Mea Mediocritas: Mary Sidney, Modesty, and the History of the Book

Abstract

If early twentieth-century scholarship tended to perceive Mary Sidney’s religious translation as an appropriately unassuming activity for a woman writer, this is at least partly due to the resounding success of her modesty rhetoric. Attention to early modern literary tastes, however, alerts us instead to the ambitiousness of her undertaking. In his Defense of Poesie, Philip Sidney identified the psalms as ‘the highest matter in the noblest form,’ and sometime after 1578 had embarked on a translation of the Old Testament material into English metrical verse.2 At the time of his death in 1586 he had completed 43 of 150 poems. Mary Sidney continued this project after Philip’s death and throughout the 1590s, translating another 107 psalms and incorporating and revising her brother’s selections.3 The ‘Sidneian Psalms,’ as John Donne called them, circulated widely in manuscript during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and survive in eighteen different manuscript copies.4 Mary Sidney’s prefatory poems, however, survive together in only one extant copy, known as the Tixall manuscript. The Tixall manuscript is an elaborate presentation copy, transcribed by John Davies of Hereford in an elegant secretary hand with gold flourishes.KeywordsCollect WorkLiterary WorkLiterary HistoryEarly Modern PeriodWoman WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.