Friday, March 22, 2013

Margaret Roper

The eldest daughter of St. Thomas More.
Also in 1524, Margaret had finished one of her grandest projects as a scholar and an intellectual. She translated the soliloquy on the Lords Prayer called “Precatio dominica”, by the Dutch humanist and great friend of her father’s, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Her aim was to write vivid and readable English prose. The work isn’t an exact word-for –word translation but an attempt to represent Erasmus’s “sense and meaning”. Her book is called “A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster, made first in Latin by the most famous doctor Master Erasmus Roterodamus, and turned into English by a young, virtuous and well-learned gentlewoman of xix years of age”. It was published in October 1524. Margaret became the first non-royal woman to publish a book she had translated into English. (Read entire post.)
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