Challenging the author: Gavin Douglas's Eneados

Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, a translation into the “Scottis” tongue of Virgil’s Aeneid, completed in 1513 and first published in London in 1553, presents, as well as the translation of the additional thirteenth book by Maphaeus Vegius, original prologues and marginal notes to the text, rubrics and articulate conclusive material. The present paper analyses this complex paratext as evidence of Douglas’s almost philological attention to the original and his preoccupation with a faithful reproduction; it is also suggested that the models for his organization of the commentary might be both medieval (i.e., manuscripts such as Petrarch’s Virgilius Ambrosianus) and early modern, as in the case of editions of classical works: the most apt example being Jodocus Badius Ascensius’ edition of the Aeneid, printed in 1501. The Eneados thus stands on the threshold between manuscript and print, and might have indicated new possibilities of use of the printing medium in Scotland, and of the value of the translation of a classical text, had history not intervened with the Scottish defeat at Flodden Fields in 1513, which put a temporary stop both to the circulation of the Eneados and to the development of Scottish printing.