Robert Copland and The Judgement of Love

In 1993, Frank Stubbings announced the sensational discovery of three sixteenth-century English printed fragments in the library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.¹ Extracted from the contemporary London binding of an octavo volume printed in Frankfurt in 1540, these fragments together formed a single complete folio, signed F2, from a lost quarto edition of a prose romance featuring the pseudo-Roman characters Affranio and Hortensia.² Although the work itself was unknown, Dennis E. Rhodes, who collaborated with Stubbings, identified the font as Wynkyn de Worde’s 95mm textura in its final state, observing that the grotesque initial ‘I’ on the recto was found elsewhere in de Worde’s corpus. On the strength of this information, Stubbings concluded that the folio was printed by de Worde between 1521 and 1535. At the same time, he acknowledged that the fragments did not match any surviving de Worde book from the period.

Six years later, Rhodes identified the Emmanuel College text as a previously unrecorded English translation of La historia de Grisel y Mirabella, a late medieval Spanish romance by Juan de Flores (fl. 1475).³ With translations and adaptations in French, German, Italian, and Polish (among other languages), Flores’s work became an international best-seller in the sixteenth century, marketed initially as a manual of style and later as a foreign language primer.⁴ Comparing the English passage to other vernacular versions of the romance, Rhodes argued that the Emmanuel text derived from the Italian translation of the Spanish original. He based this deduction on the fact that the Italian text, first printed in Milan in 1521, substituted the names Affranio and Hortensia for Torrellas and Braçayda (Cressida), the analogous Spanish characters. He went on to speculate that the Emmanuel translation—or paraphrase, as he described it—of the Italian was undertaken around 1525 and printed by de Worde around 1530. He implied that another English translation, found in the 1556 quadrilingual edition published in Antwerp by Jan Steels (STC 11092), was distantly related to the Emmanuel College text, being perhaps a revision by a non-native speaker of English.⁵

In an article published in March 2005, Joyce Boro refuted nearly all of Rhodes’s conclusions by demonstrating that the immediate source of the English text was not the 1521 Italian version of Flores’s romance but rather a French translation of the Italian text known as Le Iugement d’amour.⁶ Boro listed nine French editions of this work, mostly from the late 1520s and early 1530s.⁷ She went on to show that the English text in the Emmanuel College fragment was a literal rendering of this French source, exhibiting only a handful of stylistic variations. Key variants allowed her to identify the Lyon edition of Olivier Arnoullet as the most likely basis of the English text, but erroneous information from outdated secondary sources led her to propose an imprecise terminus post quem of 1527 for the original quarto.⁸ More reliably, she disproved Rhodes’s conjecture that the 1556 English translation of the romance, reprinted in 1608, was a revision of the Emmanuel text, although she continued to accept his attribution of the leaf to de Worde.

In the present study, I discuss a number of technical issues concerning the production of the Emmanuel College fragment. Based on an analysis of its types and ornamental initial, I reassign the leaf to the Rose Garland press of Robert Copland (d. 1547?). The state of this initial, coupled with new information about the work’s French source, leads me to propose a revised printing date of either 1531 or 1533. Using the French translation as a guide, I go on to reconstruct the English edition from which the Emmanuel College leaf derives. I conclude by observing that the anonymous translator was almost certainly Copland himself. This deduction suggests that although Copland’s known translations of French romances date from the time of his apprenticeship with de Worde (probably 1505–13), he continued to translate such works throughout his printing career.

Physical Description

Measuring 183/4 × 154mm, the Emmanuel College...