Two Modern Notes Attached to Earl Rivers's English Translation of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers

Abstract

The present paper is a progress report of our research project, the principal aim of which is to explore linguistic and textual details of Earl Rivers’s translation of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. It was obviously a popular text in the fifteenth and perhaps in the sixteenth centuries, judging from the existence of a number of different versions printed and copied in those days: William Caxton printed the first, second, and third editions of it in the fifteenth century, while Wynkyn de Worde printed another in 1528. There are also some extant manuscript versions, including two famous ones, i.e. MS Additional 22718, British Library and MS 265, Lambeth Palace Library, both copied from printed texts. Given the existence of numerous bibliographical studies on The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers from the eighteenth century onwards, research into the same text itself forms a tradition, which is worth exploring. As a step in this direction, the present paper transcribes two notes written by modern scholars, namely the anonymous note found in one of the John Rylands copies and William Blades’s note attached to MS Additional 22718.