Versifying Philosophy: Thomas Blundeville’s Plutarch

Abstract

Thomas Blundeville's Three morall treatises contain three parts. All three works are translations from pieces in Plutarch's Moralia, and the Greek originals and the Latin intermediaries that Blundeville used are all in prose. These two, The learned prince and The fruites of foes , are the focus of this chapter. Blundeville offers Plutarch in a form that could plausibly be learned by heart and although he attempts at some level to import into his verse the virtue of prose that makes ordinary sense, he has set up his selections from the Moralia so as to invite singing. Blundeville writes with an eye on the possibilities for more or less neat formulations of moral point, for sentences and similitudes encouraged by Erasmus' highlighting of passages in Plutarch's more fluid text, but made necessary by the organisation of material into quatrains. Keywords:Plutarch; The fruites of foes; The learned prince; Thomas Blundeville; Three morall treatises; translation

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