SOURCE: Tuve, Rosemond. Introduction to The Zodiake of Life, by Marcellus Palingenius, translated by Barnabe Googe, pp. v-xxiv. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1947.

The especial interest of [The Zodiake of Life] lies in what we know of its readers. A few of those readers were men of greater genius and originality than its writer. The greatest number of them were students who studied it as a school-book, in Latin, or read Googe's translation because they were interested in a “most learned” and “pregnant introduction into Astronomie, & both philosophies.” This characterization of the book by Gabriel Harvey indicates the nature of its influence upon English thought.

Among Renaissance Latin poems it enjoyed in England a popularity perhaps rivaled only by Mantuan's eclogues; it did not, like Mantuan, form men's styles, but it helped to shape the thinking of very many 16th and 17th century English writers and readers. This facsimile is a somewhat belated recognition of the importance of a poem which was prescribed as a textbook in many schools; which had more than sixty editions, ten of them in England; which was praised by Bruno; which was so admired by one of England's outstanding mathematical scientists—Thomas Digges—that he learned its 11th book “bie hart”; which appeared in Googe's English translation (first partial, then complete) in five editions from 1560 to 1588, gathering many praises, even such a one as the critical Harvey's inclusion of it among books whose translators had not wronged their authors.¹ One should add that Shakespeare probably studied it.²

THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATOR

Such reasons as these for our re-reading of a book make its writer and its translator of far less interest to us than the content and qualities of the book itself. This is fortunate, for we are not even sure of the identity of the writer, and would know little more about him if we were, while its translator is a figure of small magnitude, even to the literary historian who is caught by the fact that his eclogues did much to establish the pastoral genre in the vernacular.

The usual identification of Palingenius with Pier Angelo Manzolli of Stellata, near Ferrara, may be accepted if the reader pleases; it helps one to no further knowledge. The dedication to Ercole II Duke of Ferrara is translated by Googe in the 1576 edition; and one fact about Palingenius' life seems certain: that his bones were exhumed and burnt, and his book placed upon the Index in 1558, among writings of heretics of the first class. All other facts about him are questioned: his identity, his connection with the unorthodox group which gathered about Renée de France, his profession of medicine, the date when his book appeared (?1531 or ca. 1535).³ Thus, by a strange irony, which would not have displeased an author who is most powerful when most sardonic, Palingenius lives only in this one book, and he disobligingly died before what he said in it could bring him to his death. Nor was he destroyed by the second and symbolic death to which his book did bring him; his bones were burned and his book was reprinted—some thirty times before the end of the century.

Barnabe Googe's stature as a writer is not great, yet we must think that he added to it by translating Palingenius, and therein agree with the men of some repute who made this claim for him in their commendatory verses. These are not uninformative to one who is interested in contemporary critical attitudes and intellectual interests, offering a perspective through which the figure of Googe takes on new dignity. We may boggle at assenting to Carlile's comparison of Googe to Chaucer, but Googe's own tribute to the latter is humble and just enough. The references to Chaucer remind us, as do Harvey's marginalia, that that poet was read with great seriousness; one need not be surprised that these commenders took pleasure alike in Palingenius' and in Chaucer's “astronomy,” in Googe's and in Chaucer's Englishing of foreign works, in Palingenius' book Scorpius and in Chaucer's high arguments of free will. foreknowledge, and destiny. In sum, the commendatory verses and various prefatory epistles here reprinted help us not only to measure contemporary appraisals of Googe and Palingenius but to define more accurately the attitudes of the 1560's with regard to poets and poetry: the high hopes; the zeal in placing knowledge within reach of the unlearned; the pride in English men of eloquence and learning; the sense of the poet's responsibilities; the still firm unwinking faith (which was to help mould English poets and critics for a century to come) in the power of a philosophical poetry of high seriousness; therewith, the fair estimate of a mediaeval poet like Chaucer which, though unaided by scholarly findings, yet took account of aspects not seen by an Arnold.

Much of what there is to be known about Googe can be found in the prefatory materials here reproduced from the various editions⁴; we learn thence of his connection with Christ's College, Cambridge and New College, Oxford, his residence at Staple Inn, his connection with Cecil, his encouragers, his critics, his strongly Protestant admiration of Palingenius, the earnestness which made him begin such a work at 19 and finish it at 25. It is to be remembered that he did this despite the not inconsiderable interruptions of a journey abroad, a betrothal and marriage effected in the teeth of family opposition to which even his lady had succumbed, and the publication of the book for which literary history has remembered him: the Eglogs, epytaphes, and sonettes of 1563.

The numerous prefatory materials give a view of the young author of that more famous volume which is not unprepossessing. He has enthusiasm and determination, if he lacks urbanity. His defense of poetry is as typical of his period as is Sidney's, however less forcefully and beautifully he phrases the same didactic ideal and the same emphasis on scriptural precedent (To Cecil, 1561; To the Reader, 1565). His ranking of Chaucer with Homer, Virgil, and Ovid is part of a patriotic zeal for the English tongue and for those who had written in it with fine and filed phrases equalling the ancients'. One need not read heavy solemnity into his lighter verses; there is a humor not entirely unintended in the vision of the 19-year-old Googe faced by the Muses with the choice of translating Aratus for Urania, or Lucan for Melpomene, or Palingenius for Calliope (The Preface, 1560).

We may feel that Calliope might well have rewarded him with a little more of her sweetness of tone. Yet we must admit that he follows with honesty and intelligence his theory of translation; it is that workable one which gave us the great Elizabethan translations—not always to follow the strict order of word for word and verse for verse, but yet no whit to swerve “from the perfect minde of the autoure” (Preface to the Reader, 1565). One will note improvement in the translation as he grew older, in the direction of compression, particularity, and exactness. Even earlier, there is something to be said for a youth of 20 who for his translation of the Zodiake was included by Donne's uncle, Jasper Heywood, in that group of “Mineruaes men, And finest witts” who contributed lustre to the London Inns of Court by their translations of important foreign works.⁵

His earliest such contribution was not his last. A translation by Googe of Naogeorgus' Popish kingdome came out in 1570. Later, a busy official life in Ireland, though it prevented him from finding time for proper revision (To Cecil, 1576), deterred him no more than it did Spenser, whom he very probably knew, from that odd and strenuous Elizabethan combination of patriotic services to the English tongue and to the English empire, pen in one hand and (one must suppose) sword in the other. Perhaps the duties were not onerous; but still there can have been neither tranquility nor libraries in the bogs and fens to encourage Googe's other two translations during those years: one of Conrad Heresbach's Foure bookes of husbandry in 1577, one of Lopez de Mendoza's Proverbes in 1579 (cf. also STC 1970, Andrew Bertholdus' The wonderfull and strange effects of a new terra sigillata, translated by ‘B. G.,’ 1587).

Googe returned from Ireland in 1585, and died in 1593/4; of his eight children two younger sons were more conventionally academic than their father: Robert, a Fellow of All Souls, and Barnabe, master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. One builds up an estimate of the man—it may be, in the absence of information—much like one's estimate of his book here reproduced. It was not a great achievement. It commands esteem.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEM

This poem is in the tradition of mediaeval philosophical poetry—already a “tradition,” of course, by the time of the Middle Ages. Accordingly the scope of the poem is encyclopaedic, its purpose serious, its structure far from the simple organization of narrative, and its tone ironic or satirical, hortatory, descriptively violent or florid or macabre, according to the demands of the themes treated in the course of the argument.⁶

Like many poems of the Renaissance other than the Faerie Queene, it uses the poetic conventions of a Confessio Amantis, a Roman de la Rose, an Anticlaudianus or Archithrenius, a Divine Comedy. It is set in a “vision” framework, with various guiding spirits to explain and to instruct the author. Its mythological apparatus—pagan and Christian, “historical” and fanciful—is an eclectic composite (or, as other readers might put it, a hodge-podge). Myths and mythological figures are allegorized so as to heighten their significance; Proserpina's reign is an exemplum against Pride, Mercury is a messenger from a hell too crowded because so many friars must be accommodated, Timalphes son of Jove and Arete is the author's guide through visions and discussions elucidating the nature of earthly and heavenly love (Cancer) or of earthly and heavenly wisdom (Sagittarius).

The conflict between concepts is dramatized. Nature and Fortune bear in their persons the heavy weight of centuries of speculation; Arete (compare Jonson's and Wither's use of her) puts down the argument of Epicure. The individuation of universals by rhetorical means induces some of the chief traits of style, and floods the pages with lively portrayals of Gluttony, Idleness, Pride—portrayals which in their number and their verisimilitude are far too rich and strong for our less robust modern taste.

An awareness of the poetic theory which dictated the use of these conventions is the first condition for any just judgment of the poem. The author dreams and argues his way through to Truth; he has assuredly, as Donne recommends, wound around and around that steep and craggy mountain (cf. Aries, 5⁷), but his purpose is unwavering. He is sternly didactic and is no more afraid of a careful philosophical argument than of a heavily sensuous one; nor does he hesitate to take sides in the contemporary quarrel, but castigates those who would relegate Poetry to the irresponsible domain of lies and marvels. He has no regard, and no respect, for the reader who is unwilling to bring his full reason to bear, including Judgment as well as Imagination; such a reader is cast unceremoniously out among the other “twolegd Asses” who live with but half their faculties, those who live for riches, or court-honour, or some other partial end. The modern reader of Googe's Palingenius must face the same stern requirements.

The functional but lavish use of poetic device and rhetorical ornament, the conception of poetic inspiration, are all in decorous accord with the primary aim. Invocations call upon Urania or the Holy Ghost, according to the demand of the matter. There is more than a plenty of sententious admonition, of Polonius-like set-pieces—there are essays on the commodity of friendship, maxims on conduct; there are “characters” etched with vigorous detail, like that vivid night-piece in Taurus, of the man of business tossing and turning in his bed, and discussing his investments with himself in sleepless agitation of phrase. There is conscious use of the rhetorician's divisions: arguments “distributed” according to the delightful, the honest, the useful, with each of these generals divided into its specials; discourses enriched by “circumstances”: of a pestilence, of a husbandman's contented life.

Rhetorical amplification serves its traditional purpose of giving dramatic immediacy to imagined situations: the rich man is killed by his servant “In bed a sleepe and snorting fast” (13), the deceived man like a fish follows the twirling thread in a fast and doleful dance. Googe's marginal glosses underline the rhetorical and logical intentions of the text: they state an underlying syllogism (162); they carefully maintain the distinction between “similitude” and “comparison”; they call attention to “example” and “periphrasis,” to “a pleasaunt Antithesis” (218) or “an application of a comparison” (136), or to many an elaborate descriptio (of person, of place, of season).

The distinctions thus signalized are typical of the author's careful adjustment of his imagery to his purpose. In accord with Renaissance practice, in the writing of expository or persuasive discourse in poetic form, similitudes generally furnish a logical argument from analogy, expanded images are common, and radical or homely images are used without any sense that decorum is thereby disturbed. To love God as an equal would be like knitting a knot of amity between a silly flea and a mighty elephant (66); man should feed within his tether (22); a wife can supply the want of “a Dormouse for the night” (16). Far-fetched or dissonant images are not objected to; carpenters, large and small flies, organ-playing, usefully enter discussions of man's reasonableness, bought justice, the mind's structure. As one might expect because of the dialectical purpose and nature of much of the discourse, we may note the habits, though we miss the power and economy, of the Metaphysical poet. Simpler images match simpler concepts or purposes; in portions utilizing the fashionable genre of pastoral, mere properties breed images, and the author can find nearly as many shades of “whiteness” for a lady as could Herrick. Ordinarily, however, multiplied parallels enforce the statement of a fairly abstruse concept. Sometimes indeed they obscure it with tumbling waterfalls of analogies. But at least a certain lively concreteness characterizes the style of an author who, to make a point concerning the intelligibility of Fortune's action, needs to refer to wormwood, snow, tree limbs, amber, magnets, diamonds, basins, crocks and pitchers (146). These habits in the use of imagery are normal for writing in this kind, or writing with these purposes to assist.

The decorum observed is that of the genre written in; the tone is properly that of the mean or of the base style; thus purpose and subject set the conditions, in accordance with contemporary theory. Either style admits occasional archaisms, and of course idiomatic and colloquial language (“scotfree”—31, impune; “gredy snudge”—63, avarus; “heaveners”—219, caelicoli; “some sir Johns”—66, quidam). The roughness of satire is endorsement for violence of diction, and is partially responsible for the frequency of the figure meiosis, the diminisher (Puttenham's “disabler”): the grasping man is “a two leggde Mole,” monks are “porklings,” war is compared to Jupiter's skimming his unclean pots, and some false ideas of the movement of the spheres are derided as condemning the gods to the labor of a slavey in a bakehouse (199, 181, 190, 215). No innovation in poetic, nor rebellion against Petrarchan sweetness, need be postulated; indeed, Googe would be an odd channel for either. All these characteristics, as well as the pronounced irony and bitterness of certain passages, are quite within 16th century theory.

In many other ways the book reflects the two periods, separated by a quarter-century, which combined to produce it in the form in which it here appears. It is a mine of Renaissance commonplaces, most of them with a long history in mediaeval or classical literature. Many an inexperienced writer of the school “themes” recommended by the rhetorics of the period, many a hurried sermon-writer, and many a journeyman poet must have found useful its tree and flower lists, its comparisons of life to a stage-play, with the accompanying description of the Ages of Man, its distinctions between Reason as the sun and Opinion as the moon, its vivid collections of images describing Death and his threatening speeches. Many conventional images which we know best in Sidney, Shakespeare, Chapman, Spenser, are here in more abbreviated or more diluted form: Sleep as brother or picture of Death, Sleep as the leveller, the world as an inn, as a cherry fair, the great and the low suffering differently the winds of Fortune as do the high tree and the low shrub.⁸ References are made topical or modernized: a gloss identifies the crafty fox-hearted man with “Machiuales or worldlings” (170); a bawd is “mother Bee” (76; cf. Gammer Gurton's Needle, III.3.74); or Googe may note in a gloss: “He wrote this before the discouerie of the new Indies” (116).

The marginal glosses are largely informative, except for sighs of “in these dayes to trewe” (185), or pious hopes that “God graunt it be not found” so in England (194), or except for occasional warning comment on the text. Advice on praying to the saints, for example, is to be “read, but not folowed,” though Googe's text keeps honestly to its Catholic original (175). Some of the information indicates the type of reader anticipated. Mythological references are explained for him; he is told when the text represents the “opinion Peripateticall” (99), or when the arguments are “ab effectibus” or “a minore ad maius” (113, 228). Or parallel passages in Cicero are recalled to his mind, or famous controversies such as that over the Pelagian heresy. Many of the marginal aids are interesting as indication of the range and type of authorities to whom the student of 1576 was sent for further discussion of important matters: Varro, Cardan, Plato, Plotinus, Lactantius, Macrobius, Peter Martyr, Pliny, Petrarch (the De remediis, as one would expect). To smile at the schoolmaster showing through Googe's marginal notes would be unbecoming in the modern reader, who frequently needs what they contain.

The commendatory verses (p. 242) by Abraham Fleming (who himself translated Virgil's Bucolics and Georgics, 1575, 1589), are evidence of Googe's connection with a group of rather solemn and well-meaning translators of the period. The marginal commentary may also seem to typify a certain youthful pedantry in the author, and Googe as a translator worked in a metre which many have vilified. Yet he at least had sufficient energy of mind to attack not only a book of the length and philosophical difficulty of the Zodiacus, but also three very different volumes almost equally edifying. Even in the earliest work one does not find him careless; and a young civil servant in Ireland during the uneasy years of the seventies and early eighties who found time to open yet other veins of foreign wisdom to English readers may perhaps be pardoned a certain monotony of cadence. The fourteener which he chose for his translation can be easily turned into doggerel by the reader's own management of the pauses which are its chief method of metrical variation. But if one is willing to match Googe's own indefatigability, by careful rather than unsympathetic reading, one comes through to the end of the twelve books of the Zodiake with considerable respect for its translator.

His translation is spare; minute compressions of phrase will mount gradually to a saving of a hundred lines in a book. He does not force the opinions of his original by sly choices in the coloring of phrases. He wrenches syntax, he uses rhyme-fillers (though in this he is no egregious sinner); yet the vigor and boldness which can characterize the fourteener are more marked as a characteristic of the book than is the dilution which is the chief vice of the measure even in better hands. He shows at all times more energy than delicacy, but in this he follows his original. It is evident from the style of the Eglogs, epytaphes, and sonettes that the trenchant irony which is the most powerful instrument used by Palingenius was not the natural tone of his translator. Googe's qualities are not those of subtlety, nice discrimination, or mature mastery of covered or modulated tones.

Yet he is the honest servant of his original, frequently regarding with care the smaller indications of his author's wishes. The incivility in “Morosophi” he conserves in “Foolosophers,” and gives a note (215; the word appears in the Chaloner translation of the Praise of Folie, 1549). When in speaking of God as artificer Palingenius enforces his meaning with word-patterning (“Quae non ars, imo deberet inertia dici”), Googe transliterates it: “Which should be rather Folly cald and not a Facultie” (229; Pisces, v. 63). He may even manage an extra effect of this sort, turning “Deum … Iovem” into “Ioue … Iehoue” (65; Leo, v. 152). Except perhaps in the very earliest part of the book, he takes care not to miss opportunities for particularity, and slight differences from his original frequently take that direction: Kings suspecting “euery twigge” replaces “suspectaque eisdem Omnia sunt” (70; Leo, 377); or “dominumque volentem Dici et adorari” is made more dramatic: “Desiring yet to here the sounde, of God preserue your grace And to be duckd and knelde vnto” (62; Leo, 36). The liberties taken by some of the greater Elizabethan translators to vivify and dramatize their originals are not however characteristic of Googe.

On the whole one must concede it to be a long task done with honor. To the reader of 242 pages of fourteeners, Itzuert's phrase is a tempting one: that Googe cultivated the Muses' garden largis sudoribus; so also is that phrase of the hasty Blunderston who gave the Eglogs to the printer during Googe's absence, and called them in a preface the “fyled worke of Googes flowing Heade.” But in the Zodiake at least it was labor spent toward a serious end, and it was so appreciated by contemporaries. Hence we are not justified in thus frivolously summing up Googe's achievement in the translation of Palingenius, unless we have read its lengthy arguments with the same keenness of interest in their truth or falsity which contemporaries were willing to give. The satisfaction of such an interest was the poet's guiding intention.

THE NATURE OF THE BOOK AND ITS THOUGHT

To the reader who would prefer to regard the Renaissance as a time when daring writers redeemed men's minds at length from the darkness of mediaeval authoritarianism by the light of a new belief in man and a new independence of the past, Googe's Palingenius is a sobering document. When the bones of its original author were exhumed, one may suppose they burnt the more crisply for being labelled as those of a heretic of the first class. But there is a certain mellower heat about the book's heretical discussions, resembling as they do the discussions carried on, though in somewhat soberer dialectic, by churchmen whose bones had been allowed to rest quietly during those authoritarian middle centuries. It would be puzzling to have to conclude that one could as well say that Palingenius was born too late, as born too early. We are accustomed to lauding the Renaissance as the seedtime of those saints of our modern hagiography who suffered punishment for their crimes against Christian orthodoxy; perhaps we have a right to be affronted as well as puzzled when the newness sometimes appears to lie rather in the punishment than in the crime. Palingenius, it is true, may be mined for the gold of “modern” ideas. It is also true, however, that the orthodoxy, the even more patent “mediaevalism” of Palingenius will probably prove to be much more unpalatable to modern readers than his heresies were to a former age. It will be ironic if he is now damned for the one, having been burnt for the other.

Attitudes and purposes far from congenial to the modern mind characterize this Renaissance book. In this it is typical enough of its period. It is typical also in the fact that, as with most translations of the time, we have to deal with a sort of Janus-author, a composite. Googe can be separated from Palingenius only by the most careful research into the connotations of 16th century Latin words, only by the most careful study of the shadowy impress of the translator's preconceptions, overlaying the original. Even this would be irrelevant to one of the main purposes of the edition, that of enabling students to judge the nature of the book's influence, for we seldom know which version men read. If I speak of the author as one man, I shall probably not belie either the nature of that influence or the understanding which most 16th and 17th century Englishmen had of the attitudes and purposes of the author of the Zodiacus Vitae.

The truisms common throughout the Middle Ages which this rebel of an author accepts and promulgates must be the despair of a Burckhardtian. Far from keeping historical decorum and staying in his period, he takes a firm stance on certain commonplaces which were long since set down as unbefitting to either the 1530's when he wrote or the 1560's when he was translated; they are commonplaces regarding man's raison d'être and place in the world which any undergraduate could point to as proper and suitable to the mediaeval writer, not to the Man of the Renaissance. Our author is like certain other men of the Renaissance is not being quite “Renaissance.” He sees the ambition of self-assertive individual man, proud in his self-conceit, as a sin against God and an irrational folly—like Spenser and Milton. He finds in his vast extension of the cosmos a new argument for man to be humble, like Kepler; yet like Daniel's Musophilus, or like Donne, he is far from being impelled by a sense of man's physical insignificance toward a declaration of his spiritual bankruptcy. He sees much of this last in the world, but finds old and uningenious reasons for it. It is man's sinfulness and God's power that he would show the plainer as he discusses the plurality of worlds. This stable of earth is full of “dust, dyrt, dung, bones and carion,” full of fools; if we think God left unfurnished with greater inhabitants than these the other and greater stars, “if no creature else excell this man,” then certainly we make of “the chiefe Creator of the world” a mere Lord of misers and fools, scarce deserving of “a workmans name” (Aquarius, Sagittarius, Libra, Pisces). He is convinced that “seldome is the unlearned good” and that man must unwearyingly search the causes of things, yet, like Milton, like the stronger side in Marlowe's perhaps unconcluded argument, he seems to see as punishable the unwillingness to renounce earthly Knowledge for heavenly Wisdom (Capricornus, Sagittarius, Virgo). The burden of his mistrust of man's discoveries of Truth is like Donne's refrain: “Poore soule, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?”; he has the same distrust of “sense, and Fantasie,” and thinks to see truth finally from the same “watch-towre,” like the angels (The second Anniversary, 254 ff.; cf. Virgo).

Our author shows in other ways a similar tendency not to exalt what one has every right to expect him to exalt (that is, if he is to keep our rules for men of his century). Like the Cowley of the essays, he praises the mean estate, satisfied with “a prety house” in a small ground (Leo, 71), like Herrick counts with content his moderate orchard trees and honied bees and ground “that gives his master malt and wheat.” Praising stoic content with little, he like Montaigne adds his voice (Leo, 82) to the number of those who ask whether “To Philosophie [be not] to learne how to die.” Like Montaigne too, or Daniel's Defence, he is impatient with “trifling” books, especially when “with princely wordes theyr stile is deckt, but small effect within” (Virgo, 84). Like Sidney he defends Poetry because of the Muses' fitness to “expel the vices of the minde,” to make men sound (Aries, 3); like Ascham he deplores bawdy books, concerned that education should do more than shuffle boys through some “dolefull tragedie,” “some harlots tricks” “or doting loves of auncient time” (Sagittarius, 174). He is far from complimentary to “the Greekish sorte,” “addict to toyes and dreames”—a national characteristic evidently happily escaped by Plato and Aristotle, “Which two are lightes to all the world” (Cancer, 46; Leo, 69; Cancer, 53).

Like these others, one must grant, he is behind the times with respect to what Burckhardt saw as the typical Renaissance “discovery of the world and of man.” Perhaps he is yet a typical man of the Renaissance in certain other more optimistic and forward-looking attitudes of mind, and no doubt it is perverse to cite our parallels from the Middle Ages. Like Boethius and others, as well as Dante, Chaucer, the Roman de la Rose, he asserts that neither blood nor riches can confer nobility, that true nobility is an inward quality of the mind which each individual severally must achieve (Virgo). In the satirical scorn and vigor of detail with which he refuses to allocate value to individuals according to class, he is most like Jean de Meun; like him also he prescribes “a ciuil common loue” to all men regardless of station (Cancer). True, one is not to give one's heart to “the many.” However, dukes and rich John Franklings are unceremoniously dumped into that category; one misses in this author the modern tendency to reserve the category, which we likewise call the “masses,” for men of lesser pretensions. Like Alanus, like Jean de Meun, he openly ridicules the celibacy of clerics; especially like Jean's is a defense of love, marriage, fertility, as “sacred natures hest” (Cancer, 48). Like Brunetto Latini, Guillaume de Conches, Dante, Petrarch, he apostrophizes “famous worthy pouertye” (Taurus, 19); perhaps we must admit him here not a man of the future, except that, as in Jean de Meun again, it is man's liberty as an individual that is the point at issue. For like Jean and so many before and after him, he sees the king as enslaved to the will of others and to fear, sees the covetous man enslaved to his greed and his riches, both alike lacking “worthy Libertie, The chiefest Gem”—“For nothing more an honest man becommes than liberty” (Taurus, 11, 18; Leo, 70-1). It is true that neither he nor Jean had made our modern equation of Liberty with the power to assert one's own will or manage one's own possessions. Indeed it is to be feared that he would not even be willing to follow Bacon (or Aristotle, or Aquinas) in seeing material goods as a possible aid to the development of the moral life.⁹

In certain other habitual postures of the mind, our author is more completely a man of the Renaissance. Like Chaucer and like Langland he introduces into his poetic framework the most knife-keen satire of social abuses and of those qualities in man which make for them; his pen burns and scalds and curls its way like those of the 1590's across the easy optimist's picture of man. Like Aristotle he sees a Deity who is remote from man, has no need of him (Leo, 66; Pisces, 236). Like many mediaeval thinkers, he sees a God whose self-sufficient perfection sets Him at a distance from man, which (supposedly) increases the so-called “baroque” sense of aloneness, or perhaps we should merely say which precludes the inanities of certain later kinds of piety (Pisces; Scorpius). Like St. Augustine and Donne he distrusts the reports of the senses, but like them, and unlike writers of a naturalistic temper in the mid-17th and early 14th centuries, he is concerned chiefly to assert the validity of sensuously unverifiable spiritual phenomena, and commonly trusts and uses the methods of Reason. Yet, like William of Ockham, he occasionally separates theology and natural philosophy, in one very telling passage proclaiming that certain truths of “Moyses” are not amenable to the proofs of Reason (Aquarius, 221). But his opposition is commonly not between Reason and Faith; rather it is between Reason and Opinion, or Reason and the Affections or the Will (Libra, Scorpius, Taurus). In contrasting Reason and the Affections he emphasizes what is of course the most common antithesis in Renaissance philosophical and ethical writing. Like Abelard, Dante, Cusanus, he pursues some of the heretical implications of the principle of plenitude, in discussions that are to be related to Plotinian and to 18th century optimism, to 13th and to 17th century discussions of necessity or freedom of choice touching God as first cause, to Bruno's extensions of Abelard's premises and reasonings (Aquarius, Pisces, Scorpius, Libra).¹⁰

In general he is a man of the Renaissance in his willingness to bring baldly into the discussion the questions most embarrassing to orthodoxy, and although perhaps more inclined to compromise or evasion than Abelard or Ockham, he seems to worship no thinker except Plato. His references to “divine Plato” have the tone of personal allegiance familiar for example in the 12th century writers of Chartres, though he has not the humanistic sympathies of those writers. On the other hand he is as unwilling as 13th century Paris to subscribe wholesale to Aristotle, and his allegiance to Plato may have as much as anything else to do with the contentious tone which he sometimes adopts toward the Stagirite.

It is clear, from the differences between the men he resembles, that this author does not hold to a clear line, that he defies easy classification. Sometimes this is because his argument cannot be acquitted of the charge of confusion. Sometimes it may result from real indecision in a dilemma, or from the use of a method of irony, or from the extreme complexity of the problems introduced, most of them being still unsolved except in the popular mind. Even in flat statements of a position the use of a method of wilful irony should be suspected. In general, however, one has to be careful of imposing interpretations based on our possibly subjective judgment of what an author assumed to be unorthodox “must really have meant.” It is wise to remember that the Christian humanists who placed Palingenius in English schools were good Latinists with no desire to have schoolboys read authors who maliciously undermined orthodox Christian solutions and poked fun at God, Moses and Aristotle. The number of thinkers ordinarily (and often properly) opposed, whom the author finds it possible to resemble during the course of his arguments, gives one pause. It is not always easy to decide whether these resemblances are adventitious or whether the seeming contradictions result from falsities in the generalizations to which we have tried to make writers of this period conform.

A proper philosophical evaluation of the book would have to take cognizance of many factors with which this preface may not concern itself. The differences between the author and the translator, particularly in tone and in emotional weighting of arguments, would have to be carefully scrutinized, all the more, perhaps, in places where Googe does not make a caveat in the margin to the effect that he does not, and others should not, believe what he is translating. A technical philosophical consideration is no part of my purpose.¹¹ If and when such be made, I think it may confirm a judgment one arrives at by other routes: that the book (especially in this later form in which many Englishmen read it) is in form, purpose, poetics, and thought, an example of that inter-dependence between Middle Ages and Renaissance which makes the two periods all but inextricable. To one who wishes to draw clear lines of distinction between those periods, or remain within the confines of the later epoch, or praise either at the expense of the other, the book will be more than anything else an embarrassment.

It is even possible that this is most typically a book of the Renaissance by virtue of the mediaeval character of most of its proposed solutions. The problem of evil, posed again and again, is teased through all the familiar arguments: of contingency, of refinement through suffering, of stoic disregard, of Christian redefinition of the good, of Plotinian optimism in the statement of the concept of the scale of being, of a linked order of causes with the devil as the basest, of a dualistic conception of vile body and heavenly soul, “two so farre contrary things … compact in one” (Scorpius, 144). The reality of evil seems to be asserted in passages of a terror and power which may have ranged their author with writers accused of the Manichaean heresy. No Marston or Nashe could outdo the lashing savagery of detail, or the bitterness with which he tells men to go build them churches and rattle out hymns to ask for the lengthening of their flea-bitten lives (Virgo, Capricornus). Yet all this is, as it is in those later authors, a scourge of villainy; and man, not God, is the villain.

The end of Capricorn is very terrible, with its galling mirth over one more child born but to be a fool: “A boy is borne, be mery syrs, reioyce … Fil in your cuppes;” with its tormented self-question: “And thus vnto my selfe I saide, Is wisedome euermore, In vaine of us desirde?” The reader may decide for himself whether the question is answered or not, through the descriptions and the visions, Platonic and “Spenserian,” of a transcendent world to be seen with the eyes of heavenly Wisdom (Pisces, Sagittarius). Those who gave it to children to study thought so. Other answers are given throughout the book, and some with great power, especially that of mediaeval Christian stoicism. If sometimes the questions have more power upon us than the answers, that may indicate our relation, not the author's, to those answers.

Problem after problem receives treatment in the same concrete, denunciatory, full, often passionate style: the riddle of Fortune—subject to God, tyrannical, but powerless over the soul; the immortality of the soul, treated in several books; the infinity of the universe; the freedom of the will, Boethian in emphasis (“he alone is free, Whom reason rules,” Scorpius, 142); this author like Augustine and so many after him stresses right use of the gift of liberty, like Milton and so many before him emphasizes self-discipline and the maintaining of proper relation between the affections, the reason, and the will. Into and through every book is woven the problem of the relation of body to soul. The treatments of various aspects of this last problem are as complicated as learning and passion can make them. The line taken is generally that of the conventional hierarchy with Reason at the top, as being “more celestiall,” or as being that by virtue of which man is said to be made in God's image (though all the faculties are by God's plan in creation a natural part of man; the affections are the prick without which the mind would nought perform, and a wise man is not a “forme in marble signde,” Gemini, 35-6). The problems of the relation of body to soul and of matter to spirit are handled in every variety of context: in the context of a moral dualism, relentless in castigation of the vileness of body, in the context of a psychological analysis of man's rational and irrational faculties, in discussions of the nature of the soul, in passages eulogizing Reason, in relation to the corruptibility or incorruptibility of the heavens, in relation to the plurality of inhabited worlds, in relation to the famous Palingenian concept of an infinite space filled with light and inhabited by the finest spirits. In whatever context, Palingenius' treatments of these problems are full of foreshadowings, and like those of every Renaissance book, they are full of echoes.

It is these echoes which must be attended to by him who would see in Palingenius one of those martyrs to orthodoxy who cried new things aloud in the wilderness and could not be heard because the dark Middle Age still held sway. Any editor, even a mere facsimile editor, wishes well to his author. But before we can canonize Palingenius as one of the saints of freedom-of-thought, we must dig up and burn the bones of many a comfortably-buried predecessor, and there is a certain awkwardness in the respectability of the list. Nevertheless, there stands the incontrovertible fact. He was condemned, and condemned as no lesser heretic. The minds of inquisitors are tender. Still one can hardly believe that the snubbing of Aristotle, in remarks exalting Reason above him, for example, was sufficient to put the book on the Index, especially when that philosopher is rejected for such innocent reasons as some appear to be, e.g., a desire to deny Chance in a Christian cosmos. More serious are the implications of certain theories, seen perhaps as particularly dangerous in a particular time and place and configuration of ideas—albeit theories far from new, and argued without especial reference to their incompatibility with traditional Christian cosmology.

I shall not be the one to find all the possible reasons for that charge of heresy. He who does will, I suspect, find many of them in the book Aquarius.¹² He may find many of them in Palingenius' relationships to 15th and 16th century Averroistic thought in certain Italian centers,¹³ even perhaps in his relationship to the quarrels between Averroists of various stripes.¹⁴ Palingenius' relations to the points of conflict between these groups, and between them and more orthodox thinkers, are subtle, so hair-thin that they are obliterated by the heavier pen of a translator—especially that of one who was Protestant and under 25. In Aquarius particularly the author travels dangerous ground—discussing the infinity of the universe, the eternity of forms, the inhabitants of the stars, the eternity of the world, the creation ex nihilo, the necessity of the creation. Indeed, he is seldom off dangerous ground; to us the perils he runs are often less strange than the securities he stands upon. These latter I think were quite as important in their influence on English thinking.

There is no doubt, however, that part of Palingenius' great importance in England lay in his repudiation of certain Aristotelian dogmas, just as part of his great prestige lay in his condemnation for heresy. For though Renaissance England may have been mediaeval in much of what it believed, it was thoroughly modern in its affection for heretics, if only they might be Roman heretics. We have happily lost the bigotry of this last distinction. Googe's Palingenius is to be commended to the modern reader's attention as a writer heretically opposed to most of the intellectual positions taken for granted as “true” by the average modern man, and to most of the evaluations acted upon by modern society. One hopes that these differences from modern opinion will not sully the reputation he has gained on the score of being an “independent” and “original” thinker.

Notes

1. Contemporary references, and the list of schools in which study of Palingenius was prescribed by statute, are most conveniently found in Foster Watson, The ‘Zodiacus Vitae’ of Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus: An Old School-Book, London, 1908; an appendix gives texts of foreign references to Palingenius' work. Further substantiation of F. R. Johnson's description of it as “this most popular astronomical poem of the English Renaissance” may be found in the latter's Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England, Baltimore, 1937, esp. pp. 145-9. For Harvey's comments see Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, Stratford, 1913. The text of Bruno's comment, in which Palingenius is placed with Cusanus, Copernicus and Paracelsus, is given in E. Troilo, Un Poeta-Filosofo del 500: Marcello Palingenio Stellato, Rome, 1912 (Studi filosofici sul Rinascimento), a somewhat enthusiastic review of the main outlines of Palingenius' thought and their departure from received doctrine.

2. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols., Urbana, Ill., 1944, I, ch. 28.

3. The question of Palingenius' identity is discussed in G. Borgiani, Marcello Palingenio Stellato e il suo poema lo ‘Zodiacus Vitae,’ Città di Castello, 1912, where may be found references to early accounts of the author and later students' discussions, as well as an exposition of the Latin poem, book by book, and a good deal of information on reputation and influence. STC accepts the identification with Manzolli; Brunet thinks the proofs not incontestable. Bayle's account, still useful, is in Dict. hist. et crit., Rotterdam, 1697, II, 721-2. Borgiani dates the first Latin edition (Venice) ca. 1535-6; the Newberry Library has a copy of this edition (listed as ?-1531, in accord with datings by earlier bibliographers). His list of sixty-odd editions in Latin is divided according to countries; STC doubles his list for England. The STC does not list the first Latin edition in England (T. Marsh, 1569; sold at Sotheby's in 1940: 18 March). I owe knowledge of it to the late Dr. J. Q. Adams of the Folger Library.

4. Many modern bibliographers have described the various editions of the translation, partial and complete. Materials which are still useful are to be found in Warton, History of English Poetry, ed. Hazlitt, London, 1871, IV, 323-31, and in Arber's edition, in the English Reprints, of Googe's Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes, London, 1871 (1910). Especially in the latter will be found references to sources of information on Googe's life; or see R. C. Hope's introduction to his reprint of The Popish Kingdome … by Thomas Naogeorgus, London, 1880.

5. According to a speech addressed to Seneca in a vision; see Heywood's poetical preface to his translation of the Thyestes, 1559, printing finished March, 1560 (ed. by de Vocht in Bang's Materialen, Bd. xli, Louvain, 1913).

6. The characteristics of the poem discussed in this section are not personal to author or translator, and produce features which appear in both the Latin and English versions. A distinction between the two writers involved is proper only to the points which concern Googe's marginal glosses or his habits as a translator.

7. All references to the English translation are to pages in this edition; since many of the Latin editions have line numberings, those are used for references to the Latin version.

8. One marginal correction by Googe is interesting to the reader of Spenser and the emblem books: “… catch occasion by the hairy scalp,” p. 177, is added to his rendering of the text's “… Tumque sapit quum calva retro fortuna recessit …,” Sagitt., v. 828 (see J. G. McManaway, in Variorum Spenser, II, 226). Relations with Spenser seem not all tenuous; for a first essay at indicating some of them see the present writer's “Spenser and the Zodiake of Life,” JEGP, XXXIV (1935), 1-19.

9. Mediaeval and Renaissance attitudes on this question are suggestively treated in an article by Hans Baron on “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Humanistic Thought,” Speculum, XIII (1938), 1-37.

10. Palingenius' relation to this whole complex of ideas, and the Neo-Platonic and mediaeval discussions of them which preceded him, may be studied in A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., 1936.

11. Bibliographical aids to such a task are more conveniently to hand than heretofore, since the publication of two articles in the ACLS series of bibliographical surveys: P. O. Kristeller and J. H. Randall, “The Study of the Philosophies of the Renaissance,” JHI, II (1941), 449-96; and F. R. Johnson and S. V. Larkey, “Science [in the Renaissance],” MLQ, II (1941), 363-401.

12. A student of Palingenius' cosmological ideas, and of their relation to earlier and contemporary Neo-Platonic thought and to orthodox Aristotelian theory, will find most help in F. R. Johnson's study of Astronomical Thought in Ren. England, Baltimore, 1937; Palingenius himself is considered in pp. 145-9, 162-3; see also p. 69. Palingenius is listed not only in the Louvain Index of 1558 but in a good many later ones, as printed in F. H. Reusch, “Indices librorum prohibitorum des xvi. Jrh.,” Bibl. des litt. ver. in Stuttgart, CLXXVI (1886).

13. The physician Brasavola praised by Palingenius in the dedication to Ercole (for the translation see ed. of 1576) was the author of commentaries on Averroës dedicated to the same patron; see Renan, Averroës et l'averroïsme, Paris, 1861, 2d. ed., p. 407. Prof. P. O. Kristeller tells me that he does not know of a publication of these commentaries since Renan's designation of them as still in MS., but that conditions of teaching at Italian universities indicate that such authorship would not necessarily constitute proof of either man's philosophical alignment.

14. The violent and particularized style and the untechnical character of the language make it difficult even to align Palingenius with one of the four parties of opinion distinguished by A. H. Douglas in The Philosophy and Psychology of P. Pomponazzi, Cambridge, 1910, p. 63; these factors make it extremely difficult to pursue such careful distinctions as those by which Douglas defines Pomponazzi's position, for example (as in ch. viii, “Reason,” or ix, “Knowledge”).