Overview

Plutarch was one of the most popular classical authors in Renaissance England. These volumes present nine Tudor and Stuart translations from his Essays and Lives with a General Introduction locating these works in the context of Plutarch's wider influence in early modern England. They offer selections from two of the classics of English Renaissance translation, North's Lives (1579) and Holland's Morals (1603): the essays 'On Reading the Poets' and 'Talkativeness' and the Lives of Demosthenes and Cicero and Caesar. They also include editions of a number of less well-known but equally significant translations of individual Essays and Lives, one available in manuscript alone until now and several not reprinted since the sixteenth century: Thomas Wyatt's The Quiet of Mind (1528), Thomas Elyot's The Education or Bringing up of Children (1528-30), Thomas Blundeville's The Learned Prince (1561), and Henry Parker, Lord Morley's The Story of Paullus Aemilius (1542-46/7). Detailed annotations trace how translators drew on, and departed from, Greek, Latin, and French editions of Plutarch while introductions to each of the works examine their impact on English Renaissance literature and culture. By presenting a wide range of translations from the Essaysand Lives, the volumes bring to light the variety of translation practices and the different social, political, cultural contexts in which Plutarch was read and translated in Tudor and Stuart England.

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9781781887554

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Reviews

Schurink's edition provides an accessible and extremely useful selection of some of the 'most popular and influential' English Renaissance translations of texts by Plutarch ... The really significant contribution to scholarship is Schurink's General Introduction. Here we see his command of the subject, and can trace the logic and the evidence that results in the inescapable conclusion that we really should take Plutarch more seriously ... There is much about these two volumes that makes them important material for anyone seeking to understand English literature in the sixteenth and, indeed, the seventeenth centuries. Freyja Cox Jensen, Translation and Literature, 30 (2021), 384-90

""Schurink's edition provides an accessible and extremely useful selection of some of the 'most popular and influential' English Renaissance translations of texts by Plutarch ... The really significant contribution to scholarship is Schurink's General Introduction. Here we see his command of the subject, and can trace the logic and the evidence that results in the inescapable conclusion that we really should take Plutarch more seriously ... There is much about these two volumes that makes them important material for anyone seeking to understand English literature in the sixteenth and, indeed, the seventeenth centuries."" Freyja Cox Jensen, Translation and Literature, 30 (2021), 384-90

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