signing of the Universal Peace Treaty in October 1518. Chapter 5 examines the Julius exclusus (c.1513), a key text for both continental reformers and propagandists for Henry VIII's Divorce. In order to resolve the centuriesold question of its authorship, I expose the major textual conventions on which the dialogue rests and the contexts in which it was composed., including the oratory of the Roman court, Renaissance drama, the satiric pasquinade, and the theological and juridical literature generated by the schismatic Pisan council. Chapter 6 considers further the dissemination of, and Erasmus's reaction to, the Julius exclusus and De jructu, Utopia, the Epistolae obscurum virorum and other satires emanating from Germany in the first decades of the sixteenth century.