An Account of Denmark

Editorial Apparatus

xli EDITORIAL APPARATUS  The edition of the Account of Denmark reproduced here is a collated text from the first four English-language editions (1694–1738) identified below in Bibliographical Descriptions as items 1–3 and 5 under the heading “English Editions.” The copy text is the third edition of 1694 (item 3), which is the final textual state to be corrected and acknowledged by the author. Subsequent eighteenth-century editions indicate some very minor typographical and orthographical revisions but no significant addition or excision of the text. A comparison with the early French-language editions has also been made and has established little significant deviation. The later eighteenth-century European reception and the subsequent abridged and extracted editions of the work in French, although worthy of further attention, exceed the ambitions of this volume. A commentary on the preface to the Account was published in 1713. The editions of Hotman’s Francogallia (1711; 1721, reprinted in 1738), including the prefatory material later known as The Principles of a Real Whig (composed 1705; published 1721; extracted and reproduced in variants in 1726, 1768, and 1775) have been collated. The only notable difference between the first and second editions was the inclusion in the later volume of chapter 19, “Of the authority of the assembly of states concerning the most important affairs of religion.” A number of reasons may account for this: the most likely is that Molesworth had seen the later xlii  Editorial Apparatus edition and subsequently updated his own edition. Giesey and Salmon1 note that the 1711 version was based on the 1574 Latin original, whereas the expanded 1721 edition clearly borrowed material from the 1576 Latin edition (specifically passages from chapter 18 that were not present in the original version). The preface to Francogallia, later reprinted as a separate pamphlet, The Principles of a Real Whig, is one of the key texts of eighteenth-century commonwealth ideology. Its analysis of the variants of “true Whiggism” has also become a standard historiographical tool for understanding the influential accounts found in Pocock, Kenyon, and Bailyn. The distinction between a Whiggism of principle or place, between radical and selfinterested milieux, still drives accounts of the political history of the relationship between power and liberty in the eighteenth century. Molesworth’s translation is an interesting one. Comparison with the modern Cambridge edition suggests that he worked hard to make the prose connect with early-eighteenth-century Anglophone readers, thus enabling the “we” of Hotman’s original text to become the “we” of his audience. One clear trait is his emphasis on languages of community, the public, and liberty: for example, unlike the Cambridge edition, Molesworth commonly translated libertas as “publick liberty” rather than simply “liberty”; elsewhere, phrases like publico consilio became “universal consent ” rather than “public consent” (GS Franc., pp. 234–35; 1721 edition, p. 44); a preference for translating abdicare as “abdicate” rather than “resign ” and populi comitia as “public council” or “public convention” (rather than “assembly of the people”) also exposes contemporary concerns. Likewise , the vocabulary of “king,” “nobles,” and “commons”—or even more appropriately “representatives of the commons”—anchored the reception in the language of eighteenth-century Britain. 1. See note 77 in the Introduction. ...