Robert Copland and The Judgement of Love

Abstract

I 1993, Frank Stubbings announced the sensational discovery of three sixteenth-century English printed fragments in the library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.1 Extracted from the contemporary London binding of an octavo volume printed in Frankfurt in 1540, these fragments together formed a single complete folio, signed F2, from a lost quarto edition of a prose romance featuring the pseudo-Roman characters Affranio and Hortensia.2 Although the work itself was unknown, Dennis E. Rhodes, who collaborated with Stubbings, identifi ed the font as Wynkyn de Worde’s 95mm textura in its fi nal state, observing that the grotesque initial ‘I’ on the recto was found elsewhere in de Worde’s corpus. On the strength of this information, Stubbings concluded that the folio was printed by de Worde between 1521 and 1535. At the same time, he acknowledged that the fragments did not match any surviving de Worde book from the period. Six years later, Rhodes identifi ed the Emmanuel College text as a previously unrecorded English translation of La historia de Grisel y Mirabella, a late medieval Spanish romance by Juan de Flores ( fl. 1475).3 With translations and adaptations in French, German, Italian, and Polish (among other languages), Flores’s work became an international best-seller in the sixteenth century, marketed initially as