ABSTRACT
Vitas Patrum, or the lyff of the olde Auncyent holy faders, is a compilation of lives of the desert fathers (or eastern saints) attributed to Saint Jerome, translated into English by William Caxton in 1491 shortly before his death, and published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495 when he had solidified his overseership of the Caxton press. 1 A few texts corresponding to material in this compilation had been circulating in Britain in handwritten books—six manuscripts in English and twenty in Latin are extant. 2 Caxton, however, turned to a printed French translation of the compilation, as his prologue tells us: “Here foloweth the right deuoute… lyff of the olde Auncyent holy faders hermytes / late translated out of latyn in to frenshe / and dylygently corrected in the cyte of lyon / *e yere of our lord. M. C. C. C. C. lxxxvi.” 3 [“Here follows the right devoute… life of the old, ancient holy hermit fathers, late translated out of Latin into French and diligently corrected in the city of Lyon in the year of our lord I486.”] Indeed, during the final quarter of the fifteenth century, Jerome’s compilation of the lives of the fathers had become a printer’s book. By the time Caxton took up his translation, fifteen editions in Latin had been issued and twenty-four in vernacular languages—Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and French. By the time de Worde was able to publish Caxton’s English translation, another six vernacular editions had been published in Paris, Augsberg, and Venice. Although only a third as numerous as printed translations of another collection of holy lives, Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea sanctorum, which Caxton had also turned into English and printed as the Golden Legend (ca. 1483), vernacular versions of the Jerome collection had nevertheless cornered a place in continental printers’ repertories. 4 The emergence in 1495 of de Worde’s edition, a volume of 735 pages with 170 pictures, signals his recognition that an English Vitas Patrum would be welcomed by the buyers of books issuing from the Caxton-de Worde publishing house in Westminster— men and women, lay and religious, aristocratic and merchant. 5
