Richard J. Moll, Ed.: William Caxton: The Book of Ovyde Named Methamorphose

RICHARD J. MOLL, ED. William Caxton: The Book of Ovyde Named Methamorphose. Studies and Texts 182. British Writers of Middle Ages and Early Modern Period 4. Toronto, Canada: PIMS and Bodleian Library, 2013. 652 pp. It was William Caxton who first produced an English translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, no doubt one of most influential classical texts in English literary world. Caxton--a merchant, diplomat, and publisher-printer--was also a prolific translator. He translated and published twenty-one works in English, mainly from French but also from Latin and Dutch. According to Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's successor, Caxton was a diligent translator who fynysshed translating Lives of Fathers from French into English at laste daye ofhys lyff, a project de Worde completed by publishing and printing his master's translation (7). Caxton's translation of The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose, however, does not exist as a printed edition. Only part of it, Books 10 to 15, was known to have survived for almost five hundred years, until 1966, when a manuscript containing Books 1 to 9 of his translation was rediscovered. The English literary world then had to wait almost another half a century before Richard J. Moll's eagerly awaited edition appeared in 2013. Moll's introduction opens an account of reunion of two volumes of single manuscript. Caxton's translation of Books 10 to 15, Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library 2124, has been known to be in Pepys library since 1688, while copy that contains Books 1 to 9 had been long lost as the very rubbish of Thomas Phillipps collection (2). The rediscovered Phillipps manuscript was put up for an auction in London in 1966 and initially sold to an American collector. Public appeals in United Kingdom managed to raise 22 percent of necessary matching funds needed to keep it in Britain, and Phillipps manuscript was about to be separated from other half of manuscript by Atlantic Ocean. Then George Braziller came up an idea to publish and sell facsimiles of manuscript as a way to raise funds. The first half of manuscript is now Cambridge, Magdalene College, Old Library F.4.32, and it sits together in a display case Pepys manuscript (2). Moll's edition is first critical edition of Caxton's entire translation. The text of single extant manuscript is presented a minimum of editorial interventions (48). Hence cases of Caxton's mistranslation, such as Daedalion to be transformed into an ostrich rather than a goshawk, are allowed to stand as they are (note to 11.732). The text, which was produced with a wide range of readers in mind ( 2), has modern capitalization and punctuation and hence is easy to read, particularly aid of an extensive glossary (577-609), a useful index of proper names, which gives both Middle English and modern forms (610-652), and an introduction to grammatical features of Caxton's language (36-41). The extensive introduction also invites further scholarly investigation into hitherto understudied areas. For example, Moll untangles some of complicated textual tradition of Ovid's works before Caxton. Caxton used French Ovide moralise in prose as text of his translation. This prose Ovide moralise was itself an adaptation of French verse Ovide moralise. The verse version contained multiple layers of interpretation and explanation of Ovid's original poem, but anonymous author of prose version reproduced only historical and moral interpretations of its verse source and removed Christian allegorizations (21). Three manuscripts of French prose version survive, although none of them was used by Caxton as abase text for his translation (22). The analysis of textual errors suggests that Caxton's text and London manuscript both derived from a now-lost common (a), while manuscripts now in Paris and Saint Petersburg derived from a different copy (b). …

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