Knights, Schoolmasters, and ‘Lusty Ladies White’: Addressing Readers in the Paratexts of Gavin Douglas’s Fourth Book of Eneados (1513–1553)

Belle, Marie-Alice

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_6

Marie-Alice Belle⁵

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Abstract

In this essay, Marie-Alice Belle explores the ways in which Gavin Douglas’s prologues to his 1513 Scottish Eneados engage with contemporary discourses on the dangers of carnal love, and exploit associations between (gendered) readership, book format, and generic form to position his translation in the nascent British literary field. She then turns to William Copland’s material and editorial interventions in his 1553 edition of the Eneados, showing how he redirects Douglas’s translation towards a specific, male-oriented, pedagogical use, while at the same time capitalising on a renewed interest for romance in the early Marian context.

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Notes

1.
See on this Gordon Kendal, ‘Introduction’, in Gavin Douglas, The Aeneid , edited by Gordon Kendal (London: MHRA, 2011), p. 1.
2.
On Douglas as a liminal figure, see Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 276–80; Emily Wilson, ‘The First British Aeneid: A Case Study in Reception’, in Reception and the Classics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition, edited by W. Brockliss, P. Chaudhuri, A. H. Lushkov, and K. Wasdin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 108–23 (109–10); or again, Alessandra Petrina, ‘Challenging the Author’, in Abeunt studia in mores. Saggi in onore di Mario Melchionda, edited by Giuseppe Brunetti and Alessandra Petrina (Padova: Padova University Press, 2013), pp. 23–33.
3.
The five extant manuscript copies are fully described in Virgil’s Aeneid Translated into Scottish Verse: by Gavin Douglas, edited by David F. C. Coldwell (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1957), vol. I, p. 96. Unless otherwise noted, quotations and verse numbers are taken from this edition.
4.
Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 277.
5.
See for example Priscilla Bawcutt’s seminal analysis in Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976); Lois Ebin, ‘The Role of the Narrator in the Prologues of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados’, The Chaucer Review, 14.4 (1980), 353–65; A. E. C. Canitz, ‘The Prologues to the Eneados: Gavin Douglas’s Directions for Reading’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 2.5 (1990), 1–22; Daniel Pinti, ‘The Vernacular Gloss(ed) in Gavin Douglas’s Eneados’, Exemplaria, 7 (1995), 443–64; John Corbett, Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots (Clevedon; Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1999), pp. 41–8.
6.
On the Aeneid as ‘praise of Aeneas’, see the seminal study by Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989). On the tension between the learned and vernacular traditions in Douglas’s prologues, see in particular Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 277, and Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 163–94.
7.
See Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, and Desmond, Reading Dido, for a full discussion of the medieval interpretive and literary traditions.
8.
On Douglas’s relation to humanist values and practices, see Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, pp. 30ff., or, more recently, Nicola Royan, ‘Gavin Douglas’s Humanist Identity’, in Writing Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, edited by Eva von Contzen and Luuk Houwen, special issue of Medievalia et Humanistica, 41 (2016), 119–36. Desmond reads Douglas’s translation as based on a ‘gendered model of interpretation that is antifeminist at once in origin and in practice’ (Reading Dido, p. 194).
9.
Prologue I. 85, 98–100.
10.
‘That Virgill mycht intill our langage be / Red lowd and playn be your lordschip and me, / And other gentill company …’. Postface direction to Sinclair , ‘Heir the translator direkkis hys buk …’ (hereafter, ‘Direction’), 85–7.
11.
Direction, 41–8.
12.
Prologue II. 15, and Prologue IV. 264–7, respectively.
13.
See, respectively, Desmond, Reading Dido, pp. 193 and 187, and Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 277.
14.
Jane Griffiths, Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 90.
15.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V, l. 1786. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, edited by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 584. All quotations and line references are taken from this edition.
16.
See on this for example Lawrence Venuti, ‘Retranslations: The Creation of Value’, Bucknell Review, 47.1 (2004), 25–38. Significantly, neither of Douglas’s precedents actually consists in a direct translation from Virgil, but Douglas presents both as such, in order better to demarcate his own work from them.
17.
Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, p. 33; see also ‘The Art of Flyting’, Scottish Literary Journal, 10 (1983), 5–24.
18.
See Nicola Royan, ‘The Scottish Identity of Gavin Douglas’, in The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600, edited by Mark Bruce and Katherine Terrel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 194–210.
19.
See Yu Chiao Wang, ‘Caxton’s Romances and Their Early Tudor Readers’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67.2 (2004), 173–88, and more generally, Edward Wheatley, ‘The Developing Corpus of Literary Translation’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 1: To 1550, edited by Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 173–89 (179–80).
20.
Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘English Books and Scottish Readers in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Review of Scottish Culture, 14 (2001–2), 1–12; but she also notes that Scottish libraries suffered greatly in the Reformation. Durkan and Ross’s Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow: J. S. Burns and Sons, 1961) and Higgit and Durkan’s Scottish Libraries (London: British Library, 2006) hardly include any Caxton books. Elizabeth Hanna, however, identifies several copies of Caxton’s books in various contemporary manuscripts. ‘“A Mass of Incoherencies”: John Mair, William Caxton, and the Creation of British History in Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Mediaevalia et Humanistica, 41 (2015), 137–55 (150–1).
21.
Both originate in a French version of Ramon Llull’s Catalan romance. Katie Stevenson, ‘Scottish Knighthood in the Fifteenth Century’, in Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Linda Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 33–52 (40).
22.
Hanna, ‘“A Mass of Incoherencies”’, pp. 140–1.
23.
Hanna, ‘“A Mass of Incoherencies”’, p. 141.
24.
See on this William Calin, The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland (North York: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 176–8. Calin notes in particular that Scottish verse romance was considered a high genre, with a readership including ‘the nobility and all those with aspirations to nobility’ (177).
25.
As described for example in Sebastiaan Verweij, The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland: Manuscript Production and Transmission, 1560–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 208–9.
26.
Both in Prologue I and in the marginal commentary, where he denounces ‘corrupt Gwido’; see Griffiths, Diverting Authorities, p. 90.
27.
Calin, The Lily and the Thistle, p. 176.
28.
See Luise O. Fradenburg’s seminal 1981 article, ‘The Scottish Chaucer’, reprinted in Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, edited by Daniel Pinti (New York; London: Garland, 1998), pp. 167–76.
29.
Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 277.
30.
In both versions of the ‘Ballad’ (Riverside Chaucer, p. 597).
31.
See for example Anne E. B. Coldiron, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 85ff. in particular.
32.
See Julia Boffey, ‘“Twenty Thousand More”: Some Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Responses to The Legend of Good Women’, in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions, edited by A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 279–97.
33.
Douglas’s use of Ascensius’s 1501 Virgil was first established by Bawcutt (Gavin Douglas, pp. 99–102). For a full analysis of Douglas’s glossing practices, see Griffiths, Diverting Authorities, pp. 48ff.
34.
Griffiths, Diverting Authorities, p. 49.
35.
The latter sums up the traditional association of Book IV with the themes of love and lust by the lapidary formula: ‘Dido, id est libido’ (The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid of Virgil Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Sylvestris, edited by J. Jones and E. Jones (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), p. 12).
36.
Bawcutt, ‘Douglas and Chaucer’, p. 406.
37.
Bawcutt, ‘Douglas and Chaucer’, p. 406.
38.
See on this R. J. Lyall, ‘Books and Book Owners in Fifteenth-Century Scotland’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, edited by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 239–56 (252).
39.
As noted by Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘“My bright buke”: Women and their Books in Medieval and Renaissance Scotland’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 17–34 (33).
40.
A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24: A “Transitional” Collection’, in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, edited by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 53–67; and Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘The Cultural Repertory of Middle Scots Lyric Verse’, in Cultural Repertoires, edited by Gillies J. Dorleijn and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), pp. 59–86 (71).
41.
Douglas actually has ‘the legend of notabill ladeys’ (Prologue I. 344). For an analysis of the contents of the Selden manuscript, see Edwards, ‘A Transitional Collection’, and Boffey and Edwards’s introduction to The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. B. 24 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997).
42.
See Lyall, ‘Books and Book Owners’, p. 252.
43.
See Prologue IV. 105–6: ‘Gyf luf be vertu, than is it lefull thing / Gif it be vyce, it is your ondoyng’.
44.
On the Selden manuscript as a ‘household’ manuscript, see Boffey, ‘Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 and Definitions of the “Household Book”’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, edited by A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 125–34. While it might be tempting to read Douglas’s disdain towards Caxton’s printed book in terms of the usual manuscript vs. print dichotomy, it is not unlikely that Douglas would have had his translation printed, if given the opportunity. See on this Petrina, ‘Challenging the Author’, p. 33.
45.
Griffiths notes for example that Copland’s glosses were even possibly integrated in subsequent manuscript copies of Douglas’s translation (Diverting Authorities, pp. 97–9).
46.
The xiii. Bukes of Eneados of the famose Poete Virgill. Translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir … (London: William Copland, 1553), p. v^v.
47.
Douglas somewhat ambiguously writes that the ‘pronuba Juno’ made a ‘takyn [token] of wedlock’ (IV, 78).
48.
The gloss shows that Copland’s indexing practices, which Griffiths calls ‘innocuous’ (Diverting Authorities, p. 96), can be quite deceptive.
49.
Griffiths, Diverting Authorities, p. 96.
50.
Vergiliana poesis que latinitatis norma est … (London: Pynson, c.1515). The most likely source for Pynson’s edition is Claude Chevallon’s Vergiliana poesis (que Latinitatis norma est) … (Paris: François Regnault et Jean Petit, 1510), since Pynson almost integrally reproduces its title. See also the annotated Vergiliana Poesis (Paris: Thomas Anguelart, Hémon le Fèvre et Jean, Geoffroy et Enguilbert de Marnef, 1512).
51.
Vergiliana Poesis (Pynson), sigs. [t.v]^r and [t.iv]^r, respectively.
52.
Vergiliana Poesis (Pynson), sigs. [s.v]^r, [s.v]^v, [t.ii]^v, [t.v]^r, respectively.
53.
See J. B. Trapp, ‘The Humanist Book’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3: 1400–1557, edited by Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 285–315 (311). The copy held at the Rylands Library (as digitised on EEBO) contains extensive manuscript annotations of the Eclogues, perhaps indicative of schoolroom use.
54.
It is possible that the publication of the Eneados actually predates her accession to the throne, but, as Edward Wilson-Lee notes, ‘the printer was doubtless aware in the early months of 1553 of Edward’s debilitated state and had … begun quietly preparing for the accession of a Catholic monarch’. ‘Romance and Resistance: Narratives of Chivalry in Mid-Tudor England’, Renaissance Studies, 24.4 (2010), 483–95 (485).
55.
See H. R. Tedder, rev. Mary C. Erler, ‘William Copland’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online, 2008; and Wilson-Lee, ‘Romance and Resistance’, pp. 482–5.
56.
The Palis of Honoure Compeled by Gawyne [D]owglas Byshope of Dunkyll (London: William Copland, 1553).
57.
Donna B. Hamilton, ‘Re-engineering Virgil: The Tempest and the Printed English Aeneid’, in The Tempest and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 116–22 (116).
58.
Wilson-Lee, ‘Romance and Resistance’, p. 485.
59.
On the links between De Worde, Robert Copland, and William Copland, see Tamara Atkin and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Printers, Publishers, and Promoters to 1558’, in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558, edited by Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 27–44 (32–4); and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘William Copland and the Identity of Printed Middle English Romance’, in The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, edited by Philippa Hardman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 139–48 (140–2).
60.
Edwards, ‘Identity’, pp. 139–42.
61.
Wilson-Lee, ‘Romance and Resistance’, pp. 486 and 490.
62.
Prologue I. 332 and IV. 82.
63.
Wilson-Lee, ‘Romance and Resistance’, p. 486.
64.
See Charles Blyth, The Knychtlike Style: A Study of Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid (New York: Garland, 1987), and, more recently, Douglas Gray, ‘Douglas and “the gret prynce Aeneas”’, Essays in Criticism, 51.1 (2001), 18–34.
65.
Copland published both verse and prose romances, among which, Caxton’s Recueyll (to which Douglas actually refers his readers in Prologue I). See Edwards, ‘Identity’, p. 139.
66.
See on this Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 9–10.
67.
See John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 49–50. It is uncertain whether Spenser knew Douglas’s translation. See discussion by Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Gavin Douglas’ , in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 223.
68.
To adapt Gianfranco Folena’s distinction between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ translation. See on this Neil Rhodes, English Renaissance Translation Theory (London: MHRA, 2013), pp. 32–3.
69.
On the dynamic relationship between Tudor translations of the Aeneid, see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘What Is My Nation? Language, Verse, and Politics in Tudor Translations of the Aeneid’ , in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature 1485–1603, edited by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 389–403.
70.
The Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, edited by Stephen Lally (New York: Garland, 1987), p. 296.

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Marie-Alice Belle

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Belle, MA. (2018). Knights, Schoolmasters, and ‘Lusty Ladies White’: Addressing Readers in the Paratexts of Gavin Douglas’s Fourth Book of Eneados (1513–1553). In: Belle, MA., Hosington, B. (eds) Thresholds of Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_6

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