Richard Sherry

Richard Sherry was a 16th-century English teacher and author associated with the humanist world of Tudor education. He is chiefly known for A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, a mid-1500s handbook that explains rhetorical devices in English and was used to make classical learning more accessible to students and readers.

His writing reflects the Renaissance interest in grammar, eloquence, and the practical art of persuasion. Rather than writing for specialists alone, he presented rhetorical terms in a way that supported teaching and study, which is one reason his work has remained of interest to scholars of early English education and language.

Very little biographical detail appears to be firmly documented compared with the survival of his work itself. What can be said with confidence is that his treatise became the main reason his name endured: it offers a clear window into how rhetoric was taught in Tudor England and how English prose was beginning to absorb classical forms.