Lucius, thou art translated: Adlington's Apuleius

Abstract

ABSTRACTWilliam Adlington's translation of Apuleius’Golden Ass (1566) marks a shift away from an older practice of ‘reading for the allegory’ to a more direct engagement with the ‘pleasure’ of a literary text. Adlington draws upon early humanist scholarship, but negotiates its magical and Neoplatonic interests with post‐Reformation caution; unlike his contemporary Arthur Golding, he also omits Christianizing allegories such as those in an early French translation by Guillaume Michel (1518). His prefatory comments, as well as the translation itself, are clearly indebted to Beroaldus’ Latin commentary (1500), the Spanish translation of Diego López de Cortegana (c. 1513) and the French translation by Jean Louveau (1553). These debts are established through a comparison of passages at the end of the article. Adlington displays an Erasmian concern with a pedagogic programme founded on the combination of pleasure with ethical purpose, and celebrating linguistic and stylistic copia. This is in keeping with a new style of reading that emerges in the later sixteenth century, a style responsive to the growing attractions of a secular literary space. Nothing is known about Adlington and his political or religious affiliations, but his dedication of the translation to Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, from University College, Oxford, on 18 September 1566, is of interest in the context of the Queen's visit (with Sussex) to Oxford earlier that month.