Stephanie Downes
Manuscript and Print: The Body of Polycye in Sixteenth-Century England
John Skot’s earliest dated work, the Body of Polycye, was printed in London on 17 May, 1521. A version of the English translation of Christine’s Livre du corps de policie used by Skot in his edition is extant in a manuscript copy, Cambridge University Library MS Kk.l.5, executed in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. This paper argues that the existence of these two versions of the translation – one script and one print – does not, however, provide evidence of a direct ‘transmission’ between mediums. Minor typographical changes in the imprint might be overlooked as editorial prerogative, but Skot’s version also includes material entirely absent from the Cambridge manuscript copy. Copies of the translation that might place the Cambridge manuscript and Skot’s imprint within a genealogy of the work in England are lost, and we are left instead with the curious fact that Skot’s later imprint imitates extant French manuscripts (Musée Condé Chantilly MS 294) more precisely than the English manuscript produced some fifty years earlier. The Middle English translation of the Livre de corps de policie, then, provides evidence of an ongoing appreciation of the text as translation from French and from France.
The second part of this paper contends that in both script and print the Body of Polycye retains its female author and its French roots and utilizes these aspects of the work to graft itself onto questions of royal succession in England. It examines the Cambridge copy in the context of the manuscript in which it was bound it the late sixteenth century, alongside a copy of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; to their compiler, a book written by a woman may have seemed a suitable adjunct to a book written for a woman. Court records from 1533 link Skot with the publication of a book of the prophecies of Elizabeth Barton, hanged for speaking publicly against Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. The ongoing irony, observed elsewhere in the study of the reception of Christine’s oeuvre in England, is that the English translators and printers and readers of the Body of Polycye found commentary on the state of affairs at home implicit in its pages well into the Renaissance.