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Translating the Legenda aurea in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2017

Morgan Ring
Morgan Ring*
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
*
*Gonville and Caius College, Trinity St, Cambridge, CB2 1TA. E-mail: memr2@cam.ac.uk.
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Abstract

To its admirers, the Legenda aurea is a powerful expression of medieval belief. To the evangelical pamphleteers of early modern England, it was a symbol of all the failings of unreformed religion. For historians, it is a convenient shorthand for popular hagiography before the Reformation. These readings, however, understate the Legenda's often ambiguous place in early modern devotional life. This article seeks to complicate the Legenda's history in late medieval and early modern England. It argues that the concept and the act of translation rendered Jacobus's text more complex than the historiographical shorthand allows. Translation contributed to the Legenda's power as a devotional work, was a means by which it found its use, impact and wide audience, and was central to how reformers remembered both the text itself and its author. The translated Legenda was not the exception to the narrative of the long Reformation, but an emblem of it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 53: TRANSLATING CHRISTIANITY , June 2017 , pp. 118 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017 

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Footnotes

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Gonville Research Fund, the Archbishop Cranmer Fund, the Huntington Library, and the Bibliographical Society.

References

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12 BL, Add. MS 11565, fols 55r–v; Add. MS 35298, Calendar and fol. 162r.

13 London, LPL, MS 223, fol. 297r.

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15 Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 1729, fol. 1r; Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fol. 1v.

16 Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), Preface.

17 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, ed. and transl. Ryan, 242; BL, Add. MS 35298, fol. 35r; Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fol. 158v.

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20 Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fol. 36v.

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22 These relationships are outlined in Blake, ‘Biblical Additions’, 231–7.

23 Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fols 63r, 75v–80r. For the missing verse, see fol. 77v; for variations on in saecula saeculorum, see fols 78v, 79v.

24 Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fols 42v, 74v–75r; see also The Historye of the Patriarks, with parallel Texts of the Historia Scholastica and the Bible Historiale, ed. Mayumi Taguchi (Heidelberg, 2010), 102.

25 Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fol. 71r. In the AV, the verse reads: ‘And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.’

26 Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fol. 70r.

27 Ibid., fol. 73v.

28 BL, C.1.22.h.7, fols 9r–16r;. For further examples, see BL, C.11.c.16, fols 3r–52r.

29 Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS 54577, fols 2r–54v. Some of these are also present in the New Testament section.

30 BL, C.11.c.16, fol. 33v. Whether or not this annotator was trying to align the Legenda more closely with a particular translation is unclear. Both the Wycliffe Bible and the Bishops’ Bible use ‘ruddy’ in translating 1 Samuel 17: 42. Elsewhere, the annotator substituted ‘dreames’ for Caxton's ‘sweuenes’ in 1 Samuel 28: 6. ‘Sweuenes’ is used in the early Wycliffe Bible, while ‘dreames’ is present in the later Wycliffe translation and in Coverdale. In Judith 5: 11, Caxton refers to ‘claye tyles’, which the annotator amended to ‘bryke’: Wycliffe's translation has ‘clay’, while Coverdale and subsequent versions have ‘brick’ and ‘clay’: see C.11.c.16, fols 36r, 50r.

31 See, for instance, summary annotations to the life of Saul in San Marino, Huntington Library, MS 69796, fols 63v–65v; and to the lives of Adam and Moses in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 00767, fols 3r–v, 17v–20v. For annotations throughout the text, see, for instance, Cambridge, Corpus Christi Parker Library, EP.H.7, fols 2r–8r, 14r, 17r, 20r–21r, 42r, 45r–v, 47r, 70r, 71r, 83r; BL, C.11.c.16, fols 3r–52r; John Rylands Library, MS 13418, fols 1r–54v.

32 Toronto, ON, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, MS 97, fols 4v, 95r, 104v, 105v, 237r, and fol. 47r.

33 Finch, Epiphanie, sig. C2r.

34 William Lyndwood, Constitutions prouincialles (London, 1534), 78–9.

35 Watson, Nicholas, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), 822–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a surge in devotional English writing coexisting with anxiety over the vernacular, see Powell, Susan, ‘Evidence for the Licensing of Books from Arundel to Cromwell’, in Horobin, Simon and Mooney, Linne R., eds, Middle English Texts in Transition (Woodbridge, 2014), 134–58Google Scholar; McSheffrey, Shannon, ‘Heresy, Orthodoxy, and English Vernacular Religion, 1480–1525’, P&P 186 (2005), 47–80Google Scholar.

36 Powell, Susan, ‘After Arundel but before Luther: The First Half-Century of Print’, in Gillespie, Vincent and Ghosh, Kantik, eds, After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout, 2011), 523–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Butterworth, Charles C., The Literary Lineage of the King James Bible 1340–1611 (Philadelphia, PA, 1941), 53–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horrall, ‘Caxton's Biblical Translation’, 91–8; Blake, ‘Biblical Additions’, 238–47.

37 Caxton, Legenda aurea (1483), fol. 36v; ibid. (1527), fol. 2r.

38 Ibid. (1483), fol. 68v.

39 See BL, C.53.b.22.

40 See also Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible’, JBS 42 (2003), 141–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments (London, 1570), 1334Google Scholar.

42 Pierpont Morgan Library, MS ChL1788a, fol. 212r; Oxford, Trinity College Library, MS I.16.15, fol. 53r. There are some copies in which both feasts are intact, such as the 1493 copy now in Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS B3/2; the 1503/4 copy now in Cambridge, St John's College Upper Library, A.1.9; and the 1527 copy now in the Huntington Library, MS 69790.

43 Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic, 85–91.

44 New Haven, CT, Yale Center for British Art, MS BX4654.J32, fol. 84r.

45 See OED.

46 Patten, William, The Expedicion into Scotlande of the most woorthely fortunate prince Edward, Duke of Soomerset (London, 1548), sig. D7vGoogle Scholar. See also Featley, Daniel, The Romish Fisher Caught and Held In His Owne Net (London, 1624), 10Google Scholar.

47 Porter, Edmund, Christophagia (London, 1680), 18Google Scholar; Trapp, John, A Commentary or Exposition upon These Following Books of holy Scripture (London, 1660), 97Google Scholar.

48 ‘[H]istoriarum quoque non contemnendus scriptor, & Augustini uoluminum ita studiosus . . . utriusque instrumenti diuina uolumnia primus omnium in Italicam linguam summa fide ac diligentia transfudit’: Sixtus Senensis, Bibliotheca Sancta (Venice, 1566), 397. The Scottish Jesuit John Hay published a new edition of the work at Lyon in 1593, dedicating it to William Chisholm: Sixtus Senensis, Bibliotheca Sancta, ed. John Hay (Lyon, 1593), sigs 1r–2r, with the story of Jacobus at p. 251.

49 ‘Hujus laus est, quod primus omnium sacra biblia in Italicam transfuderit linguam: ut Sixtus Senensis testatur . . . Legendam illam auream . . . scriptam esse ab homine oris ferrei, cordis plumbei’: Gerardus Johannus Vossius, De Historicis Latinis (Lyon, 1627), sig.):(1r, pp. 457–8.

50 For citations based on Sixtus, see Brerewood, Edward, Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions through the chiefe parts of the world (London, 1614), 192Google Scholar; Field, Richard, Of the Church Five Bookes (Oxford, 1628), 239Google Scholar; Capel, Richard, Capel's Remains (London, 1658), 67–8Google Scholar; Pierce, Thomas, The Primitive Rule of Reformation (Oxford, 1663), 26Google Scholar. For citations drawing on Vossius, see notes provided by Fuller, Thomas, The Appeal of Iniured Innocence (London, 1659), 47–8Google Scholar; and Heylyn, Peter, Examen Historicum (London, 1659), 74Google Scholar. Heylyn also quoted the story in The History of That most famous Saynt and Souldier of Christ Iesus S. George of Cappadocia (London, 1631), 16–17, and did repeat the pun, though only in reference to the Legenda and drawn from Vives himself rather than from Vossius. Tenison, Thomas quoted the story with no source in A Discourse Concerning a Guide in Matters of Faith (London, 1683), 36–7Google Scholar.

51 Brerewood, Enquiries, 192. Several authors made the same point regarding the embarrassment of ‘learned Papists’ over the Legenda, including John Rainolds and John Gee, both converts to Protestantism: Rainolds, John, The Summe of the Conference Betwene Iohn Rainolds and Iohn Hart Touching the Head and the Faith of the Church (London, 1584), 495–6Google Scholar; Gee, John, The Foot out of the Snare (London, 1624), sig. A2r [vere A4r]Google Scholar. See also Reames, Sherry L., The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History (Madison, WI, 1985), 28–42Google Scholar.

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53 Discussed by Milton, Anthony, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), 29–31Google Scholar.

54 Heylyn, St. George of Cappadocia, 16–17.

55 Heylyn, Examen Historicum, 74.