When the Scottish bishop Gavin Douglas (c.1476–1522) translated Virgil's ancient Latin epic the Aeneid into his vernacular tongue in 1513, he produced a literary monument which would go on to be appreciated and praised for centuries. The translation marked the first time that a major classical poem had been faithfully and entirely carried over into English, and even today the work preserves the power to enchant its English readers, just as it had inspired near‐contemporary poets in their own attempts at vernacularisation. Much later, the early twentieth century responded to it with notable excitement: Douglas was foremost among the poets W. H. Auden fell for when he first discovered the wonders of medieval verse, and Ezra Pound even claimed that the Eneados was better than the Aeneid itself. Despite such long‐standing enthusiasm, however, scholarship seems to have struggled to get a firm handle on what Douglas's translation originally looked like. Accordingly, this is the task which Priscilla Bawcutt and Ian C. Cunningham have set themselves with their new critical edition.

For decades now, the standard critical edition of the poem has been that curated by David Coldwell between 1957 and 1964, and it is reassuring to read even in the first sentence of this present book that it is based on Coldwell's work in an attempt by the Scottish Text Society to revise, update and expand it. The justifications for this approach are laid out clearly and compellingly. Coldwell's edition had the virtues of fidelity to the most reliable textual witness of Douglas's translation (the ‘Cambridge Manuscript’), as well as sound editorial practice. Several lengthy quotations from Coldwell, in fact, are reproduced by the editors as statements of the methodological approach used in this most recent edition.

However, due to the near illegibility of the heavily tweaked book manuscripts which Coldwell sent to the typist or compositor back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as that compositor's unfamiliarity with Latin, numerous errors of transcription insinuated themselves into the published edition itself. Compounding this problem, it seems that Coldwell never corrected the proofs he subsequently received. Cunningham's contribution to the volume has focused on this issue, and involved the painstaking work of purging the new edition of such Latin errors. In addition to all these concerns, and as Bawcutt explains substantially through a reproduction of her 1973 Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions article ‘Gavin Douglas and the Text of Virgil’, Coldwell's dating of a key source for Douglas's translation was incorrect. Rather than being printed in 1507, it actually left the pirate presses of Lyons in 1517, meaning that it appeared too late to have been used by Douglas, who instead, Bawcutt argues, used an edition of Virgil printed in 1501. Overcoming the former shortcomings enables this edition to better reproduce the Cambridge Manuscript version of the text (the version which bears the closest resemblance to Douglas's translation as it was first written); overcoming the latter scholarly blunder means that the commentary and notes offered here can tell us more about how Douglas translated and adapted the specific Virgilian text he saw before him, rather than any more recently reproduced form of it.

This edition delivers on both the above points, and for the most part is a substantial book‐by‐book commentary on Douglas's translation, noting moments which offer parallels to, or divergences from, Douglas's Latin sources. These sources include Virgil, Virgilian commentators such as the fourth‐century Servius and the sixteenth‐century Ascensius, and other classical and contemporary poets with whose works Douglas was familiar. It is also worth noting that Bawcutt has contributed introductions to the celebrated Prologues with which Douglas prefaced his translations of each of Virgil's ‘books’, and that these are new elements, not revisions of Coldwell's. There is also, at the end of the volume, a hefty glossary (extending and amending Coldwell's) which defines Scots words which might be unfamiliar to modern (and, given Douglas's archaic tastes, even some sixteenth‐century) readers. It is obvious that these elements of the volume alone are extremely valuable for current and subsequent studies of Douglas, Scots poetry, and classical reception between the late medieval and Renaissance periods.

Yet there is more in this volume, as the ‘introduction’ in its title promises. In its opening section, there is a fine biographical sketch of Douglas, which fills in hitherto obscured details using new archival discoveries. Following this, there is an account of his other works, and a thorough review of existing Douglas scholarship. Then, we find a strikingly comprehensive description of surviving textual witnesses for the Eneados, as well as later printed editions running up to Gordon Kendal's 2011 effort (which here receives serious, if fair, criticisms for its modernised spellings and its reliance upon Small's problematic 1874 edition). The attention to the different kinds of reception Douglas's translation enjoyed in the early modern period is especially fascinating, as the focus shifts from marginalia concerned with morality, to printed editions which changed the text to fit a Protestant agenda, to scholars who regarded the poem as a treasury of obsolete words which could help advance their nascent studies of Anglo‐Saxon. Much of this is refreshingly new scholarly ground.

As it stands, this volume itself is a welcome condensation of current thought on Douglas's Eneados, produced primarily by the leading expert on the subject with the aim of providing a reference work for other students of Douglas's translation. This is not, for the merely curious reader, a book to be consumed from cover to cover. The introductory sections, on the other hand, should certainly be read completely and digested slowly by anyone at all interested in textual scholarship, even if their areas of research do not focus on Douglas, late medieval literary cultures and classical reception. This is because these sections show by example how a critical edition should be put together, and how the spurious hypotheses which bedevil that process can be identified and cast out.

As the publication date of Bawcutt's reproduced article suggests, much of the wisdom within the volume is hardly new. Having said that, the decision to bring that accumulated scholarship together in a new edition was an inspired one, and to someone such as myself whose research interests touch on Douglas's translation (in my case via the 1428 sequel to Virgil's epic which was composed by the Italian humanist Maffeo Vegio, and included in Douglas's Scots rendering), it feels as though this work was a long time coming. And this was the case even before the Coronavirus hit us. It can only be hoped that the next volume, which I believe is intended to reproduce Douglas's translation itself, will be published very shortly. Then, these two books together will become new classic editions. It is entirely plausible that, like the edition they are designed to improve upon, they will go on to be consulted for at least another five decades, introducing Douglas's masterpiece to new readers and scholars.

当苏格兰主教加文·道格拉斯（ç .1476-1522）翻译维吉尔的古拉丁语史诗埃涅阿斯纪进他的舌头白话1513年，他制作了一个文学的纪念碑，其会去欣赏和赞扬了几百年。译文首次标志着一首主要的古典诗歌被完整地忠实地延续到了英语中，直到今天，该作品仍保留着吸引其英语读者的力量，就像它启发了近代诗人自己进行白话化的尝试一样。二十世纪初期，道格拉斯对此感到非常兴奋：道格拉斯在奥登第一次发现中世纪诗歌的奇观时就被诗人WH Auden所接受，而Ezra Pound甚至声称Eneados比埃涅阿迪德本身更好。尽管有着如此长久的热情，但是学术界似乎一直难以对道格拉斯的翻译本来面目有把握。因此，这是Priscilla Bawcutt和Ian C. Cunningham为其设定的新批评版的任务。

几十年来，这首诗的标准批评版一直是大卫·库德韦尔（David Coldwell）在1957年至1964年之间策划的，即使在本书的第一句话中，也可以放心地读到它是基于库德韦尔的作品而进行的。苏格兰文字协会对其进行修订，更新和扩展。这种方法的理由是明确而令人信服的。柯德威尔（Coldwell）的版本忠于道格拉斯翻译的最可靠文本见证人（“剑桥手稿”）以及完善的编辑实践，具有美德的美德。实际上，编辑们转载了Coldwell的一些冗长的引文，作为对本最新版本中使用的方法论方法的陈述。

但是，由于Coldwell在1950年代末和1960年代初发给打字员或作曲家的书的手稿经过了大量调整，几乎难以辨认，而且该作曲家对拉丁语不熟悉，因此许多抄写错误都将其暗示为已出版的版本。使这个问题更加复杂的是，似乎考德威尔从未纠正过他后来收到的证明。坎宁安（Cunningham）对这本书的贡献集中在这个问题上，并且涉及清除此类拉丁错误的新版本的艰苦工作。除了所有这些关注之外，正如鲍卡特（Bawcutt）通过其1973年爱丁堡书目协会的复制品进行的实质性解释一样，文章“加文·道格拉斯和维吉尔经文”中，科德威尔对道格拉斯翻译的主要来源的约会是不正确的。它实际上不是在1507年印刷的，而是在1517年离开了里昂的海盗印刷厂，这意味着它似乎为时已晚，以至于道格拉斯都没有使用过，道格拉斯认为，沃格斯反而使用了1501年印刷的维吉尔版。克服了以前的缺点使该版本能够更好地复制该文本的剑桥手稿版本（该版本与道格拉斯的译文最相似，是首次撰写时）。克服后者的学术失误意味着此处提供的评论和注释可以使我们更多地了解道格拉斯如何翻译和改编他所见过的特定维吉尔文字，而不是最近复制的任何形式。

该版本同时兼顾了以上几点，并且在很大程度上是针对道格拉斯翻译的大量逐书评论，并指出了与道格拉斯拉丁文来源相似或不同的时刻。这些资料来源包括维吉尔，维吉尔评论员，例如四世纪的Servius和十六世纪的Ascensius，以及其他古典和当代诗人，他们对道格拉斯的作品都很熟悉。值得注意的是，鲍库特（Bawcutt）为著名的序言作了介绍，道格拉斯（Douglas）用序言作为他对维吉尔（Virgil）每一本书的翻译的序幕，这些都是新的内容，而不是对考德威尔（Coldwell）的修订。在本书的最后，还有一个庞大的词汇表（扩展和修订了Coldwell的词汇表），该词汇表定义了苏格兰人可能不熟悉的现代词汇（并且，考虑到道格拉斯的古朴品味，即使是大约16世纪的读者也是如此。显然，仅这些部分的内容对于道格拉斯的当前和后续研究，苏格兰诗歌以及中世纪晚期至文艺复兴时期之间的古典接受都是极其有价值的。

然而，正如其标题中的“引言”所承诺的那样，该卷还有更多内容。在其开头部分，有一张精美的道格拉斯传记素描，它使用新的档案发现填补了迄今为止被遮盖的细节。在此之后，对他的其他作品进行了介绍，并对现有的道格拉斯奖学金进行了全面回顾。然后，我们找到了有关Eneados幸存的文本证人的惊人综合描述，以及直到Gordon Kendal 2011年努力的更高版本的印刷版本（在这里，由于其现代化的拼写和对Small的有问题的1874年版本的依赖，在这里受到了严重的批评，如果是公平的话）。由于焦点已从关注道德的边缘化转向印刷版，使文本适应了新教徒的日程，对于关注诗歌的学者而言，现代早期对道格拉斯翻译的关注尤其令人着迷。过时的单词库，可能有助于推进对盎格鲁撒克逊人的新生研究。其中大部分是令人耳目一新的学术领域。

就目前而言，这本书本身是对道格拉斯《Eneados》的最新思想的令人欢迎的总结，该思想主要由该主题的领先专家制作，旨在为道格拉斯翻译的其他学生提供参考作品。对于仅仅好奇的读者来说，这不是一本本本被一本本消费的书。另一方面，对文本学术感兴趣的任何人当然都应该完整地阅读入门部分，并对其进行缓慢地消化，即使他们的研究领域不集中于道格拉斯，中世纪后期的文学文化和古典接受。这是因为这些部分通过示例显示了如何将关键版本组合在一起，以及如何识别和消除构成该过程的虚假假说。

正如Bawcutt的转载文章的出版日期所暗示的那样，本书中的许多知识并不是什么新鲜事物。话虽如此，决定将积累的奖学金重新汇集到一个新版本中，对于像我本人这样的人来说是一个鼓舞人心的决定，他的研究兴趣触及了道格拉斯的翻译作品（以我为例，是通过1428年维吉尔史诗的续集），意大利人文主义者马菲·维吉奥（Maffeo Vegio），并包括在道格拉斯（Douglas）的Scots渲染中），感觉这项工作似乎需要很长时间了。甚至在冠状病毒袭击我们之前就是这种情况。只能寄希望于下一本书很快出版，我相信该书旨在复制道格拉斯的译本。然后，这两本书将一起成为新的经典版本。完全有道理的是，