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Caxton and the Synfulle Wretche

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2017

Mary Jeremy
Mary Jeremy*
Affiliation:
Rosary College, River Forest, Illinois
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Extract

Sometime after November 20, 1483, William Caxton published his English translation of Jacobus de Varagine's Legenda Aurea. This is the famous medieval compilation of saints' lives which Emile Mâle names among the ten books most useful to one seeking a just appreciation of the Middle Ages and which Henry Adams ranks with the Roman breviary as a guide to the stone carvings and stained glass of medieval cathedrals. Caxton's publication, augmenting by about one-third the original treatise, was his most ambitious work as translator, editor, and printer.

In preparing his Golden Legend the English printer asserts that he has used the original Latin and two translations, one French and one English. This last work is extant in nine manuscripts, more or less complete, all copies, and all representing one version. Although several critics have declared that this translation surpasses Caxton's in accuracy and beauty, some of its special peculiarities have not hitherto been considered. Who was its author? Apparently he remembered the warning of the Imitation: ‘For all man's glory, all temporal honor, and all worldly highness, to thine eternal glory compared is but as foolishness and vanity.’ His version of the Legenda is declared to be the work of ‘a synfulle wretche’ by whom it was ‘drawen out of Frensshe into Englisshe, the yere of our lorde a.M.CCCC. and. XXXVIII.’ The motive for this anonymity is revealed by the words which follow his humble self-designation: ‘whos name I beseche Jhesu Criste bi his mentis of his passioune and of alle these holis seintes afore written, that hit mai be written in the boke of everlastinge life.’

Type
Miscellany
Information
Traditio , Volume 4 , 1946 , pp. 423 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © 1946 by Cosmopolitan Science & Art Service Co., Inc. 

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References

1 Richardson, E. C., Materials for a Life of Jacopo da Varagine (Parts I–IV in one volume, New York 1935) ix–x: Voragine is ‘the bad pun of a writer who described Varagine as a very “whirlpool” (vorago) of learning. … Jacopo's name was, in the Italian of his time, da Varagine, in the Latin of his time, de Varagine, and in modern Italian, da Varazze.’ Google Scholar

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5 Harleian 630, Egerton 876, Douce 372, Lambeth 72, B.M. Add. 11,565, B.M. Add. 35398, Lansdowne 350, Trinity College (Dublin) 319. For a description of the Trinity MS see Gerould, G., Saints' Legends (Boston 1916) 195–196. For the others, see Butler, P., Legenda Aurea, Légende Dorée, Golden Legend (Baltimore 1899) 50–70, 149–154. ‘The Ashburnham MS’ is now B.M. Add. 35298. None of these MSS have been edited. Several others, containing very small portions of the Legend need not be enumerated here. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations in the present study are from Harleian 4775, hereafter to be designated as H. Since the scribe's pagination is inaccurate, folio numbers will be given according to the Library of Congress pagination stamped on the lower left-hand corners of leaves in M.L.A. rotograph 343.Google Scholar

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