Early works He made a partial verse translation of the
Moralia of
Plutarch, to which
Roger Ascham added verses. It appeared as
Three Moral Treatises in 1561, his first work, to mark the accession of
Elizabeth I, to whom one of the pieces was dedicated. Another was dedicated to the courtiers
John Harington and
John Astley. His book on horsemanship,
The arte of ryding and breakinge greate horses, was published about 1560 and is the first work on
equitation published in English. It is an abridged and adapted translation, made at the suggestion of John Astley, of
Gli ordini di cavalcare by
Federico Grisone, and is directed towards the use of horses in war. He followed it with
The fower chiefyst offices belonging to Horsemanshippe (1565–6), which included a revised translation of Grisone together with other treatises. It was praised as "Xenophontean" by
Gabriel Harvey.
Historiography His expressed views on history are considered standard for Elizabethan England. The approach is causal, invoking the "meanes and instrumentes" of history, and mechanism in politics. Influentially, he compromised between "linear" (traditional Christian medieval) and "cyclic" (classical) overall views of the working-out of history, for a "spiral" model. For him, the providential is not incompatible with the moral order as it asserts itself in the details of exemplary political history, and he has been compared to
Edmund Bolton in combining the medieval and humanist traditions. He commented that to be a good historiographer is a prerequisite for a counsellor, in his 1570 book on
counsel. His
True Order and Methode was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester and was a loose translation and summary of historiographical works by
Jacopo Aconcio and
Francesco Patrizzi. It endorsed the realist writing of history as process, and was one of the few English contributions of the period to the
artes historicae. He translated also a manuscript of Aconcio on
fortification, for the
Earl of Bedford.
Logic His
Arte of Logike (written 1575, published 1599) is somewhat
Ramist in approach, but strongly so in discussing method. Besides
Aristotle, it also shows the influence of
Galen,
Melanchthon,
Cornelius Valerius the
De Methodo of Aconcio of 1558, and
Thomas Wilson. It contains a section on
fallacies. Under
petitio principii, it uses an even-handed example of
Aristotelian and
Copernican arguments on the motion of the Earth.
Scientific, mathematical and geographical These later works are directed towards geography,
navigation and travel, geography in Blundeville's view being a necessary support to history; their content is very mixed. The
Exercises (1594) collected six treatises on practical skills, with a serious effort to be up-to-date. One of the parts described the world map of
Petrus Plancius, published two years earlier. Other topical matters covered were
Molyneux's globes, the work of
John Blagrave and
Gemma Frisius, and the
cross-staff of
Thomas Hood. According to Rouse Ball: A later edition (1613) showed the circumnavigations of
Francis Drake and
Thomas Cavendish. He collaborated on an astronomy book,
The Theoriques of the Seuen Planets (1602), assisted by
Lancelot Browne as he notes in the preface. It contained also information about the recent research of
William Gilbert on the Earth's magnetic field, which he included with help from
Edward Wright and Henry Briggs. Wright had earlier supplied some of the innovative material for his writing on
navigation in the
Exercises. He had worked with
William Barlow and others on the required scientific instruments; according to Hill Blundeville invented the protractor. ==Works==