Making a Politic Erasmian Gentleman: Wynkyn de Worde and the first Ars amatoria in English (original) (raw)

Making a Politic Erasmian Gentleman: The First Ars amatoria in English M. L. Stapleton The first substantial English translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria was of a type that twenty-first-century students of classical and early modern literature would not expect to encounter. Wynkyn de Worde’s The flores of Ouide de arte amandi with theyr englysshe afore them (1513) was a Latin primer and bilingual dictionary for students and probably a teaching aid for their harried masters. It was certainly an Erasmian humanist enterprise, foretelling the pedagogical theory of double translation enunciated by Roger Ascham’s The scholemaster (1570) and Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (1581). In spite of de Worde’s stock woodcut of the magister armed with his birch rods as he presides over his pupilli. The flores in its conception and construction would seem to counsel patience and persuasion as teaching strategies rather than the brutality of corporal punishment and other modes of fear-based learning. . As a text it is a self-contained unit, with all vocabulary doubly rendered and classified, and the Latin distichs followed by renderings into idiomatic English prose: a miniature encyclopedia. The flores would seem to be a counterintuitive choice for a schoolboy reader, since the Ars was notorious from its initial circulation as a cynical and satiric primer for sexual seduction that led to its author’s banishment for immorality by his emperor. Its first two sections were prized and consulted by medieval poets and physicians attempting to understand lovesickness and women’s psychology from a male perspective. Its third book is addressed to women, and encourages them to beware of fair blandishments and to learn how men might be best managed and controlled. It concludes with a flourish: how women might adopt the positions during lovemaking that would be most flattering to them, based on bodily type. The compiler of The flores intended that it fulfill the function encoded in its title, to offer material for intermediate language study whose excerpts were intentionally devoid of context or explanation from the rest of Ovid’s poem. Yet many of its elegiac couplets nevertheless enunciate or embody conceptions of masculinity that early modern culture wished to inculcate in the adolescents for whom it was intended. I will explore the text’s embedded mores, account for the disjunction between early sixteenth-century ideas of appropriate reading matter and our own, and situate The flores in its literary milieu.