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More's Attic Nights: Sir Thomas Move's Use of Aulus Gellius' ‘Nodes Atticae’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

R. J. Schoeck
R. J. Schoeck*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

That More read and referred to Aulus Gellius has apparently escaped the attention of such More scholars as R. W. Chambers and J. H. Lupton, though there are at least two allusions to or citations of the Noctes Atticae in More's Correspondence; and at least once in his History of Richard HI (though in the Latin only) and more than once in his Debellation of Salem and Bizance More gives evidence of his familiarity with the Noctes Atticae.

Although Aulus Gellius was apparently not translated during More's lifetime, and indeed not until quite late in the story of English translations from the classics, there are numerous Latin editions after the editio princeps of 1469—and none can question the accessibility of such a Latin work to the humanists of More's day.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Summer 1960 , pp. 127 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1960

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References

1 Chambers, R. W., Thomas More (1935) and Lupton, J. H., ed., Utopia (Oxford, 1895)Google Scholar, from which a later quotation is made.

2 Rogers, Elizabeth F., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton University Press, 1947), p . 304 Google Scholar (a sententia, in a letter from the University of Oxford, 1524), and p. 310 (a direct allusion, in a letter to Cranevelt, also 1524).

3 Rome (Hain 7517)—see Hain 7517-7527. In 1532, Pelargus writes Erasmus on Luscinius’ edition of Gellius which appeared at Strasbourg in 1531 (P. S. Allen et al., edd., Opvs Epistolarvm … (Oxford, 1906 ff.), x, 49—hereafter cited as Allen.

4 Historia Richardi Regis Angliae Eius Nominis Tertii. . . (1565)—I quote from this edition through the kindness of Prof. Richard S. Sylvester, who called this passage to my attention. Prof. Sylvester is editing More's Richard III for the Yale Edition of St. Thomas More. Italics are mine.

5 A. Gellii, Noctium Atticarum, XVI, xvi—I quote from the readily accessible Loeb edition, and throughout refer to this as Noctes Atticae. Italics are mine.

6 See Rogers, Correspondence, p. 33 (letter to Dorp, 1515). One must note Augustine's frequent references to Varro.

7 I quote from the text of the English Workes of 1557, sig. T viiir.

8 Book XI, xi.

9 For the 1535 judgment: Allen, xi, 178; for a discussion based on the Nodes Atticae, x, 48,49; see also VIII, 186,32 ff. (on Seneca); vn, 71 ; IX , 129 ff.;xv, 20, 8.

10 Gellius was among the fifty authors whom Montaigne knew well: P. Villey, Les Sources et I'euolution des essais de Montaigne (G. Highet, Classical Tradition [1957], p. 188)—for Gellius’ lasting influence see further R. R. Bolgar, Classical Heritage (1954). PP. 42, 263, 276, 423.