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More Sources of Rastell's Interlude of the Four Elements
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Recent publications have suggested a considerable number of sources of the cosmological and cosmographical material in John Rastell's Interlude of the Four Elements. M. E. Borish maintains that the source of Rastell's “cosmology, natural history, and geography is Gergor Reisch's Margarita Philosophica.” Elizabeth M. Nugent affirms that Rastell garnered his material not only from Reisch but also from Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De proprietatibus rerum, Caxton's Mirrour of the World, Sacrobosco's Textus de Sphaera, and Martin Waldseemüller's Cosmographiae Introductio (to which was appended Amerigo Vespucci's Quattuor navigationes and Waldseemüller's huge world map of 1507). I wish to add to this list of sources a number of pertinent texts which have been overlooked.
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References
1 “Source and Intention of The Four Elements,” SP, xxxv (1938), 149–63.
2 “Sources of John Rastell's The Nature of the Four Elements,” PMLA, lvii (1942), 74–88. See also George B. Parks' rejoinder, “Rastell and Waldseemüller's Map,” PMLA, lviii (1943), 572–574; and his article, “The Geography of the Interlude of the Four Elements,” PQ, xvii (1938), 251–262.
3 Four Elements, pp. 31–32. My citations from Rastell's interlude are from the text published by J. O. Halliwell in Publications of the Percy Society, vol. xxii (1848). Miss Nugent (op. cit., p. 81) cites Waldseemüller's Cosmographiae Introductio as the source of this passage.
4 The idea that Vespucci first discovered the New World, and the designation of this new continent as America, were first begun in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller in his Cosmographiae Introductio. Thereafter, currency to Vespucci's fame as the first discoverer was given by all cosmographers until 1533, when John Schöner (in his Opusculum geographicum) gave due credit to Columbus. Cf. Justin Winsor, ed., Narrative and Critical History of America (New York, 1899), ii, 174 ff.
5 Sig. Biii (Harvard Library copy).
6 “… in occasu ultra africam et Europam magna pars terre quam ab Americo eius repertore Americam vocant vulgo autem novus mundus dicitur….” Verso of title-page (William L. Clements Library copy, University of Michigan).
7 “… alia quarta pars ab Americo vesputio sagacis ingenii viro inventa est, quam ab ipso Americo eius inventore Amerigem quasi americi terram sive americam appellari volunt….” Ibid., folio vii verso.
8 “AMERICA sive Amerigen novus mundus: et quarta orbis pars: dicta ab eius inventore Americo Vesputio viro sagacis ingenii: qui earn reperit Anno domini 1497.” Beginning of Chapter XI, folio 60 (Harvard Library copy). Other references to Vespucci and America are on folios ii verso, iiii recto, v verso, vii recto and verso.
9 For other books published before 1518 (the generally accepted date of Rastell's play) which disseminated the idea that Vespucci first discovered the novus mundus, see Henry Harrisse, Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, A Description of Works Relating to America, 1492–1551 (New York, 1866), entries 48, 49, 55, 83, 84, 86, 90. For a list of several sets of globe gores prior to 1518 which contained the label America, see E. L. Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes (New Haven, 1921), i, 74 ff.
10 Four Elements, p. 32. Nugent (op. cit., p. 86) and Borish (op. cit., p. 157) suggest respectively Waldseemüller's Cosmographiae Introductio and Reisch's Margarita Philosophica as the source of this passage. Cf. also Parks, PQ, xvii (1938), p. 255.
11 A. W. Pollard edition (London, 1900), p. 225. The STC lists five London editions between 1496 and 1504. Parks, PQ, xvii (1938), p. 255, has suggested Mandeville, but his citations do not contain the terms India Minor and India Major.
12 The Kalender of Shepherdes, A Reprint of Richard Pynson's Edition, London, 1506, ed. H. O. Sommer (London, 1892), p. 166. This work is a translation of the French Le Compost et Kalendrier des bergiers, published first at Paris in 1493. There were eight editions before 1500. An English edition was published at Paris in 1503, another at London in 1506 (by Pynson), and another at London in 1508 (by Robert Copland and Wynkyn de Worde).
13 Reprinted by Edward Arber in The First Three Books on America (Birmingham, England, 1885), pp. xxvii–xxxvi. Arber dates this tract 1511?; Harrisse dates it 1522.
14 Sig. Cii recto.
15 “INDIA SUPERIOR SIVE ORIENTALIS….Haec cum minori Meridionali India: est sub dominio Presbyteri Ioannis.” Luculdentissima quaedam terrae totius descriptio, folio 54.
16 Four Elements, pp. 28–31.
17 Cf. Columbus' Letter to Luis Santangel (1493), Columbus' “Lettera Rarissima” (1505), the Syllacio-Coma Letter (ca. 1497), Angelo Trivigiano's Libretto (1504), Marcus Sabellicus' Enneades (1504), and Peter Martyr's Decades (1511, 1516). See these accounts in John Boyd Thacher's Christopher Columbus (New York and London, 1903), II, 21–25, 250, 259, 487–89, 520–22, 694; and the Decades, reprinted in Arber, op. cit., pp. 67, 77, 137–38, 161–62, 242, 345.
18 Cf. the following:
a. “They have brought back here [to Portugal] seven natives, … These … are clothed in the skins of various animals, … In their land there is no iron, … They have great quantity of salmon, herring, cod and similar fish. They have also great store of wood and above all pines for making masts and yards of ships.” Letter from Pietro Pasqualigo, Venetian Ambassador to Portugul, containing an account of Gaspar Corterat's voyage to Newfoundland in 1500; published in Paesi nouamente retrousti (Venice, 1507); cited and trans. by James A. Williamson, The Voyages of the Cabots (London, 1929), p. 28.
b. “This yeare [1500] also were brought unto the king [Henry VII of England] three men, taken in the new founde Iland, … These were clothed in beestes skinnes, and ate raw fleshe, … and in their demeanour like to bruite beastes, …” Robert Fabyan's (now lost) Chronicle; cited in Hakluyt's Voyages as part of the account of Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland in 1498; quoted from Williamson op. cit., p. 37.
c. “… the people of this land [”Armenica“] have no kynge or lorde nor theyr god … this people goeth all naked, … lyven lyke bestes without any reasonablenes…. They take much fysche for they can goen under the water and feche so the fysches out of the water.” Of the newe landes and of ye people founde by the messengers of the Kynge of portygale named Emanual, reproduced in Arber, op. cit., pp. xxvii–xxxvi and in Harrisse, op. cit., pp. 197–98.
12 “AMERICA…. In ea sunt homines brutales proceres ac elegant staturae: vivunt ex piscibus: quos in mari piscantur. Nullos domorum pagos: nullane tuguria habentes: praeter quem folia arborum grandia: sub quibus a solis fervore: sed non ab imbribus se protegunt…. Adorant firmamentum et Stellas. Et in quibusdam huius locis habent domicilia ad instar campanarum fabricata…. Insula est mire magnitudinis: sed nondum prorsus cognita: in qua virilis ac foeminini etiam sexus homines non aliter quam eos mater peperit ire consueti sunt….
PARIAS INSULA … est… specialis magna portio terrae huius quarta partis mundi. Nucli sicuti superioris insulae homines habent: sed sua libertate vivunt: … nullam legem; nullum legitimum thori foedus in suis connubiis observant: eorum etenim vita omnino voluptuosa est. Sacrificia nulla faciunt: nec loca orationisne domos habent. Domus eorum ad instar campanarum constructae sunt…. Sylvis ac nemoribus maxime plena….
SPAGNOLLA INSULA…. Nudi etiam ambulant: ferrum non habent. Adorant coelum: solem: et lunam.“ Op. cit., folios 60–61.
Contending that Rastell was “greatly influenced by Vespucci's account” of the natives, Miss Nugent (pp. 85–86) cites four passages from the Quattuor navigationes. Professor Parks (PMLA, lviii, 572) reluctantly accepts these passages as “conclusive” evidence. Vespucci's statements, however, are virtually reproduced in Schöner's account here cited.
20 Third Decade (published in 1516), cited in Hakluyt's Voyages, ed. Ernest Rhys in Everyman's Library edition (New York, 1907, 1927), v, 89. In Richard Eden's translation (Arber, op. cit., p. 162) the word is not copper but laton, but his marginal note reads: “Perhappes this laton is copper which holdeth gold.”
21 The Decades (Section v, “Out of the Writings and Maps of Francisco Lopez de Gomara and Sebastian Cabot”); cited from Arber, op. cit., p. 345. Cf. also: “They [in Baccalaos]… go covered with the skinnes of dyvers beasts both wylde and tame…. They have sylver and copper, … They are Idolaters and honoure the soone and moone, …” (Section ii, from Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes); Arber, p. 242.
22 Four Elements, p. 2.
23 Ibid., p. 16.
24 Ibid., pp. 39-40.
25 Ibid., pp. 40–41.
26 Hain, Copinger, and Panzer list fifteen editions of Pliny before 1518. Borish (op. cit., pp. 154–155) finds all three proofs also in Reisch's Margarita Philosophica. The phraseology in Rastell's passages, however, is not precisely that of either Reisch or Pliny.
27 Bk ii, cap. lxxii. I cite from the Loeb Classical Library edition (trans. H. Rackham), pp. 313–315; though I disagree with Professor Rackham's translation of illi as “the latter” rather than as “the aforesaid.” Miss Nugent (p. 80, note) refers to a similar passage in Sacrobosco's Textus de Sphaera.
28 Bk. ii, cap. lxxi, pp. 311–313. Similar statements are in Aristotle's De Coelo, Bk. ii, cap. xiv and in Proclus' De Sphaera. For the latter (of which a Latin translation by Thomas Linacre was published in London about 1510), I cite William Salysburye's translation (London, 1550), sig. Fiiii.
29 Bk. ii, lxv, p. 299. The same proof in Roger Bacon's Opus Majus is (like Reisch's) accompanied by an explanatory diagram similar to that drawn by Rastell's character Experience. See The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, ed. Robert B. Burke (University of Pennsylvania, 1928), i, 177-178.
30 Four Elements, p. 11.
31 Op. cit., p. 123.
32 Paraphrased by J. L. E. Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems from Tholes to Kepler (Cambridge, 1906), p. 229. This work of uncertain authorship was originally placed in the Opera of Bede (cf. Dreyer's notes). A similar passage is also in Robert Wyer's Boke of Demaundes (London, ca. 1532), sig. Aii verso (Huntington Library copy), a popular book which was merely an awkward paraphrase of a much earlier French work entitled The histary of kyng Boccus & Sydracke. In his edition of Caxton's Mirrour (EETS, ES, CX, 50–51), O. H. Prior cites four other sources of the passage in question. Miss Nugent (p. 79) cites the Mirrour as Rastell's source.
33 Cf. Nugent, pp. 77–78.
34 Cited from Apianus by Richard Eden in his “Epistle to the Reader” accompanying his translation of Sebastian Minister's Cosmographia Universalis (called by Eden A Treatise of the Newe India); I quote from Arber, op. cit., p. 10.
35 Nugent (pp. 81–92) juxtaposes passages from Waldseemüller's Cosmographiae Introductio. Similar statements occur in Proclus' De Sphaera (Salysburye's translation, [London, 1550], sigs. Ei–iii) and in Schöner's Luculentissima descriptio (folio 3); and an almost verbal reproduction of Waldseemüller's passages is in Stobnicza's Introductio in Claudii Ptholomai Cosmographiam, sig. i. verso.
36 Op. cit., pp. 128–131.
37 “Universalis mundi machina in duas partes principales dividitur scilicet in regionem etheream que est pars mundi celestis et regionem elementarem que est totum spacium sub concavo Orbis lune. Unde regio etherea sive celestis est illa mundi pars que immediate supra regionem elementarem sita est: … Unde regio elementaris diffinitive est illa pars universi in qua continue fiunt rerum transmutationes, scilicet alterationes et corruptiones.” Sigs. ii recto, ix verso (Huntington Library copy). Cf. this passage with that from Sacrobosco's Textus de Sphaera cited by Miss Nugent (p. 76).
38 Similar captions are in the table of contents of Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum Naturale. Nugent (pp. 87–88) and Borish (p. 153) cite pertinent material respectively from Caxton's Mirrour and Reisch's Margarita Philosophica.