SELIM06.pdf ____________________________________________________________________ 178 MORRALL, E. J. ed. 1996: Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius (Pius II): The Goodli History of the Ladye Lucres. Oxford: EETS - OUP. xlii + 73 pp. Hardback. This text has been scrupulously edited, criticised and annotated, in a study carried out by Professor Morrall that unites conscientious scholarly analysis of the work, its sources, author, period and general characteristics with accessible commentary to illustrate its richness and literary worth. However, this volume is the consequence of another editing process, that which Professor Morrall intended to carry out on “the earliest German version of this product of early Italian humanism” (p. v). Consequently, the edition of this English version highly benefits from the wide-ranging literary scope and proficiency of this scholar. Nearly half of the volume’s contents is devoted to the critical apparatus that surrounds the main text, a sixteenth century translation into English of the Historia duobus amantibus (1444?). The author was Silvius Piccolomini, who would become Pope Pius II, but was a layman at the time. The Goodli History is an anonymous translation, published c. 1553, of the Historia. The story tells the amours between Lucres, a noble lady of Sienna married to Menelaus, and Eurialus, a visitor in the city accompanying the Emperor Sigismund. A bawd is employed to convey messages until Pandalus, a cousin of Menelaus’s, eases the way for Eurialus after his promise of a noble title in the Emperor’s court. Eurialus must eventually leave Sienna with the Emperor, and although he returns briefly, the separation literally kills Lucres, while he lives mournfully ever after. Morrall’s edited volume consists of a brief Preface, a List of Contents, a list of Sigla and Abbreviations, an Introduction, a Select Bibliography, the Goodli History text, Notes on the text, a Glossary, an Index of Proper Names, and a list of Concordance of the English and Latin editions. Interspersed in the text are three plates, whose origin is specified in the List of Contents. Already in the Preface Professor Morrall states the amount of Latin origi- nals and vernacular versions he encountered in the process of edition, a knowledge which enables him to fundament his critical preference for one ____________________________________________________________________ 179 particular version, that by John Day (1553?), as he explains later. He also ad- vances how in Silvius’s work the convention of the medieval romance is transformed in very enriching ways, since the original tale’s plain structure does not make for a religious dimension, which an ecclesiastic of the stature of Pope Pius II would be inclined to pursue, while realism is made prominent in opposition to sentiment. The list of Sigla is a comprehensible listing of the early printed editions of The Goodli History, which Morrall nominates a, b and c, for those editions of John Day (1553?), John Kynge (1560) and William Copland (1567), and the most frequently cited Latin versions of the Historia duobus amantibus, four in all. In the Introduction these a, b and c printed versions of The Goodli History, and the four Latin versions of the Historia Duobus Amantibus are contextualised and commented on. The Introduction offers a fine piece of critical research, and comprises five subsections: 1. The Author, 2. The Printed Editions and the Latin Source, 3. The Text, the Characters and their Prototypes, 4. The Language and Vocabulary of the Translation, and 5. Editing the Text. Thus Morrall scrutinises every aspect of the text and its origins, its meaning and literary worth. In a review of Piccolomi’s life Morrall offers ample information on this figure that seems to have played a paramount role both on the political and religious spheres at a time when an ecclesiastic schism had to be sealed up and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks was rather recent. In 1442 he had been appointed poet laureate in Frankfurt by the future Emperor Frederick III; he also moved to Vienna to be a secretary in the imperial chancery. He was likewise a committed scholar, whose knowledge of the Latin classics and the previous Italian generation was to provide him with the germ of this story of adulterous love between Lucres and Eurialus. Other works of Pic colomini’s were already known in England, mostly his De Miseriis, which Alexander Barclay adapted in one of his Eclogues (1514?). At about the same time, a first translation of the Historia was published, although only a fragment exists. In subsection number 2, The Printed Editions and the Latin Source Mor- rall explains the details (visible signatures, erasing, staining, binding, leaf size, number of lines per page, occurrence and appearance of ornamented initials, ____________________________________________________________________ 180 type colour, etc.) of the three earliest complete translations that exist of the Historia (Day’s, Kynge’s and Copland’s, as mentioned), and are compared in the light of these details. The wording is accessible even to the neophyte, a fact that should encourage students not very competent in Early English texts to approach this particular one. This accessibility of phraseology and presentation is in my view one of the constants throughout the volume, and one of its principal advantages. Morrall’s edition process proves marked by thoroughness and logic: “To demonstrate error and thus enable the editor to choose the best of the three English versions as a base for an edition it is necessary to investigate the text used as a source for the transla tion. This proved to be a Latin version in a printed edition” (p. xv). He argues that his choice of the text for his edition was conditioned by their respective proximity to the Latin original source for the translation, even though, as he maintains, all three have broadly the same text, and repeat approximately the same errors. Most of these had already been noted by H. H. Gibbs, who had produced a diplomatic reprint of William Copland’s translation in 1873. Morrall’s sifting process has undoubtedly been a patient and devoted one. He collated forty printed Latin editions, and the conclusion of this process points to a 1488 edition by Gerard Leeu of Antwerp, which shows a parallelism between its deviations from the original and the speech corruptions in the English translation. In addition to this, John Day, the first printer of this translation, also had connections with Antwerp, on both the religious and professional levels. Subsection number three centres on the text and its characters and is by far the amplest in the Introduction, which leads one to think of Morrall as a scholar concerned as much, if not more, with strictly literary concerns (cross- references, adaptations, intertextuality) as with editorial ones. Because of its nature, this third section reads easily and throws interesting data on the pro - tagonists of the tale and the tale itself. Morrall reflects on the story as it appears in the English translation, as opposed to its longer Latin original. In it the tale is preceded by letters to Mariano Sozzini and Caspar Schlick, which endow the tale with a realism heightened by an authorial indication that Eurialus is an alias for Schlick himself. Sozzini was Piccolomini’s friend and former teacher at the University ____________________________________________________________________ 181 of Sienna; Schlick was the Imperial Chancellor. However, these letters could serve precisely to make for a realism which a fictitious story lacked. In any case, since they are absent from the English translation, their documentary nature in this roman à clef is equally lost. By eliminating also a passage on the illicit ways by which men obtain their titles, Morrall considers the translator is obscuring the author’s critical intention in writing this story, which is none other than warning the young of the perils of love’s frivolities. The characters, Morrall discusses, may have been reflections of real life personalities. The moral purpose is built up in Morrall’s view by Piccolo - mini’s choice of names for his protagonists, Eurialus being the best example for his indebtedness to one of Virgil’s Trojan warriors, passionate and de- voted, and to a gladiator created by Juvenal who fathers an illegitima te child. Morrall maintains that Piccolomini only felt some sympathy for his male character towards the end of the story, which has Eurialus withering away after news of Lucres’s death of sadness has reached him. The author’s opin - ion of the heroine is more positive, as seen already in her name. Unlike the legendary Roman Lucretia, she does not commit suicide, but the theme of the broken heart runs parallel with multiple mentions to classical and legendary cases of women who in Lady Lucres’s position took t heir own lives, such as Medea, Ariadne and Dido. Piccolomini may have been partaking here of a debate held by the church and the humanists over the topic of suicide, one of the participants being Coluccio Salutati with his Declaratio Lucretiae (c. 1367), which evidently provided Piccolomini with a name for the lady. In letting Lucres die of dejec- tion, he avoids making her an adulteress and a murderer. The reading public were ready to receive Lucres with sympathy, Morrall maintains, as they in - deed did, to judge from the editions that ensued the first, since she had been created also a cultured and eloquent humanist. Morrall goes on to examine the characters of Pandalus and Eurialus, who have each a correspondent in Boccaccio’s Filostrato, although of a different nature. He maintains the indebtedness of Piccolomini’s work to that of Boc- caccio’s, in spite of the differences, the most important one being the reversal of roles in the pairs. It is Criseida that abandons Troilus, which she does for a new lover. Troilus’s nobility and faithfulness are opposed to Eurialus’s cyni- cism and fickleness, but also Criseida outdoes Eurialus in cruelty. Structural ____________________________________________________________________ 182 and lexical proximity are proof Morrall uses to stress the relationship between both works, for “the humanist parallels reinforce the thesis that the Historia is indeed a roman á clef and based upon a genuine amorous adventure while being heavily indebted to literary models” (p. xxxiii). In the fourth section, dealing with the language and vocabulary of the translation, Morrall gives ample evidence of his knowledge of literary fig ures, or rhetorical figures of speech, which come very helpfully accompanied by an explanation of their meaning and of course by examples. These figures, he says, constitute a sign of both the translator’s skills in adjusting these fig - ures from the Latin source and his ear for rhythm and musical effect. Overall Morrall considers the translation fluent and idiomatic, and that in spite of the occasional mistranslation. The reader perhaps misses in this introductory subsection a general out- line of the characteristics of the English language at this particular time when the translation was carried out, more so once Morrall states that the abundant rhetorical figures are “clear signs of a developing literary language” (p. xxxiii). In this period English was the object of serious attempts at cultivation and regularisation, when a conscious effort was being made to reproduce the standard of London and the court. This brought English to a state recog- nisable for the modern reader, mostly owing to the effects of the Great Vowel Shift, on the pronunciation level, and to the eventual consequences of the printing press, on the spelling level. The spirit of the age, however, had spread to its language, distinguished by a plasticity people used to mould and categorise words at their will. New words, variation in pronunciation and spelling still prevailed, but would be settled with Modern English. Again, I am bearing in mind the beginner in Early English, who would appreciate to have these general notions at hand prior to reading the text. Even if these constitute basic knowledge of the development of the English language, it would represent no great effort to very cursorily point them out. Finally, a fifth subsection deals with the technical aspects of the text edi- tion. The text itself is presented within a clarifying framework, the only critical additions being line numbers and a notation system (of the type [A.i], [A.ii] … up to [H.iii]) to specify the gatherings of the original. The first are obviously used to identify lines that the later Notes interpret in the section following the text. The latter show which gathering of the Latin original ____________________________________________________________________ 183 commences with the line they are annexed to. Both aids occur to the left of the main text in the even pages and to the right in the odd ones, following a system that does not hinder the reading of the text. A further convention, a vertical line, is used to mark the end of a page. All these points are clearly expounded by the author in the fifth and final section of the introductory es - say (pp. xxxvii-xxxix), together with the minor alterations (misprints and little errors) he may have decided to emend in the edition. Morrall’s own words explain that “the principal intention in editing this text has been to reproduce as closely as possible the book as originally printed by John Day (a)” (p. xxxvii). The Select Bibliography comes preceded by the notice that certain entries must be looked for in the list of Abbreviations and the notes to the Introduc- tion and the text. While acknowledging the appropriateness of having each reference and footnote specified where it is most necessary, I defend the use of comprehensive bibliographies, which do not demand too great an effort and provide the work with a sound bibliographical back-up that both the spe- cialised scholar and the beginner like to find in one separate section. A difference is made between the use of footnotes and endnotes. The first are used to refer to variants between the early printed editions of The Goodli History. No numerical reference appears in the body of the text to warn the reader of a footnote specification: this on the one hand allows for a fluent reading of the text, but on the other forces the reader to check the footnotes for an eventual explanation of specific points where he may need help. Endnotes broadly serve to compare the translated version with the Latin originals, and to provide commentaries on the author’s classical or legendary allusions. They are preceded by Morall’s explanation of his methodological procedure. In their format they result rather straightforward: location is sig - nalled by the page and line numbers separated by a stroke, and followed by the word(s) or sentence(s), in bold type, object of the explanation. Otherwise, like the footnotes, they are not announced by a numerical superscript in the main text, this disadvantage being stressed here by the fact that these notes appear all at the end of the text, which forces the reader to continually move backward and forward in search of the translation’s affinities with the Latin source or other type of extra information. ____________________________________________________________________ 184 Overall, this is an accomplished edition of a translation into English of a Latin original, with as much attention paid to the text itself as to the careful method followed in the critical apparatus. Sections are clearly delineated and the conventions adopted explained, cross references to other sections made only when they may be necessary or explanatory. It is, I believe, a conscien- tious work of textual edition aided by accessible elucidation, virtues both of which turn this edition into an appealing object of study for scholars and stu- dents alike. On the whole, a volume worth reading both for the high scholarly criteria and the delightful tale of Eurialus and Lucres of Sienna. Eva M. Pérez Rodríguez University of Oviedo * † *