This is odd. I was chasing down an Elizabethan something through the thicket of Google Books (it came to nothing in the end, sadly) when I chanced upon a collection of Latin letters by the Dutch scholar and Stoic Joose Lips, better known by his Latin name, Justus Lipsius. The letters (Epistolarum centuriae duae: quarum prior innovata, altera nova (1590); '200 Letters, the first hundred previously published, the second new') are from all over Europe. Most look like this one, from The Hague:
Or this from Frankfurt:
Two of the 200 were sent from London. Curious, I took a look. But in the Google Books edition, the London letters look like this:
Intrigued, I tracked down a second edition of the book (this a later-published Collected Works of Lipsius from 1613, Iusti Lipsi Opera). But this was no more enlightening:
There are only two letters from London in the whole collection. What was Lipsius saying about that city, under Elizabeth, that provoked whoever-it-was to censor it, not once but twice? It really is very tantalising. Incidentally, the bit you can read, from that second letter, is: 'An potius linguam? Ista enim deest, qui tamdiu siles. Vindictam talionis merebare: sed noster amor si non maior, certe acrior: procatur, & lacessit te utro. Valemus ego, tuo liberi, tua uxor, non meae Musae
What ...?
One quick PS: despite the publication date on the title page, up there, it looks as though the vol actually includes letters written as late as 1592.
Actually, I should have looked more carefully. Th ehandwritten note at the bottom of the title page at the top tells us that the book was 'corrected and expurgated' by somebody on the 29th of June (is that?) 1613 in Madrid. Madrid? I'm guessing the first letter dated from 1585 and the second a little later. Why would a Spaniard want to censor them? Do they say something disobliging about the Spanish in the run up to the Armada?
ReplyDelete... or rather (looking again), the first letter dates from 1583 and the second from 1585.
ReplyDelete