A Looking Glasse for the Court

Book excerpt: An old-spelling edition Sir Francis Bryan's 1548 translation of Antonio de Guevara's Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (1539), a treatise in the contemptus mundi vein exhorting the reader to quit the court and live in the country. Although de Guevara has not been edited and published in English in over a century, during the mid-sixteenth century his prose was among the most read in all of Europe, translated into every major language. (Merik Casaubon remarked that no book besides the Bible was as often translated and reprinted as Guevara's Dial of Princes, a.k.a. The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius.) In A Looking Glasse for the Court, one will find a convergence of the courtly and medieval traditions with a heady infusion of classical erudition (sometimes spurious, of Guevara's own invention). It should be noted that while our text is based on the 1548 translation, our title is taken from the the later 1575 edition. Guevara's prologue, which appears in the original 1539 edition, has been newly translated and restored by Jessica Sequeira, as it has not previously appeared in English.