Isn't archaic language a stamp of authenticity whose value is greater than
the reader's convenience? Similarly Chaucer's corpus is "reformed" by his
editors and "corrections" are made as a matter of fidelity to source texts,
not Tudor English. Similarly Piers Plowman is slightly modernized for
print, but the antiquity of the language is emphasized, while a Tudor
manuscript copy makes a complete modernization. At the same time, every
16th-century editoral project I've read about also entailed deliberate
revisions, omissions, and/or interpolations. -Dan Knauss
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 9:56 PM
> Subject: Re: a list of archaisms from Batman (c. 1582)
>
>
> David's long message, which I've left out of this response,
> should prompt some interesting discussion not only of
> archaisms in language but of the sense of history and its
> uneven, surprising manifestations during the Elizabethan years.
>
> David doesn't mention that Bat(e)man found his archaisms not
> in Bartholome proper, but in John Trevisa's English
> translation. With resources ready to hand, I know only that
> Trevisa's English comes from the end of the 14th century.
> Has any modern work been done on the MSS. and the dialect(s)
> to be found therein?
>
> I find it curious that Batman's book is advertised as "newly
> corrected" but as editor, he didn't modernize the language:
> he seems to have valued its pre-Reformation "period" flavor.
> And perhaps this is doubly curious since, in several
> substantial and strange chapters that he added to B.
> Anglicus' medieval encyclopedia, he "enlarged and amended"
> its natural philosophical lore with his own translations of
> long passages from H. C. Agrippa's "De Occulta Philosophia"
> -- giving proper credit to his neoteric source and apparently
> seeing no discontinuity in the juxtapositions. (Agrippa
> himself, as D P Walker showed a long time ago, was borrowing
> whole cloth from Ficino -- without acknowledgement if I
> remember rightly.)
>
> It's been years since I looked at any but a few photocopied
> pages from "Batman vppon Bartholome," and I commend David and
> any others who are interested in the book as a whole. I have
> no doubt that it was in Spenser's library. I don't recall
> with confidence to whom the book was dedicated: George Carey,
> Lord Hunsdon, husband of Elizabeth Spencer?
>
> Yours, Jon Quitslund
>
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