Arthur Golding’s “A Moral Fabletalk” and Other Renaissance Fable Translations. Liza Blake and Kathryn Vomero Santos, eds. MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations 12. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017. xviii + 574 pp. $45.
creditably, not entirely—limits itself to the reception of already familiar texts in a fairly small subset of well-studied late medieval English poems. On the other hand, from that perspective there are surprising omissions—no chapter on Horace, for example—and JanM. Ziolkowski’s chapter on Virgil, for all its erudition, is oddly thin: several pages on the period before 800, two pages only on everything between then and Chaucer. Rita Copeland’s introduction offers important guidance here, noting both the lack of what she calls “unmediated reception” of any of the major classical authors and that several well-known classical texts—such as Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Martial—were widely read but little imitated in vernacular literature. She here implies, without directly acknowledging, the elephant in this book’s room: there is not a great deal to say about classical reception in English literature (that is, literature in English) between the Norman Conquest and the latter fourteenth century because there simply isn’t much of it in comparison with the large quantities of Anglo-Latin literature produced in these centuries. One of the greatest oddities ofOHCREL 1 is howmuch more space is devoted tomedieval literature which is neither of English origin, nor written in English (such as the French Roman de Thèbes, or the works of Dante and Boccaccio), than to the great wealth of literature from England written in Latin. That literature, which attained a European-wide reputation for excellence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is reasonably enough not a central focus in a study of literature in English; but for a study of “classical reception,” such an omission amounts to a laming. Most readers of Renaissance Quarterly, however, will have literary interests primarily in the final century covered by the volume, and here it is a reliable and often fascinating guide, with strong chapters by James P. Carley and Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby on Henrician humanism (including an entertaining demolition of Henry’s pretensions to literary patronage in comparison with those of Francis I), David R. Carlson on Skelton, and a particularly fine final piece by James Simpson on Surrey’s translations of the Aeneid. The editor, Rita Copeland, is to be commended for the very considerable effort involved to bring such a project together; for her excellent introduction that honestly confronts, if it does not solve, some of the tensions in the volume as a whole; and for contributing herself a further three admirably clear chapters.