AMDigital Reference:MS Mm.3.32

A fair holograph copy of Wenman's partial translation of Jean de Maumont's French adaptation of the twelfth-century Byzantine historian Joannes Zonaras's Epitome historion (Epitome of history). Wenman's translation of Zonaras's text exists in three manuscripts, all currently held at Cambridge University Library, MS Mm.3.32 (described here), MS Dd.1.18 and MS Dd.1.19. The Epitome of History starts with the creation of the world and ends with the reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexis I. Wenman worked from a French translation printed in Paris in 1583 which arranged Zonaras's text into three "books". (An earlier edition of this translation was printed in 1561.) The French text supplements Zonaras's text with information drawn from other sources. All that survives of Wenman's translation is part of the text of the first "book". Wenman followed the French version in dividing up Zonaras's text into numbered "Histories", each preceded by a short argument. Cambridge University Library MS Mm.3.32 (the manuscript described here) begins at the start of History 17 and ends in the middle of History 20. It is written, according to C.H. Cooper (1865), in Wenman's autograph. If Cooper is right, MS Mm.3.32 must have been written out before 1617, the date of Wenman's death. Watermark evidence suggests a date in the 1590s. Cambridge University Library MS Dd.1.18 and Cambridge University Library MS Dd.1.19 contain a fair scribal transcription of Wenman's text, made, as the title-page of MS Dd.1.18 makes explicit, not only after Wenman's death but also after the elevation of her husband to a Viscountcy in 1628 and possibly after his death in 1640. MS Dd.1.18 contains, in addition to translations of the preliminaries of the French printed edition, the complete text of Histories 1-15 and the beginning of History 16. MS Dd.1.19 contains the remainder of History 16, Histories 17-19 and a large part of History 20, though misbound. Two scribes (Hands A and B) were involved in the copying of these manuscripts. They seem to have worked from MS Mm.3.32 (as well as from other lost manuscripts containing portions of the text not included in MS Mm.3.32), as MS Mm.3.32 includes copious annotation in Hand A. The many alterations to Wenman's text made by Hand A were incorporated in the text of Dd.1.19, in addition to other alterations. As translated in Dd.1.18, the title-page of the French edition lists the contents of the full text of Zonaras's text. It seems quite likely, then, that Wenman translated all of the Epitome and that most of her translation is lost.Jane Griffiths has tentatively linked Wenman's translation of Zonaras with her Catholicism, suggesting that "Although De Maumont's preface stresses that the work is one of "secular and humane learning" (C.U.L. MS Dd. i. 18, fol. 2v), it describes rulers who "separated themselves" from "the sincere and true doctrine of God" (ibid., fol. 9v), and its translation in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century might well have been regarded as a political act" (Griffiths, forthcoming). The substance of Zonaras's criticism of such rulers-certain Byzantine emperors (Magdalino 1983)is unfortunately confined to a late section of his text which does not exist in Wenman's translation.Nothing is known about the context of the transcription of Wenman's translation in presentation form in MS Dd.1.18 and MS Dd.1.19 beyond the fact that the scribe of Hand A had access to MS Mm.3.32 and was aware of the identity of its author. Hand A's alterations to Mm.3.32 are stylistic rather than substantive. His/her main intention seems to have been to modernise Wenman's vocabulary.

Reproduction of: Partial holograph translation of Zonaras'sEpitome historion (Epitome of History), c. 1591-1617.

Cambridge University Library