Philemon Holland's Livy: Peritexts and Contexts

Abstract

Philemon Holland’s Livy of 1600 was the first in a series of unabridged translations of canonical Latin works that made him, in Thomas Fuller’s famous phrase, ‘the translator general in his age’. It is slightly surprising how little critical attention his work has received, considering his voluminous output and the frequency with which he is cited as bringing Latin and Greek texts to a wider audience. This paper will explore the significance of Holland’s first published translation, Livy’s Roman History. What did it mean to translate Livy’s History of Rome at this time? Livy was a complex writer who evoked a multi-faceted response in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a response I examine through the peritexts and contexts of the translation. By peritexts, I mean dedicatory epistles, the index of speeches, the table of consuls, and Holland’s presentations of the chronology and the topography of Rome. By contexts, I mean both other works published in England at around the same time, and the political circumstances in late Elizabethan England. Through these we can see that Holland’s translation was part of a nexus of controversies over the interpretation of Livy. Livy’s History of Rome, generally known as Ab Urbe Condita, had originally consisted of 142 Books. Of these, it seems only the first and third ‘decades’ were known by the early second millennium. As with so much else in the Renaissance, the revival began with Petrarch, whose enthusiasm for Livy drove him to hunt for new manuscripts. He was able to take a copy of the third decade from a manuscript at Chartres Cathedral; he also sought out and compared two versions of the first decade from the most divergent traditions.1 Livy was popular in the Italian city republics, as he depicted the rise of the most successful city