VERGILIUS MARO, Publius (Virgil).

£60,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The.xiii. bukes of Eneados of the famose poete Virgill translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir, First edition of the first complete translation of the entire Aeneid into any form of English, rendered in Middle Scots, which at the period functioned as a fully developed literary language closely related to (and intelligible to readers of) contemporary English. Gavin Douglas (c. 1474-1522), Bishop of Dunkeld and a leading figure of the Scottish Renaissance, completed his verse translation in 1513. Douglas translated directly from the Latin and prefaced each book with a substantial original prologue. His work is notable not only for its fidelity and ambition but also for its literary self-consciousness: Douglas explicitly frames the project as a vernacular rival to classical epic and to continental humanist translations. "In the early 1500s no major classical work had been translated into English, and Douglas's Eneados was a pioneering work... Douglas shared the values of the humanists: an antipathy to scholasticism, respect for classical authors, and a zeal for education. He wished to communicate to his countrymen a knowledge of the Aeneid, and also to enrich his native 'Scottis' tongue with something of the 'fouth', or copiousness, of Latin" (ODNB).Provenance: 17th-century ink monogram "J.M.L." to title-page and verso of final leaf - manuscript footnote in a relatively early hand on M1v, noting the omission of some lines from Virgil's original - John Thomson of Char

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