Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700

Volume 1: Early Tudor Women Writers

Elaine V. Beilin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754661658
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351964968
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

This volume includes leading scholarship on five writers active in the first half of the sixteenth century: Margaret More Roper, Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon. The essays represent a range of theoretical approaches and provide valuable insights into the religious, social, economic and political contexts essential for understanding these writers' texts. Scholars examine the significance of Margaret More Roper's translations and letters in the contexts of humanism, family relationships and changing cultural forces; the contributions of Katherine Parr and Anne Askew to Reformation discourses and debates; and the material presence of Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon in the intellectual, religious and political life of their time. The introduction surveys the development of the field as an interdisciplinary project involving literature, history, classics, religion and cultural studies.

Part I

Margaret More Roper

1

Margaret Roper’s English Version of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica and the Apprenticeship Behind Early Tudor Translation

John Archer Gee

THE following article falls into two closely related and yet separate parts. The first centres in the work under consideration and discusses in turn various facts which pertain to it. The second, growing out of the first, centres in what is known of the apprenticeship behind the work and argues that this knowledge may offer an important clue to the apprenticeship behind other contemporary English translations by the disciples of humanism.

I

Erasmus’ Precatio dominica in septem portiones distributa, a short treatise which, as the title indicates, follows the mediæval manner of biblical exposition known as postillating,¹ was first published in 1523 by Froben at Basle. Several editions appeared during this and the next year.² By October 1, 1524,³ it had been translated into English by Margaret Roper, eldest daughter of Sir Thomas More, and this translation, with an introductory letter¹ by Richard Hyrde, a member of More’s household at Chelsea, was printed by Berthelet before March 12, 1525/6.²

The translation and the letter have survived in what is evidently a unique copy of an edition which was probably not the first, but one soon after it.³ The title-page (A1^r) of this copy, a black-letter quarto in the British Museum, reads as follows:

¶ A deuout treatise/vpon the Pater no=|ster/made fyrst in latyn by the moost fa =|mous doctour mayster Erasmus | Roterodamus/and tourned | in to englisshe by a yong | vertuous and well | lerned gentyl-woman of .xix. | yere of age.

Beneath these words is found, within ornamental borders, a woodcut (9·5 cm. × 5 cm.) of a woman seated at a reading desk and turning the pages of a folio.⁴ On the reverse of this leaf is a full-page woodcut (13 cm. × 9·2 cm.) containing Cardinal Wolsey’s Arms.⁵

The letter extends from A2^r to B3^v inclusive; the translation from B4^r to F4^v inclusive. F4^v also contains the colophon:

¶ Thus endeth the exposicion of the Pater noster. | Imprinted at London in Fletestrete/in the | house of Thomas Berthelet nere to the | Cundite/at the signe of Lucrece. | Cum priuilegio a rege indulto.

The type used in the text is an old fount of De Worde’s.¹

First I would direct attention to the dates. Written and published during the middle of the 1520’s, this translation preceded all but a few of the many English translations by the sixteenth-century humanists. Accordingly it belongs to the early history of an important movement, one which did much to establish modern English literary prose. Since, besides, a considerable contribution to this movement was made by the numerous vernacular versions of various works of Erasmus, its significance is increased, for, with the exception of Tindale’s version of the Enchiridion militis Christiani,² it is the first among those to which we can assign a fairly definite date of composition; and with the possible exception of Gentien Hervet’s version of the De immensa dei misericordia and Thomas Berthelet’s version of several collections of apophthegms edited by Erasmus and printed in Latin and English in a volume under the general title of Dicta sapientum,³ it is the first that was published.

Also noteworthy is the fact of female authorship. Not only was the translation made when few Englishwomen had practised literature of any sort, but it was published soon after its completion, and published, besides, with a prefatory letter and a title-page which conjointly offered a decisive clue to the translator’s identity. Not long before its appearance More had written to Margaret and praised her for continuing her literary labours despite the fact that she could not, as he intimated, hope to enlarge her circle of readers much beyond her family.⁴ After quoting this part of More’s letter Stapleton added this extended comment: “She had produced works which fully deserved to be published and read by all, although the bashfulness of her sex, or her humility, or the almost incredible novelty of the thing (as More hints) never allowed her to consent to publication.⁵ Perhaps Stapleton did not know of this printed translation. He devoted a whole chapter to Margaret Roper without referring to it. Nevertheless he spoke of Richard Hyrde with such little real knowledge as to suggest that what information he had about Hyrde was derived from this book.¹ Hence these last words should perhaps be read as literally true, in which case we must conclude that the translation was published by Hyrde² or another without her permission. But even if Stapleton is in error and she did consent to its publication, she must have been somewhat hesitant about doing so, for while a few works had already been written by Englishwomen and published under their names, none of these publications bore a sufficiently close analogy to this one to have given her decision much support.

Among these works was not Juliana of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, for it remained in manuscript until 1670.³ About 1501, however, and again twenty years later—this time with six other devotional tracts—A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon was printed, a fragment “taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of Lynn.⁴ In the famous Boke of St. Albans (1486), too, the second of the original three parts—that on hunting—has near its end the words, “Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes.”⁵ And finally there were two translations by the mother of Henry VII, the illustrious Lady Margaret (Beaufort),⁶ who died in 1509. The first, which was of the spurious Fourth Book of the Imitatio Christi, appeared in separate form⁷ in 1504 as a supplement to William Atkynson’s translation (1503) of the three authentic books. Both here and in the later editions, most of which include all four books, her authorship is acknowledged. The second, also published under her name, was of Denis de Leeuwis’ Speculum aureum animæ peccatricis.¹ The two earliest editions of this translation to be dated are of 1522. It was reprinted in 1526 and probably later.²

Of these four hitherto printed writings avowedly by Englishwomen, only these two translations offered any valid precedent for the non-anonymous publication of Margaret Roper’s translation. Yet neither could have lent much encouragement to the undertaking. One, though it first appeared separately, was but an addition to another work, and the other seems to have been published posthumously.³ Nor was this all. Distinguished as well for her generous and intelligent patronage of literature and learning as for her social eminence, the Lady Margaret was perhaps the most famous Englishwoman of her time. Margaret Roper, on the other hand, was only nineteen or twenty when her translation was published, and though because of her father’s extensive circle of intimate friends there were undoubtedly many who already knew of her remarkable cultural attainments, these people could have constituted but a small portion of the reading public. The books themselves exhibit this contrast. Whereas the Lady Margaret’s translations were introduced by a notice which merely stated who the translator was,⁴ this other translation was prefaced by a letter which served to point out the translator’s fitness for the task and the merits of the translation itself. So while the publication of Margaret Roper’s translation may have been somewhat influenced by these two publications slightly prior to it, there is this major difference to be noted. And because it was one thing for the Lady Margaret to appear before the public as an authoress and quite another for a relatively unknown girl to do so, we may discern in this later publication a literary venture the very modesty of which but emphasizes its novelty.

Had it not been for the circumstance of female authorship, Hyrde’s letter, which Foster Watson calls “the first reasoned claim of the Renascence period, written in English, for the higher education of women,”¹ would not have appeared. Though, as a poem by John Leland indicates,² he was evidently a man of some prominence, this letter is one of the few records of him that we possess. During part of the 1520’s he certainly lived with More’s family,³ and his reference to More as “my singular good master and bringer up”⁴ suggests that he had commenced to do so before going to Oxford, where he became Bachelor of Arts in 1519.⁵ According to Stapleton, who is the first of More’s biographers to mention Hyrde, he succeeded William Gonell as a tutor in More’s household and taught the grandchildren.⁶ The first part of this statement may well be correct, for Gonell appears to have left More’s service about the time Hyrde graduated from Oxford.⁷ Since, however, Hyrde died in the early spring of 1528,⁸ having suffered a bad drenching in fording a swollen river just outside of Orvieto when accompanying Gardiner and Fox on their journey to Rome to advance the Divorce,⁹ he could hardly have taught More’s grandchildren, the oldest of whom was born in 1522 or 1523.¹⁰

Judging from some of his remarks in the prefatory letter, one of his pupils was the “Fraunces S.” to whom it is addressed.¹¹ She, still a young girl in 1524,¹² when the letter was written, was the daughter of More’s oldest sister Joan (n. March 11, 1474/5)¹³ and Richard Stafferton, one of the prenotaries of the Sheriff’s court of London,¹⁴ and she had been brought up “of a babe”¹⁵ among More’s children. Probably, too, some and perhaps all of these children were also taught by Hyrde. His continued presence in More’s household and his great enthusiasm for the instruction of women in humane letters—an enthusiasm evident not only in his letter to Frances Stafferton but in the fact that he translated Vives’ De institutione feminœ Christianœ¹—together warrant such a conclusion. Yet nowhere does he say or even imply that he ever taught any of More’s children, and though More refers at times to Gonell and Nicholas Kratzer as their tutors,² Hyrde’s name is never mentioned by him in any connection. Furthermore, Hyrde’s presence in the More household may be explained by the description of him at his death as “singularly learned in physic, in the Greek and Latin tongues,” one in whose “learning and experience in physic” Gardiner and Fox had great confidence,³ for these references suggest that his major function while with the Mores during the 1520’s was to act as a resident family-doctor. As such, however, he may well have done a good amount of teaching in humane letters. And he may have taught medicine to Margaret Roper, to whom in 1521 or somewhat later her father wrote that it was to medical science, together with the study of sacred literature, that he wished her eventually to devote her life.⁴

Because Hyrde became Bachelor of Arts in 1519 and was still a young man⁵ when he died in 1528, he was probably only a few years older than Margaret Roper. She, as we know from the combined evidence of the title-page and prefatory letter of her translation, was born about 1505.⁶ For ever endeared to posterity because of her heart-rending loyalty and devotion to her father in the cruel days of his martyrdom, even as a young girl she was highly esteemed by her relatives and friends for her fineness of character and her erudition. Brought up with her brother and sisters, and others, in the school maintained by More in his home—a school described by Erasmus as a Platonic Academy of the Christian religion¹—and continuing to study under tutors after her marriage to William Roper in 1521, she surpassed in sacred and humane learning all her fellow-students. Despite her sex, moreover, she was not content to remain a mere recipient of this learning. She developed a capability for critical scholarship, and to her we are indebted for a lasting emendation of a corrupt passage in St. Cyprian.² She also strove to acquire a finished style in Latin composition, and how well she succeeded is revealed in the praise given by Stapleton to a speech of hers in imitation of Quintilian³ and by Reginald Pole and others to some of her Latin letters which More proudly permitted them to see.⁴

We do not know whether she took her father’s advice and first wrote these letters in English, thereby resolving the thought and its general arrangement before attacking the problem of putting what she had to say into Latin.⁵ It is certain, however, that she frequently practised English composition. When, about 1522, More was writing his vernacular Treatise of the Four Last Things, he requested her to write independently on the same subject.⁶ Furthermore, the competence of her version of Erasmus’ treatise indicates a considerable apprenticeship in the art of vernacular translation.

Hyrde’s appraisal of its merit is both enthusiastic and perspicacious:

… whoso list, and well can confer and examine, the translation with the original, he shall not fail to find that she hath shewed herself not only erudite and elegant in either tongue, but hath also used such wisdom, such discreet and substantial judgment, in expressing lively the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Chronology
• PART I MARGARET MORE ROPER
• PART II KATHERINE PARR
• PART III ANNE ASKEW
• PART IV THE COOKE SISTERS: ANNE COOKE BACON, MILDRED COOKE CECIL
• Index