History
Caxton in 1476 travelled to Westminster from Bruges, where he had been running a successful printing business. He wanted to practice his new printing skills in his native country. He had perhaps learned printing technology in Cologne. The first book Caxton printed with a date was Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, although it is not usually regarded as the first book he had printed in England.
The translation of Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers from French to English was by Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, who did the translation on a voyage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostella. In 1473 the knight Lewis de Bretaylle had lent him a French manuscript, Les ditz moraulx des philosophes by Jehan or Guillaume de Thionville, whose turn-of-the-fifteenth-century French translation of a Latin work has a lineage that derives from an Arabic text. The Arabic, Mukhtar al-hikam wa mahasin al-kalim ("Choice Maxims and Finest Sayings") was written toward the middle of the eleventh century by al-Mubashshir ibn Fatiq, an Egyptian emir.
When Woodville finished with his translation from French to English he handed the manuscript to Caxton for proofreading. Caxton revised the translation and added an epilogue. He pointed out that Woodville had omitted the remarks of Socrates concerning women. A chapter was then edited back in called "Touching Women".
Read more about this topic: Dictes And Sayings Of The Philosophers
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)