St Thomas More (1478–1535), ed. Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1467–1536)
De optimo reip. statu, deque noua insula Vtopia
Basel: Johann Froben, 1518
Late in 2014 a Cambridge historian consulting this early edition of Utopia discovered three previously unnoticed manuscript poems, credited to Erasmus of Rotterdam, written in the margins. Two of these he could identify; the one shown here, an epitaph on King Henry VII, was unknown. Further research suggests that it was probably written in the hand of a member of the humanist circle surrounding Thomas More. To discover a poem five hundred years after it was written is a rare privilege: how many more such discoveries remain within the Royal Library’s 30,000 volumes?
Rel.c.51.3, pp. 318-319 (Royal Library)
It is unfortunate that we cannot yet identify the first owner of CUL Rel.c.51.3, a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia that made it into Bishop Moore’s collection just a few years before it passed to the crown and thence to Cambridge as part of King George I’s handsome donation. Johannes Froben’s Basel edition of Utopia appeared under the title De optimo reip. statu, deque noua insula Vtopia in spring 1518, and was one of the publishing highlights of that year. Edited by Desiderius Erasmus, the most renowned scholar of that generation, the volume was a sort of testimony to his friendship with More, and it included not only Utopia but also the collected Latin poems first of More and then of Erasmus himself. For it was probably the original owner who, doubtless with the scholarly self-satisfaction of one who knows something that others don’t, copied into the margins of this book three poems by Erasmus that were not to be found in the published collection. These poems were rediscovered and identified late in 2014 by Richard Rex (Reader in Reformation History in the Faculty of Divinity, and Fellow of Queens’ College).
Checking the two modern critical editions of Erasmus’s poetry, he was not surprised to learn that two of these poems (found on p. 355 of the volume), a linked pair composed in connection with a summit conference between King Henry VIII and the Emperor Charles V at Calais in July 1520, were already known, having been discovered in the early 1880s in a manuscript now in the Bibliotheek Rotterdam.
The pleasant surprise was that the third item, a curious sort of epitaph on King Henry VII (found on p. 319) appeared to be entirely unknown. Further researches in the literature relating both to Henry VII and to early Tudor neo-Latin poetry confirmed this. A lost poem of Erasmus’s had indeed come to light. A full account of this new discovery and of the other two poems has been produced by Richard Rex in collaboration with a colleague at Queens’ College, the classicist David Butterfield, and is currently under consideration for publication in Humanistica Lovaniensia: the Journal of Neo-Latin Studies.
All three of the poems copied into this volume have strong connections first with England and secondly with Thomas More in particular. Thomas More was at Calais for the summit in 1520, and afterwards travelled back to Bruges with Erasmus before returning to England. And back in 1509, when Erasmus came to England in the first flush of enthusiasm for a new golden age of learning which was expected to result from the death of Henry VII and the succession of the young Henry VIII, More and Erasmus spent a great deal of time together in what was the period of their closest friendship and the likeliest time for the composition of the ‘epitaph’. These unpublished verses probably circulated in the humanist coterie that clustered around Thomas More, and the original owner of this volume, who lovingly copied these extra verses into it, was very probably a member of that circle.
Richard Rex and David Butterfield
