Sadly, it’s a first Saturday photo, but I didn’t want to wait until next month.
First Friday photo
Z is for Zitkála-Sá
Zitkála-Šá was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Dakota name was Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a German-American man named Felker, who abandoned the family while Zitkala-Ša was very young.
For her first eight years, Zitkála-Šá lived on the reservation. She later described those days as ones of freedom and happiness, safe in the care of her mother’s people and tribe. In 1884, missionaries came to the Yankton Reservation. They recruited several of the Yankton children, including Zitkala-Šá, taking them for education to the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker school in Wabash, Indiana.This training school was founded by Josiah White for the education of “poor children, white, colored, and Indian,” with the goal of helping them advance in society.
Zitkála-Šá attended the school for three years. She later wrote about both the deep misery of having her heritage stripped away, when she was forced to pray as a Quaker and cut her traditionally long hair. By contrast, she took joy in learning to read and write, and to play the violin.
In 1887 Zitkála-Šá returned to the Yankton Reservation to live with her mother. However, in 1891, Zitkála-Šá decided to return to the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute for further education. She studied piano and violin, and started to teach music at White’s when the teacher resigned. In June 1895, she was awarded her first diploma and gave a speech on women’s inequality.
Though her mother wanted her to return home after graduation, Zitkála-Šá chose to attend Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where she received a scholarship. Though initially feeling isolated and uncertain among her predominantly white peers, she soon proved her oratorical talents again with a speech entitled “Side by Side” in 1896. During this time, she began gathering Native American legends, translating them first to Latin and then to English for children to read. In 1897, however, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to leave Earlham College due to ill-health and financial difficulties.
From 1897 to 1899, Zitkála-Šá studied and played violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 1899 she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where she taught music to the children. She resented the founder’s program of assimilation into dominant white culture and the limitations of the curriculum, which prepared Native American children only for low-level work, assuming they would return to rural cultures. She also conducted debates on the treatment of Native Americans and began writing articles on Native American life, including one which describes the profound loss of identity felt by a Native American boy after undergoing the assimilationist education at the school. Soon after this article was published, Zitkála-Šáwas dismissed. She took a job as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and began collecting stories from Native Americans on the reservation to publish in Old Indian Legends, commissioned by the Boston publisher Ginn and Company.
In 1902 she met and married Captain Raymond Talefase Bonnin. Of mixed race, he was culturally Yankton and had one-quarter Yankton Dakota ancestry. Soon after their marriage, Captain Bonnin was assigned to the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah. The couple lived and worked there with the Ute people for the next fourteen years. During this period, Zitkála-Šá gave birth to the couple’s only son, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.
Zitkála-Šá had a fruitful writing career. American Indian Stories is a collection of childhood stories, allegorical fiction, and an essay, including several of Zitkála-Šá’s articles that were originally published in Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly. First published in 1921, these stories told of the hardships which she and other Native Americans encountered at the missionary and manual labor schools designed to “civilize” them and assimilate them to majority culture. The autobiographical writings described her early life on the Yankton Reservation, her years as a student at White’s Manual Labor Institute and Earlham College, and her period teaching at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Her autobiography contrasted the charm of her early life on the reservation with the “iron routine” which she found in the assimilation boarding schools.
Old Indian Legends (1901) was a collection of stories which she had gathered from various tribes. Directed primarily at children, the collection was an attempt both to preserve Native American traditions and stories in print and to garner respect and recognition for those traditions from the dominant European-American culture.
In 1910 Zitkála-Šá began collaborating with American composer William F. Hanson, who taught at Brigham Young University. She wrote the libretto and songs, based on sacred Sioux ritual, which the federal government prohibited the Ute from performing on the reservation. She also played Sioux melodies on the violin, and Hanson used this as the basis of his music composition.
In February 1913, the premiere performance of The Sun Dance Opera was presented at Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah. The production featured members of the Ute Nation, who lived on the nearby Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. It was significant for adapting the Native American oral musical tradition to a written one. Its debut was met with critical acclaim. Few works of Native American opera since have dealt so exclusively with Native American themes.
In 1938 the New York Light Opera Guild premiered The Sun Dance Opera at The Broadway Theatre as its opera of the year. Its publicity credited only William F. Hanson as composer.
Zitkála-Šá was an active member of the Society of American Indians, which published the American Indian Magazine. From 1918 to 1919 she served as editor for the magazine, as well as contributing numerous articles. These were her most explicitly political writings, covering topics such as the contribution of Native American soldiers to World War I, issues of land allotment, and corruption within the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the agency within the Department of Interior that oversaw American Indians. Many of her political writings have since been criticized for favoring assimilation. She called for recognition of Native American culture and traditions, while also advocating US citizenship rights to bring Native Americans into mainstream America. She believed this was how they could gain political power and protect their cultures.
Zitkála-Šá died on January 26, 1938 in Washington, DC at the age of sixty-one. She is buried under the name of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin in Arlington National Cemetery. Since the late 20th century, the University of Nebraska has reissued many of her writings on Native American culture.
She has been recognized by the naming of a Venusian crater “Bonnin” in her honor. In 1997 she was designated a Women’s History Month Honoree by the National Women’s History Project.
Zitkala-Sa’s legacy lives on as one of the most influential Native American activist of the twentieth century. She left with her an influential theory of Indian resistance and a crucial model for reform. Through her activism, Zitkála-Šá was able to make crucial changes to education, health care, legal standing of Native American people and the preservation of Indian culture.
Zitkála-Šá. 1876-1938. Old Indian Legends. Retold by ZItkala-Sa. Illustrations by Angel De Cors (Hinook-Mahwi-Kilinaka). Ginn and Company, 1901.
Zitkála-Šá., 1876-1938. American Indian Stories.Foreward by Dexter Fisher. University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Zitkála-Šá, 1876-1938. Dance in a buffalo skull. Iillustrated by S. D. Nelson.South Dakota State Historical Society Press, [2007]
Zitkála-Šá (Gertrude Bonnin). “Why I Am a Pagan.” The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings, Ed. Glynis Carr. Winter 1999.
Zitkála-Šá, Fabens, Charles H. and Matthew K. Sniffen. Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery. Philadelphia: Office of the Indian Rights Association, 1924.
Zitkála-Šá. Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera. Edited by P. Jane Hafen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8032-4918-7.
Zitkála-Šá: Letters, Speeches, and Unpublished Writings, 1898-1929. Edited by Tadeusz Lewandowski. Leiden, Boston: Brill Press, 2018.
Hanson, William F., and Zitkála-Šá.. The Sun Dance Opera (romantic American Indian opera, 1913, 1938).
For a more comprehensive listing of all her writings see the American Native Press Archives maintained by the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.
Y is for Ann Yearsley
Born in Bristol to John and Anne Cromartie (described as a milkwoman), Ann married John Yearsley, a yeoman, in 1774. Robert Southey wrote a biography of Ann Yearsley in the year 1831. He called his biography an “introductory essay on the lives and works of our uneducated poets.” Southey describes the first encounter between Hannah More, who became Ann Yearsley’s patron, with the poet. Hannah stated that Ann’s writing “excited [her] attention” because it “breathed the genuine spirit of poetry, and [was] rendered still more interesting by a certain natural and strong expression of misery that seemed to fill the head and mind of the author.”
Hannah More found Ann Yearsley living in poverty with six young children born in the space of seven years, while caring for her aged mother. Hannah was impressed by Ann’s ability to interpret the leading literature of the age with such accuracy “without having ever conversed with any body above her own level.” Hannah describes Ann as not having seen a dictionary or knowing anything of grammatical rules, bound to “ignorant and vulgar” syntax, yet using language full of metaphor, imagery, and personification. Hannah describes herself as striving to save Ann from the vanity of fame and being more concerned about providing food for Ann than providing fame.
More organized subscriptions for Ann Yearsley to publish Poems, on Several Occasions (1785). The success of the volume led to a quarrel between Hannah and Ann over access to the trust in which profits from the undertaking were held. Ann included her account of this quarrel in an Autobiographical Narrative appended to a fourth edition of the poems, which appeared in 1786.
Now supported by Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, Ann Yearsley published Poems, on Various Subjects in 1787. A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade appeared in 1788. Her poem was considered by many critics to rival a similar poem written by Hannah More entitled Slavery: A Poem. Ann Yearsley was one of many prominent Bristol women who campaigned against the Bristol slave trade.
Ann Yearsley turned to drama with Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play (performed in 1789 ; printed in 1791) and to novel-writing with The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript (1795). Her final collection of poetry, The Rural Lyre, appeared in 1796.
Ann Yearsley, 1753-1806. The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley. Edited by Kerri Andrews. Pickering and Chatto, 2014.
X is for Yu Xuanji
Yu Xuanji (pinyin: Yú Xuánjī, approximate dates 844–868/869), courtesy names Youwei (pinyin: Yòuwēi) and Huilan (pinyin: Huìlán), was a Chinese poet and courtesan of the late Tang dynasty, from Chang’an. She was one of the most famous women poets of Tang, along with Xue Tao, her fellow courtesan.
Her family name, Yu, is relatively rare. Her given name, Xuanji, translates roughly to “profound theory” or “mysterious principle,” and is a technical term in Daoism and Buddhism. “Yòuwēi” translates roughly to “young and tiny” and, “Huìlán” refers to a species of fragrant orchid. She is distinctive for the quality of her poems, including many written in what seems to be a remarkably frank and direct autobiographical style, using her own voice rather than speaking through a character.
Little trustworthy information is known about the relatively short life of Yu Xuanji. She grew up in Tang capital Chang’an, which was the terminus of the Silk Road and one of the most sophisticated cities of its time. Yu was married as a concubine, or lesser wife, to an official named Li Yi (pinyin: Lǐ Yì) at 16. After separating three years later, she became a courtesan and a Daoist nun. She was a fellow of Wen Tingyun, to whom she addressed a number of poems. She died early, at the age of 26 to 28. Apart from names and dates in her poems, the Little Tablet from the Three Rivers gives the only purported facts about her life, although these are salacious in detail: that she had an affair with Wen Tingyun, lived a scandalously promiscuous life, and was executed for allegedly beating her maid to death. This account is considered semi-fictional, and may be a reflection of the traditional distrust of women who were strong-willed and sexually independent.
In her lifetime, Yu Xuanji’s poems were published as a collection called Fragments of a Northern Dreamland, which has been lost. Forty-nine surviving poems were collected in the Song Dynasty mainly for their sensationalist value in an anthology that also included poems from ghosts and foreigners.
Yu Xuanji. The Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji. Translated by David Young and Jiann Wesleyan Press, 1998.
W is for Lady Mary Wroth
Lady Mary Wroth (18 October 1587 – approximately 1640) was the eldest daughter of Barbara Gamage, a Welsh heiress, and Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, the younger brother of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Lady Mary spent much of her childhood at the ancestral home of the Sidneys, Penshurst Place, one of the great country houses in the Elizabethan period. It was a center of literary activity and its gracious hospitality is praised in Ben Jonson’s famous poem To Penshurst. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger included Lady Mary in a group portrait of Lady Sidney and her children in 1596, which is now on display at Penshurst.
During a time when few women were educated, Lady Mary had the privilege of a formal education, which was obtained from household tutors under the guidance of her mother. With her family connections, a career at court was all but inevitable. In 1604, Lady Mary married Sir Robert Wroth and became part of Queen Anne’s intimate circle of friends, actively participating in masques and entertainments. Her poetry was circulated in manuscript and garnered much praise. Ben Jonson dedicated The Alchemist to her and praised her as “a Sydney” who incorporated the virtues of all the goddesses.
Sir Robert Wroth appears to have been a gambler, philanderer, and drunkard. Ben Jonson adds more evidence of an unhappy union, by noting that ‘my Lady Wroth is unworthily married on a Jealous husband.’ Various letters from Lady Mary to Queen Anne also refer to the financial losses her husband had sustained during their time together. Sir Robert died in 1614, leaving Lady Mary with an infant son and a debt of £23,000. She endeavored to pay off the debt herself, and suffered financial difficulties for the rest of her life. Never remarrying, Lady Mary bore two illegitimate children by her cousin, WIlliam Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke.
Lady Mary is best known for The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), an intricate prose romance patterned on Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Lady Mary also appended 19 songs and 83 sonnets to the text, entitled Pamphilia to Amphilantus (the latter name translates to Lover-of-two) portraying Pamphilia constant in her love for the faithless Amphilanthus. Lady Mary’s poems are in the Elizabethan style of her father’s Rosis and Lysa, and her uncle’s Astrophil and Stella. The work caused a scandal, since it was rumored to satirize court intrigues. Lady Mary apologized and withdrew the book from sale. A second half of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania remained in manuscript until it was published for the first time in 1999.
After the publication issues surrounding The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Wroth left King James’s court and was later abandoned by William Herbert. There is little known about Lady Mary’s later years but it is known that she continued to face major financial difficulties. Lady Mary is commemorated in Loughton by the naming of a footpath adjacent to Loughton Hall as Lady Mary’s Path.
Wroth, Mary, Lady, approximately 1586-approximately 1640. The first part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton,1995.
Wroth, Mary, Lady, approximately 1586-approximately 1640. The second part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts ; completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Renaissance English Text Society in conjunction with Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,1999.
Wroth, Mary, Lady, approximately 1586-approximately 1640. The poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Edited, with introduction and notes, by Josephine A. Roberts. Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
Wroth, Mary, circa 1586-circa 1640. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in manuscript and print. Edited by Ilona Bell ; texts by Steven W. May and Ilona Bell. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017.
U is for Leonora, Countess Ulfeldt
Leonora Christina, Countess Ulfeldt, born “Countess Leonora Christina Christiansdatter” (8 July 1621 – 16 March 1698), was the daughter of King Christian IV of Denmark and Kirstine Munk. Leonora Christina’s autobiography, Jammersminde (Memory of Woe, published 1869) shows a psychological and social realism unusual in the writings of 17th century noblewomen. Now regarded as a classic of Danish literature, it explores her prison years in detailed and vivid prose, recounting her crises, confrontations, humiliations, self-discipline, growing religious faith and serenity, together with descriptions of hardships she endured or overcame. The work still commands popular interest, scholarly respect, and has virtually become the stuff of legend as retold and enlivened in Danish literature and art.
Leonora Christina’s marriage to Corfits Ulfeldt, prime minister of Denmark until the death of Christian IV in 1648, led to the accusation of her being involved in her husband’s treason. First exiled, then confined to the Blue Tower from 1663 to 1685, Leonora Christina lived only 12 years after her release.
Countess Ulfeldt also wrote an account of her happy youth, Den Franscke Selvbiografi (The French Autobiography), completed in 1673 and smuggled out of the Blue Tower. It was intended to be included in Otto Sperling the Younger’s De Foeminis Doctis (On Learned Women) which was never published. In a compilation of biographical sketches of female regents, Heltinders Pryd (The Ornaments of Heroines, 1684), Leonora describes the combative, faithful and virtuous, and steadfast heroines whose struggles left role models for the future. Due to this work, some later literary and political critics see Leonora as a proto-feminist. Kristian Zahrtmann (1843-1917) has memorialized her story in a series of 18 monumental paintings, the first of which was shown in 1871. These paintings were later included as illustrations in an 1890 edition of Jammersminde, and released as individual prints in 1907.
Only recently have scholars focused on less positive aspects of the Countess’s personality: arrogance, stubbornness, blind devotion to an unworthy husband, and a disingenuous cleverness revealing itself as a tendency toward self-absorption and self-absolution that somehow never casts her in a negative light. For all these flaws, real or imagined, the saga of the prisoner of the Blue Tower — the fall of a mighty woman and her rise from despair to an even greater intellectual and spiritual might, as told against the backdrop of Europe during the Reformation — remains deeply compelling.
Through her son Count Leo Ulfeldt (1651-1716), an Austrian soldier, her descendants not only include some of the most influential German and Slavic noble families of Europe, but also: King Simeon II of the Bulgarians (born 1937), King Michael of Romania (born 1921), Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein (born 1945), Emperor Karl I of Austria-Hungary (1887-1922), King Peter II of Yugoslavia (1923-1970), King Manuel II of Portugal (1889-1932), King Frederick Augustus III of Saxony (1865-1932), Marie Christine, Princess Michael of Kent, (born 1945), Christoph, Cardinal von Schönborn (born 1945), Maximilian, Duke of Hohenberg (1902-1962), Johannes, Prince of Thurn and Taxis (1926-1990), and the Earls of Clanwilliam.
Also notable among her descendants is Isabelle, comtesse de Paris (1911-2003), whose life, aside from imprisonment, resembled Leonora Christina’s in several respects: Daughter of a morganatic union, she lived in exile with and remained staunchly faithful to a faithless husband, signed away valuable property for his sake, wrote biographies of historically significant women, and penned a memoir (Tout m’est Bonheur, 1978) that celebrated life’s blessings in the face of life’s travails.
Ulfeldt, Leonora Christina, 1621–1698. Memoirs of Leonora Christina, daughter of Christian IV of Denmark written during her imprisonment in the Blue Tower at Copenhagen, 1663-1685. Translated by F. E. Burnett. Dutton, 1929.
V is for Juan Luis Vives
Juan Luis Vives (Latin: Ioannes Lodovicus Vives; Catalan: Joan Lluís Vives i March; Dutch: Jan Ludovicus Vives; 6 March 1493 – 6 May 1540) was a Valencian scholar and humanist who spent most of his adult life in the Southern Netherlands.Vives was born in Valencia to a family which had converted from Judaism to Christianity. As a child, he saw his father, grandmother and great-grandfather, as well as members of their wider family, executed as Judaizers at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition; his mother was acquitted but died of the plague when he was 15 years old. Shortly thereafter, he left Spain never to return.
Vives studied at the University of Paris from 1509 to 1512, and in 1519 was appointed professor of humanities at the University of Leuven. At the insistence of his friend Erasmus, he prepared an elaborate commentary on Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, which was published in 1522 with a dedication to Henry VIII of England. Soon afterwards, Henry invited him to England as tutor to the Princess Mary, for whose use he wrote De Institutione Feminae Christianae, on the education of girls. He dedicated the latter book to Henry’s queen Catherine of Aragon, which is ironic considering that the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who were Catherine of Aragon’s parents, were also leaders of the Spanish Inquisition that executed Vives’ relatives.
In De Institutione Feminae Christianae, Vives details the necessary attributes of a married woman. She must be loyal, dedicated, and obedient to her spouse; she must dress appropriately, covering her face in public; she must not allow any man into her house without her husband’s permission. While a wife’s obedience and dedication to her spouse determined her honor, a husband’s honor stemmed from his ability to control his wife and ensure she remained virtuous.
While in England, he resided at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where his friend Erasmus had strong ties. Having declared himself against the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Vives lost royal favour and was confined to his house for six weeks. On his release, he withdrew to Bruges, where he devoted the rest of his life to the composition of numerous works, chiefly directed against the scholastic philosophy and the preponderant unquestioning authority of Aristotle.
Vives, Juan Luis,1492-1540. The education of a Christian woman : a sixteenth-century manual. Edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
T is for Lucrezia Tornabuoni
Lucrezia Tornabuoni (22 June 1427 – 25 March 1482) was a writer and influential political adviser. Connected by birth to two of the most powerful families in 15th-century Italy she later married Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, connecting herself to another of the most powerful families in Italy and extending her own power and influence. She had significant political influence during the rule of her husband and that of her son, Lorenzo. She worked to support the needs of the poor and religion in the region, supporting several institutions. She was a patron of the arts, and also wrote poems and plays herself.
Lucrezia and Piero had eight children, including Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492). Piero presented Lucrezia with a desco da parto showing the Triumph of Fame by Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi, to celebrate the birth of their first son and heir. Piero and Lucrezia hired tutors, Gentile de’ Becchi and Cristoforo Landino among them, to educate their children in such subjects as philosophy, business, and politics, and to ensure that they acquired good taste in literary culture and the fine arts.
Lucrezia wrote religious stories, plays, and poetry. She read her poems to famous poets, comparing them with their compositions. Some of her poems were set to popular tunes and performed publicly, and published four years after she died.. She wrote stories about Esther, Susanna, Tobias, John the Baptist and Judith, in part to inspire and educate her grandchildren.
A significant patron of the arts, Lucrezia commissioned the Morgante by Luigi Pulci, who called her “a famous lady in our century.” She also supported the poet Angelo Poliziano, who was also a tutor for her grandchildren by Lorenzo. He would read Lucrezia’s poems to them. Lucrezia was a patron of Bernardo Bellincioni, with whom she would exchange humorous poems that they had written.
Lucrezia also supported several religious institutions. She was responsible for the addition of the Chapel of the Visitation in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. When Lucrezia recovered from an illness in 1467, she believed it was due to the intercession of Saint Romuald, and supported the hermitage at Camaldoli which he had founded.
Around 1475, Lucrezia’s brother Giovanni Tornabuoni commissioned a portrait of her by Domenico Ghirlandaio, which is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She may also be represented in three scenes in Ghirlandaio’s frescos in the Tornabuoni Chapel: The Visitation, The Birth of the Baptist, and The Nativity of Mary.
Tornabuoni, Lucrezia, 1425-1482. Sacred narratives. Edited and translated by Jane Tylus. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
S is for Tibors de Sarenom
Tibors is one of eight trobairitz with vidas, short Occitan biographies, often more hypothetical than factual. Research into Tibors the poet’s identification is hampered by the popularity of her name in Occitania during the period of her life.
Tibors was the daughter of Guilhem d’Omelas and Tibors d’Aurenga, who brought as dowry to her husband the castle of Sarenom, probably Sérignan-du-Comtat in Provence or perhaps Sérignan in the Roussillon. Sadly for historians and Occitanists, Tibors and Guilhem had two daughters, both named Tibors, after their mother.
Raimbaut d’Orange, the famous troubadour, was a younger son of Guilhem and Tibors and thus a younger brother of the two Tibors sisters. In 1150, Tibors d’Aurenga died and by her will left Raimbaut, then a minor, under the guardianship of her elder daughter Tibors and her son-in-law, Bertran dels Baus, who was Tibors’ second husband, with whom she had three sons: Uc, father of Barral of Marseille; Bertran, father of Raimon; and Guilhem, also a troubadour.
Of Tibors’ work only a single stanza of a canso with its attached vida and razo has survived. Nonetheless she is mentioned in an anonymous ballad dated to between 1220 and 1245, where she acts as the judge of a game of poetry. Her only extant work, Bels dous amics is translated below.
Sweet handsome friend, I can tell you truly
that I’ve never been without desire
since it pleased you that I have you as my courtly lover;
nor did a time ever arrive, sweet handsome friend,
when I didn’t want to see you often;
nor did I ever feel regret,
nor did it ever come to pass, if you went off angry,
that I felt joy until you had come back;
nor [ever]. . .
Looking into printed translations of Tibors, all I could find is this score.
Escot, Pozzi. Bel dous amics: soprano, oboe, viola. Publication Contact International, 1993.
R is for Margaret Roper
Margaret Roper (née More) (1505–1544) was an English writer and translator, as well as one of the most learned women of sixteenth-century England. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas More and Jane Colt. Margaret, or “Meg” as her father called her, was a frequent visitor during More’s imprisonment in the Tower of London.
Margaret married William Roper in 1521 and had five children: Elizabeth (1523–60), Margaret (1526–88), Thomas (1533–98), Mary (d. 1572), and Anthony (1544–1597).
Margaret’s father, Thomas More, was Chancellor of England for Henry VIII. A devout Roman Catholic, More refused to accept Henry VIII as head of the English Church, and would not sign the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Succession (1534). For his refusal, More was beheaded and his head was displayed on a pike at London Bridge for a month. Afterwards, Margaret bribed the man who was charged to take the head down and throw it in the Thames, to give it to her instead. She preserved it by pickling it in spices until her own death at the age of 39 in 1544. After her death, her husband, William Roper took charge of the head, and it is buried with him.
William Roper produced the first biography of his father-in-law, but his homage is not remembered as well as his wife’s efforts. Alfred, Lord Tennyson invoked Margaret Roper, “who clasped in her last trance/ Her murdered father’s head” in his Dream of Fair Women as a paragon of loyalty and familial love.
Roper was the first non-royal woman to publish a book she had translated into English, Precatio Dominica by Erasmus, as A Devout Treatise upon the Paternoster. In a letter Roper mentions her poems, but none are extant.
Erasmus, Desiderius, died 1536. A devout treatise upon the pater noster made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterdamus and tourned into englishhe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of xix yere of age. Copied by L. W. Longstaff from a copy made by Mr. T. Raworth in 1949 from the British Museum copy.
Lapidary Prose 