The Young Princess Elizabeth, Neo-Latin, and the Power of the Written Word

Hosington, Brenda M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-71952-8_2

Brenda M. Hosington^5,6

Part of the book series: Queenship and Power ((QAP))

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Abstract

Earlier critics of Elizabeth’s life-long use of Latin wondered why she bothered to learn the language, queried whether in fact she really did, and claimed that her portrayal as a humanist scholar of Latin emanated simply from Tudor propaganda. Fortunately, we have moved on from these negative views thanks to subsequent editions and studies of her Latin compositions and translations. Those she composed while still a princess, however, have attracted little critical attention. They will be the focus of this essay and will demonstrate that even at this early age, Elizabeth was aware of the power of the written word to articulate a particular conception of the monarchy, to reinforce family relationships, and to create for herself the persona of a learned and pious young woman, thus ensuring her safety and inclusion in the unstable world of the Tudor court.

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Notes

1.
Elizabeth’s written and extempore original Latin compositions, except the dedicatory epistle to Edward and non-autograph letter to Ferdinand, are in Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus, eds., Elizabeth I. Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) and translated into English in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I. Collected Works (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); her Parr and Ochino translations and dedicatory letters are in Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel, Elizabeth I . Translations, 1544–1589 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).
2.
Vittorio Gabrieli, “Bernardino Ochino : ‘Sermo de Christo’. Un inedito di Elisabetta Tudor,” La Cultura. Rivista di filosofia, letturatura e storia 21, no. 1 (1983): 151–74.
3.
Roger Ellis, “The Juvenile Translations of Elizabeth Tudor,” Translation and Literature 18, no. 2 (2009): 157–80.
4.
Latin quotations from the letters to Edward are from Mueller and Marcus, Elizabeth I. Autograph Compositions, with page references in parentheses in the text. Latin quotations from the Parr and Ochino translations and their accompanying dedicatory epistles are from Mueller and Scodel, Elizabeth I. Translations, 1544–1589, again with page references in parentheses in the text. All the English translations provided are mine.
5.
Roger Ascham , in The Whole Works of Roger Ascham , Now First Collected and Revised, with a Life of the Author, ed. J. A. Giles, 3 vols (London: John Russell Smith, 1864–65), Vol. I, Pt. 2, Letter XCIX, pp. 181–93 (91).
6.
Ascham, in Giles, Vol. 1, Pt. 2, Letter CXVII, pp. 271–74 (272).
7.
Roger Ascham , The Scholemaster or Plaine and Perfite Way of Teaching Children, The Latin Tong (London: John Day , 1570), sig. H1r.
8.
John Leland, Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum, encomia (London: T. Orwin, 1589), 58–9.
9.
Henry Savile, trans., The End of Nero and Beginning of Galba. Fower Bookes of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus. The Life of Agricola (London: R. Robinson, 1591), sig. 2^v.
10.
T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s small Latine & lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 284.
11.
Caroline Pemberton, ed., Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings of Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, A.D. 1593; Plutarch, De curiositate [A.D. 1598]; Horace, De arte poetica (Part), A.D. 1598. Early English Text Society, orig. ser. 113 (London: Early English Text Society, 1889).
12.
Baldwin, 1944, 276. Baldwin actually mistakenly identifies her source as Publilius Servus, whose wording is “Feras non culpes quod mutari non potest” (“what cannot be changed must be endured”). It is, in fact, Erasmus ’s “Feras non culpes quod vitari non potest” (“what cannot be avoided must be endured”, Adagia 214, my italics). It appears more than once in his De conscribendis epistolis, a widely used letter writing manual with which Elizabeth was most certainly familiar. Mueller and Marcus also mistakenly attribute the saying to Publilius Servus, although they also mention Erasmus ’s Adagia; however, they do not comment on the “mutari”, “vitari” variation, which clearly makes Erasmus the source (Mueller and Marcus, 2003, 26, n. 4).
13.
Dana Sutton, “The Queen’s Latin,” Neulateinisches Jahrbuch. Journal of Neo-Latin Language and Literature 2 (2000): 233–40; 238–9.
14.
Walter J. Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56, no. 2 (1959): 103–24; 108.
15.
Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets. Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, eds., Women Writing Latin from Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, 3 vols (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).
16.
Linda Shenk, Learned Queen. The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
17.
Lysbeth Benkert, “Translation as Image-Making: Elizabeth I ’s Translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy,” Early Modern Literary Studies 6, no. 3 (2001): 1–20, http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/benkboet.htm, date accessed November 10, 2016; Georgia E. Brown, “Translation and the Definition of Sovereignty: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor,” in Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century. Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000), ed. Mike Pincombe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 88–103.
18.
Leah S. Marcus, “Queen Elizabeth I as Public and Private Poet: Notes Toward a New Edition,” in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 135–53; 143.
19.
Mary Thomas Crane, “‘Video et Taceo’: Elizabeth I and the Rhetoric of Counsel,” Studies in English Literature 14 (1988): 1–15.
20.
Neville Williams, Elizabeth, Queen of England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1967), 10.
21.
Judith Henderson, “On Reading the Rhetoric of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance-Rhetorik/Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 143–62.
22.
John Gough Nichols, ed., Literary Remains of King Edward The Sixth. Edited from his Autograph Mansucripts, with Historical Notes, and a Biographical Memoir (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons for the Roxburgh Club, 1857), 40.
23.
Thomas Heywood, Englands Elizabeth: Her Life and Troubles, During Her Minoritie (London: J. Beale for P. Waterhouse, 1631), 46–7.
24.
Carole Levin, “Sister-Subject/Sister-Queen: Elizabeth I Among Her Siblings,” in Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World: Sisters, Brothers and Others, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 77–88; 87.
25.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant. Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 7.
26.
David Loades, Intrigue and Treason: The Tudor Court, 1547–1558 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004), 36–8.
27.
Brenda Hosington, “‘How We Ovght to Knowe God’: Princess Elizabeth’s Presentation of Her Calvin Translation to Katherine Parr,” in Booldly bot meekly. Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis, ed. Catherine Batt and René Tixier (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 353–63.
28.
Mueller and Scodel, 2009, 136, n. 5.
29.
Jane A. Lawson, “This Remembrance of the New Year. Books Given to Queen Elizabeth as New Year’s Gifts,” in Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed. Peter Beale and Grace Ioppolo (London: The British Library, 2007), 133–71; 161–5.
30.
Roger Ellis, “Translation for and by the Young in 16th-Century England: Erasmus and the Arundel Children,” in Thou Sittest at Another Boke: English Studies in Honour of Domenico Pezzini, ed. Giovanni Iamartino, Maria Luisa Maggioni, and Roberta Facchinetti (Milan: Polimetrica, 2008), 59–72.
31.
H. R. Woudhuysen, “The Queen’s Own Hand: A Preliminary Account,” in Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed. Beale and Ioppolo (2007), 1–28; 3.
32.
David Starkey, Elizabeth. Apprenticeship (London: Vintage, 2001), 53.
33.
BL Royal MS 7 D ix, f. 1.
34.
Janel Mueller, ed., Katherine Parr. Complete Works and Correspondence (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 374.
35.
Mueller and Scodel, 2009, 131.
36.
Ibid., 131.
37.
Mueller, 2011, 381.
38.
Brenda Hosington, “Margaret Beaufort’s Translations as Mirrors of Practical Piety,” in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625, ed. Micheline White (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 185–203.
39.
Dvii^r–viii^r.
40.
Micheline White, “Pray for the Monarch. The Surprising Contributions of Katherine Parr and Queen Elizabeth I to the Book of Common Prayer ,” The Times Literary Supplement (3 April 2015): 14–15.
41.
Micheline White, “The Psalms, War, and Royal Iconography: Katherine Parr’s Psalms or Prayers (1544) and Henry VIII as David,” Renaissance Studies 29, no. 4 (2015): 554–75.
42.
White, “The Psalms, War, and Royal Iconography,” 2015; Mueller and Marcus, 2003, 5.
43.
Mueller and Scodel, 2009, 294.
44.
Mueller and Marcus, 2003, 15.
45.
David Loades, Elizabeth I. The Golden Reign of Gloriana (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 58.
46.
Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr. The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 321.
47.
Starkey, 2001, 88.
48.
Woudhuysen, 2007, 11–12.
49.
MacCulloch, 1999, 27.
50.
MacCulloch, 1999, 26–7.
51.
Anne Overell, Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–c.1585 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 47.
52.
Bernardino Ochino , Prediche di M. Bernardino Ochino, nomate laberinti del libero, o ver servo arbitrio, prescienzia, predestinatione, & libertà divina, & del modo per uscirne (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1561), sig. A3v.
53.
Hosington, 2016, 363.
54.
Bernardino Ochino , Prediche di Bernardino Ochino da Siena. Nouellamente ristampate & con grande diligentia riuedute & corette (Basel: s.n, 1543–62).
55.
Woudhuysen, 2007, 1–4.
56.
Mueller and Scodel, 2009, 294–5.
57.
Hosington, 2017, 363.

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Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada
Brenda M. Hosington
Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Brenda M. Hosington

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Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Donatella Montini
Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Iolanda Plescia

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Hosington, B.M. (2018). The Young Princess Elizabeth, Neo-Latin, and the Power of the Written Word. In: Montini, D., Plescia, I. (eds) Elizabeth I in Writing. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71952-8_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71952-8_2
Published: 28 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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