ABSTRACT
Joanna Lumley’s teenage years were a humanist’s delight, for a holograph manuscript includes her Latin versions of five orations by Isocrates, two Latin letters to her father, the Earl of Arundel, and ‘The Tragedie of Euripides called Iphigeneia translated out of Greake into Englisshe.’1 In one of the letters to her father she noted that following the recommendation of Cicero, she was devoting herself to Greek literature and that she derived ‘incredibilem voluptatem’ (wonderful pleasure) from reading ‘Evagoras,’ Isocrates’ fourth oration to Nicocles.2 Herself the owner of at least fifteen books, Lumley was fortunate to have a father who collected a large library and to marry John, Lord Lumley, who possessed ‘probably the largest private library in Elizabethan England,’ having inherited both his father-in-law’s library and that of Thomas Cranmer.3 Sharing his wife’s interest in learning, in 1550, John Lumley translated Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani as The Education of a Christian Prince, dedicating the work to his father-in-law. At about the same time, using Erasmus’s Latin translation, Joanna Lumley was translating Iphigenia, raising the possibility that the two works were companion pieces.
