Aeneid 4 in BL Add. MS 60283: A New Assessment and Text

Abstract

On 5 July 1978, a collection of Renaissance manuscripts came up for sale at Christie’s in London. They had been discovered less than a year before, tucked away ‘in the back of an old drawer’ at Castle Ashby.1 Most of the manuscript collection consisted of works by Cosmo Manuche, but a previously unknown translation of Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid was also found in the back of that drawer.2 The scholar responsible for the discovery, William P. Williams, hailed the new translation as ‘an important addition to the corpus of renaissance English poetry’.3 In spite of Williams’ excitement, however, interest in the new Book 4 manuscript has been slow to follow suit. In the 1980s, it enjoyed a brief moment of fame, when it became the subject of contention as to whether or not it was the work of Sir John Harington. But this debate was effectively concluded in 1989, when Simon Cauchi persuasively argued that it was not by Elizabeth’s ‘witty godson’.4 Since that time, interest in the anonymous Book 4 seems to have disappeared