'Triumphs of English' Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court : New Essays in Interpretation

One of the few authors from the ranks of the nobility during the first half of the sixteenth century, Henry Parker, Lord Morley (c.1481-1556) is an undeservedly neglected figure, whose rehabilitation this volume sets out to accomplish. Morley was the first Tudor writer to render Petrarch's Trionfi into English verse, he set about imitating the "Italian Ryme called Soneto", and he translated Plutarchian Lives into English decades before any other writer attempted to do so. Indeed his career forms a context against which to read the accomplishments of the much better known Henrician writers Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. He presented his translations each year as New Year's gifts to those he wished to please, individuals as diverse as Henry VIII himself, the King's daughter Mary, and Thomas Cromwell. To Mary he wrote in praise of orthodoxy whilst to Henry and Cromwell he condemned the pope in no uncertain terms. When Parker's own daughter, the widow of George Boleyn, Lord Rochford was beheaded as an accomplice to Catherine Howard, he responded by translating Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus and suggesting this text stand as a model for those ladies at Court whose behaviour was less than exemplary. As these essays show, Morley was a kind of mirror of the ways in which the Tudor nobility functioned in a world wracked by faction and discord. Triumphs of English is a deeply interdisciplinary collection and has contributions by leading historians, cultural critics and literary scholars: David Starkey, James P.Carley, Julia Boffey, A.S.G.Edwards, K.R.Bartlett, Richard Rex, Jeremy Maule, David R. Carlson, James Simpson, Marie Axton, Suzanne Woods, and Richard Axton. It also includes editions of hitherto unpublished writings by Morley, one of which has long been lost. The result is a richly interconnected whole, each essay discrete in itself, but also reflecting and illuminating the others.