Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Francis Meres (1565–1647), a writer, translator, and clergyman, is best known as a witness to other writers’ careers, because of a brief section of his Palladis tamia (1598). Meres was born in 1565 in Holland, Lincolnshire, to a long-established family of local gentry. He entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, as a sizar in 1584, proceeded to a BA in 1587, and took his MA in 1591. He returned to Lincolnshire and unsuccessfully sought preferment with the assistance of influential local relatives John and Lawrence Meres. He was incorporated MA at Oxford in 1593. Meres sought advancement in London sometime before 1597, when he published his sermon on marriage, Gods arithmeticke . He was possibly associated with the Inns of Court, since two of the four books he published in 1598 were dedicated to members of the Middle Temple. Three were translations of the Dominican ascetic and theologian Fr Luis de Granada, whose works were entering a minor vogue in the English book trade and whose Libro de la oratión y meditatión , translated by Richard Hopkins, had already seen four printings in English by 1596. Meres is cagey about whether or not he translated directly from de Granada's Spanish; his title pages boast that ‘Fr Lewes’ has already been translated into Latin, French, and Italian (and in one case into German) before being ‘Englished by Francis Meres, Master of Arts in Both Universities, ... log in or subscribe to read full text