Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2007 by Brenda M. Hosington

A work of this nature, however inclusive, cannot be exhaustive and, however erudite, completely error-free. In the chapter on the learned ladies of sixteenth-century England, for example, we find both omissions and inaccuracies. Margaret Beaufort's translation of the Speculum aureum by Jacob de Gruitroede (and not Denys the Carthusian) rates a mention but not her rendering of book 4 of Thomas a Kempis's Imitatio Christi; nor is it made clear that both were made from French translations, not the Latin originals. Queen Elizabeth's translations from the classics are mentioned, but not her girlhood Latin renderings of an Ochino sermon and Katherine Parr's Prayers or meditacions. More serious are the omission of her own Latin prayers and the attribution of the Latin poem "Genus infoelix vitae" to her. In fact, she composed the English version but it was translated into Latin by a German visitor for his continental readers. Finally, the "M. C." of the dedicatory epistle to Anne Bacon's translation of John Jewel's Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae is not Mildred Cecil as tentatively suggested but M[atthew] C[antuarensis], or Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was responsible for printing the work.

Yet Women Latin Poets is an eloquent and cogent testimony to Stevenson's scholarship, and constitutes an essential milestone on the road to understanding the place of women writers in premodern society. In particular, it challenges all we ever thought we knew about women and Latin in the period under discussion and offers exciting opportunities for further scholarship.

BRENDA M. HOSINGTON

Universite de Montreal/University of Warwick