An Unpublished Autograph Letter from Sir Philip Sidney to Carolus Clusius, 21 April 1576

Abstract

Only a decade ago Roger Kuin's The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney (2012) offered scholars for the first time a complete edition of Sidney's correspondence. Kuin modestly allowed room for new discoveries, in the hope that additional letters might be identified. This article introduces a previously unpublished autograph letter by Sidney, written in French, addressed on 21 April 1576 to Carolus Clusius or Charles de l'Écluse, an associate of Hubert Languet and a noted botanist then active in Vienna at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. After briefly discussing the provenance of the manuscript I turn to its contents, situating the letter within the wider corpus of Sidney's extant correspondence, with reference to letters to and from Clusius and Languet in Kuin's edition, and analysing it within this context. The newly discovered letter, transcribed and translated in an appendix, is shown to offer important new evidence for Sidney's relationships with Clusius and Languet as well as his place in European intellectual culture more generally.