Helen COB
On Wednesday, January 16, 2002, at 10:04 AM, Colin Burrow wrote:
Comparisons between English and Classical authors had indeed become
commonplace by the 1590s. Meres' Palladis Tamia, which compares a range of
English authors more or less unconvincingly to classical authors (Harding
the chronicler comes out as one of several English Ovids, for instance, and
'as Homer and Virgil among the Greeks and Latines are the chiefe Heroick
Poets: so Spencer and Warner be our cheife heroicall Makers'). The most
accessible text is in G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford,
1904).
I'm not sure of the origins in England of this practice, and would suspect
Leland is probably one of the earliest examples, if not the earliest
example, and I would also suspect that the topos is dominantly a neo-Latin
rather than a vernacular one before the mid-century. As I recall John Bale's
Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae, printed in Basle in 1557, makes
similar comparisons, but I have not verified this distant and probably
inaccurate memory.
Colin Burrow, Fellow and Tutor, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge CB2
1TA
tel: 01223 332483
web: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Helen Conrad- O'Briain Sent: 04 January 2002 19:22 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: VIRGIL: Homer-Vergil to Chaucer
Dear list, I was recently asked by a colleague to translate a pair of poems in praise of Chaucer by the Tudor antiquary Leland - about five hundred years out of my period - hence my question: - is a comparison of Homer, Vergil and A Another as the chief poet of their respective languages a common topos in renaissance literature (I rather suspect it is) and if so could the list suggest a few examples prior to c. 1535? From my period, Bede contrasts the subject of one of his poems with Vergil's Aeneid at one point in the EHE, and Aldhelm points out that as Vergil was the first of the Latins to write a 'Georgics, he, Aldhelm, was the first of the Germanic nations to write on metrics, but that isn't quite the same thing. By the way, Leland has a charming little poem in which he plays on the similarity between his patron 's name (Brian) Tuke and Vergil's Tucca.
Helen COB
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