Great Deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis

Notes to Translation

459 BOOK ONE 1 Numbers used as a navigational aid to the text are not references to pages of the English translation, but to numbers printed within [square brackets] in the text, which are in fact page numbers from the Plantin De Rebus. Thus: [1] is the frontispiece , [2] is a blank flyleaf, [3] is title and text, and so on. Accordingly the numbers in Stanihurst’s Index refer to the original page numbers now in the body of the text in square brackets. 2 De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis. The Latin title has of course its echoes of the Res Gestae of Augustus but as Hiram Morgan suggests, it is also a homage to Giraldus Cambrensis whose autobiography was entitled De Rebus a se Gestis. See introduction, p. 22 for the decision to give a different title to this modern edition. 3 Patrick Plunket was in fact Stanihurst’s brother-in-law. He was married to a sister of Janet Barnewall. Janet – Stanihurst’s wife died – in 1579. Her epitaph is amongst a number of poetical conceits and devices appended to his 1583 First Foure Bookes of Virgils Aeneis (Stanihurst, Aeneis, Binneman ed., 100–1), a book also dedicated to Patrick Plunket. The latter as a minor had been a ward of Sir Christopher Barnewall at Turvey, a house frequented by Stanihurst (Lennon, Stanihurst, 32). In his 1577 ‘Description of Ireland’ (Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, Miller and Power eds., 107), Stanihurst says that Sir Christopher had sent his charge to Oxford and that as a result of his learning Patrick was an accomplished but as yet unpublished writer. 4 Stanihurst had manuscripts of at least the Topographia and Expugnatio of Giraldus since there were no printed editions until their inclusion in William Camden’s compiliation , Anglica, Hibernica, Normannica, Cambrica, à veteribus scripta (Frankfurt, 1602). 5 In the second preface to his Topographia Hibernica Giraldus Cambrensis addresses himself to King Henry II in the persona of a prophet. Silvester (‘man of the woods’) had come to mean mage or magician and was in fact a name for Merlin. See Expug., 313, n.161, on the prophecies of Merlin of Celidon. See also endnote 254. 6 The Cimmerians were a mythical people who lived in perpetual darkness. See Tibullus, 4,1,64; Valerius Flaccus, 3,389; for the trope see Ammianus Marcellinus Rerum Gestarum 29, 2, 4 velut in Cimmeriis tenebris reptabamus. Citations from classical authors may be consulted in the Loeb editions published by William Heinemann, Cambridge, Mass. 7 Stanihurst may well have encountered Abraham Ortelius (1527–98). His famous atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum was first published in 1570 by Christopher Plantin. In 1572 the English scholar Daniel Rogers presented Ortelius with a copy of Giraldus’s Topographia requesting that he publish it. This never happened but in the 1573 edition Ortelius included a summary description of Ireland, its people and its Notes to Translation Notes to translation pages 79–81 wonders because Giraldus’s treatise ‘as yet is not set forth and therefore not common and everywhere to be gotten’. According to his posthumous biographer, Franck Sweert, Ortelius visited Ireland in 1577. See Morgan, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis and the Tudor Conquest of Ireland’, 29. 8 Possibly a reference to Stanihurst’s contemporaries, men such as Francisco Tarafa (see notes below) or Joannes Boemus Aubanus whose Repertorium librorum trium de omnium gentium ritibus (Augsburg 1520) was reprinted quite frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 9 hearsay and lies in Latin rumusculorum mendaciunculis; Cicero uses the diminutive rumusculos e.g. at Pro Cluentio 105 and de Legibus 3, 35 and mendaciunculis once at De Oratore 2, 241. The use of diminutives was common in renaissance Latin, especially for addressing friends. Note also the figure of paronomasia in the wordplay of impudenter and imprudenter, part of the ‘Grand Style’ suitable for a dedicatory letter. 10 This list goes back to Giraldus who had some good things to say about Ireland – e.g. O’Meara ed., Top., 53: ‘This is the most temperate of all countries’ – probably with a view to attracting more colonists in order to complete the conquest. Ireland’s reputation as a temperate country went back further, at least to the classical writers Pomponius Mela and Solinus and had also been emphasised by Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede. 11 you can find. The use of valere for posse is found only in poetry in classical Latin (see Lucretius 1, 109; 3, 258; Horace Odes 1, 34, 12) and in...