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1 Gavin Douglas's Humanist Identity1 Nicola 1 Gavin Douglas’s Humanist Identity1 Nicola Royan University of Nottingham Finished in 1513, the Eneados – the first complete translation of the Aeneid into any variety of English – is often seen to demonstrate Gavin Douglas’s humanism. The Eneados does indeed present a new engagement with Virgil’s text: in its completeness, its overt and often precise dependence on scholarship new and old, and in its direct discussion of the problems of translation, of representing a text accurately rather than a character fairly.2 Yet to identify Douglas as a humanist without any qualification is problematic. Firstly, even in his prologues, Douglas makes reference to other aspects of his identity: his rank and (implicitly) his kin, in the dedications to Henry Sinclair; his status as a senior churchman; and his Scottishness (in contrast to Erasmian internationalism).3 The first two, because of their contiguity with question of authority, political and religious, but also to some degree, textual, have a greater bearing on the discussion that follows; his patriotism contributes obliquely, since his family status is necessarily dependent on his Scottishness. Secondly, since what it is to be a humanist at the beginning of the sixteenth century is often defined more by examples than by absolute criteria, teasing out the elements of Douglas’s practice, in conjunction with his other identities, allows a greater subtlety in our framing of intellectual culture in Scotland in the early sixteenth century. It would be foolish to pretend that Douglas’s humanism has not been addressed before: there are numerous critical accounts that consider it. In particular, Priscilla Bawcutt, in Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study, discusses Douglas’s achievements, his use of a specific print version of the text, his engagement with recent humanist commentaries, and the novelty of his undertaking, to translate the 2 Aeneid, rather than to rewrite or rework its material.4 Notwithstanding John Skelton’s exercises in prose translation, such a description seems out of line with many of Douglas’s better-known contemporaries:5 Erasmus, Thomas More and others wrote in Latin in preference to their vernaculars and were anxious about enabling the less learned to read their material.6 By the end of the Eneados, in contrast, Douglas imagines an audience of schoolmasters, benefiting from a crib in Older Scots.7 Douglas’s championing of the vernacular to represent classical texts appears prescient, yet he is also concerned to control that representation. This article will consider the methods of control Douglas employs and ask whether his humanism is modulated by other concerns. Douglas received his formal education at the University of St Andrews; it seems probable that he also spent some time in Paris, whether or not he attended university classes there.8 Humanist interests are evident in Scotland among Douglas’s father’s generation: the libraries of William Elphinstone and Archibald Whitelaw include classical books, and Whitelaw was able to produce classical oratory in Latin as well.9 Apart from John Damian the alchemist, however, James IV did not employ humanists in the manner of Louis XII or Henry VII; humanist thinking, by and large, was brought back to Scotland by returning students, such as Hector Boece and Douglas himself. A sense of a local audience, therefore, may also have influenced Douglas’s translation: the distribution of the manuscript witnesses suggests that he was right to foresee one.10 Moreover, time spent in France not only enabled access to Latin humanist culture and the printed edition of the Aeneid that Douglas would use for his translation, but also, potentially, another vernacular model. Octavien de Saint- Gelais’s French translation of the Aeneid was printed in Paris in 1509, although composed earlier; Saint-Gelais had previously written Le Séjour d’honneur.11 There 3 are parallels therefore between Saint-Gelais, also a nobleman and a churchman, and Douglas, although evidence of direct influence is scarce. Simply in terms of rank and role, there may be questions to pursue. The first is the ways in which the Aeneid might be particularly attractive to noblemen. In The Palice of Honoure, Douglas is concerned, amongst many other topics, with the use of exempla and models of honour, not simply military. The Douglas kin had also previously commissioned work to demonstrate their honourable origins, notably The Buke of the Howlat. The Aeneid, in its exploration of Aeneas’s movement from fugitive to ruler, and in its predictions of an imperial future, offers the raw material for advice to princes, a particular strength of Older Scots writing. To explore that possibility fully, however is beyond the scope of this article.12 The second qualification, however, has more direct bearing on what follows. As a priest and dean of St Giles, Douglas was also concerned with the transmission of theology to his flock. Although evidence is slight, there is no reason to doubt his piety, and that he would also have taken the transmission of true doctrine equally seriously.13 Making the core theological text available to the less learned, that is translating the Bible into a variety of English, remained hugely contentious, so religious truths were mediated and managed by selective interpretation and quotation; furthermore, even amongst the learned, biblical reading was subject to innumerable commentaries. Given, then, that in his day job, Douglas was concerned with maintaining orthodoxy and with supporting religious truths, it would not be surprising if similar concerns inflected his presentation of an authoritative classical text, also open to misreading. As we shall see, Douglas seeks to direct and control reading in his presentation of the Eneados; it is not inconceivable that his humanist interest in 4 the text itself is constrained by other practices to maintain truthful and correct understanding. The point where Douglas articulates most clearly his position as translator and thus as humanist interpreter is the Prologue to Book 1, effectively the prologue to the whole book. This too has been the subject of much discussion and anthologisation: recently, it has been seen as a statement of Scottish identity, particularly based around language, since Douglas differentiates between ‘sudron’ and ‘our awyn langage’.14 There is an unspoken tension perhaps between Scots and Latin, between first and second languages, between the local and the international, and a further discrimination between Douglas and his readers, and Virgil himself, for whom Latin was native. In the use of ‘oure’, Douglas’s presentation of Scots imagines a Scottish audience, a domestication of high European culture. This is one of several linguistic issues Douglas raises in the prologue. Firstly, there is the question of poetic talent: Quha may thy versis follow in all degre In bewtie, sentence and in grauitie? Nane is, nor was, ne ȝit salbe, trow I, Had, haß or sal haue sic craft in poetry.15 Such idolisation of Virgil’s style might be seen as humanist, for although the poet’s reputation had remained constant throughout the Middle Ages, the engagement with style generally is often identified as humanist (witness Erasmus’s railing against the Ciceronianus).16 Douglas’s specificity contrasts with the more general attitude he ascribes to his patron, Henry Sinclair, who ‘prayt [Douglas] translait Virgil or Homeir’.17 While it is possible that either Sinclair or Douglas might have seen Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translation of the Iliad, printed in 1474, or even Aldus Manutius’ editio princeps of 1488, Homer would have been a less likely and 5 certainly less accessible choice for a poetic translation.18 Douglas’s emphatic engagement with Virgil’s style seems to confirm this: he clearly read a great deal of classical Latin verse, including Virgil’s Georgics, and was aware of the particular features of Virgil’s style and attitudes.19 Although Douglas’s praise of Virgil evokes the modesty topos familiar from Dunbar, amongst others, he identifies specific issues that make task in representing Virgil difficult. Leaving aside his claims to lack of talent, these difficulties are concerned with the representation of Virgil’s poetics in a vernacular language, Older Scots. In particular Douglas draws attention to issues of lexis, alongside the need to translate sentence, and the complexities of poetic meaning. Lexis is the most basic, at face value simply having words to construe the text. Douglas initially presents his language as being inferior to Latin: a “lewit barbour tong” but later modifies this to suggest it is only such because of his own failing (“Nocht for our tong is in the selwyn skant/ Bot for that I the fowth langage want”).20 Douglas’s straightforward solution is to borrow, from Latin, French or English, using the classical model of Latin adopting Greek terms: although presented as a humanist mimicking of classical practice, such techniques are commonplace. Any reader of the Eneados diligently looking up words in the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue will nevertheless be struck by the number of definitions which reference only the Eneados: it appears that Douglas did indeed look far and wide for his terminology, especially in seafaring, and in battle.21 Whether a failure of the language or the poet, Douglas locates the problem in precise equivalence, in finding the best word to express the “cullour”.22 Even at the straightforward level of lexis, therefore, Douglas is striving for nuance and effect. He provides “arbor” and “lignum” among other examples in the Prologue, and in the Trinity College manuscript, he provides learned notes to explain further his other 6 difficulties.23 Such precision points forward to Douglas’s larger challenge, his striving after sentence, larger meaning constructed in part from nuance. In the discussion of this issue in the Prologue, Douglas notes that Lorenzo Valla struggled for twelve years to understand the Aeneid, so neither Douglas nor his reader (“my wys frend”) need reproach themselves for their own difficulties.24 One of the models of understanding Douglas identifies therefore is humanist, but this is not the only one.
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