According to Lewis and Short, "famosus" meant "much talked of (well or ill)"
and thus had both the positive sense "famous, renowned" and the negative
sense "infamous, notorious." See here:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=famosus&la=la#lexicon
-----Original Message-----
From: Brad Walton
Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2015 9:38 AM
To: Lutelist
Subject: [LUTE] [Lute]Re: Latin Translation
Fidibus illustris ille Corbetto Italus
Voce Margharitha Salicola virgo Boniensis
Venetis tam famosa theatris vicere musas.
As Monica suspected, the author of these lines seems to have been (or
was pretending to be?) somewhat incompetent in Latin, given the
standards of the period. It looks like he may have been attempting to
write the piece in hexameters and then gave up. The most amusing gaff
(if that's what it is) is his use of famosa to describe the "virgo"
Margharitha Salicola, In classical Latin (which would have been the
literary idiom in the late seventeenth- /early eighteenth-century),
famosus meant "infamous" or "notorious," not "famous."
Brad
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