Translatio Lupae: Du Bellay's Roman Whore Goes North

Abstract

In 1609 Gervase Markham, England's leading authority on horses, Sir John Harington's cousin, and not a truly bad poet, invited readers ofThe Famous Whoreto give the prostitute “a kind welcome out of Italy.” According to the headnote of this long poem, the elderly woman who here makes her “lamentable complaint” was “Paulina the famous Roman Curtezan, sometimes M[istress] unto the great Cardinal Hypolito of Est.” Since Markham seems so confidently to direct our eyes to Rome, it is understandable both that the entry on him in theDictionary of National Biographyposits an unknown Italian model and that neither the modern bibliography of his works nor the revisedShort Title Cataloguecan identify his source. In fact, Markham's work is a fairly close imitation of Joachim Du Bellay's’ ‘Vieille courtisanne,'’ first published in 15 5 8 as part of a collection somewhat misleadingly entitledDivers jeux rustiques.