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:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)