Ecclesiastes de Salamam: an unknown biblical translation by Damiao de Gois.

The sixteenth century was one of the great ages of biblical translation in the Christian West. The invention of printing, the growth of humanistic scholarship, and dissension within the Church all stimulated the production of a vast number of new versions of Scripture, including new translations into Latin as well as into the vernacular languages of Europe. It was not only the major languages that were involved. Luther's famous Bible of 1534 was in High German, but a Low German version appeared in Lubeck the same year. In the sixteenth century there were also translations of the complete Bible into Icelandic, Slovene, Hungarian and other languages with relatively few speakers. (1) In Spain and Italy, the heartlands of Catholicism in Southern Europe, there were fewer translations than elsewhere. But Brucioli's Italian Bible came out in 1532, and Marmochini's in 1538. In Spanish two different versions of the New Testament appeared before the Index of 1559, and a Ladino translation of the Old Testament was issued by the firm of Samuel Usque in Ferrara in 1553. The first complete Spanish Bible, translated by Cassiodoro de Reyna, appeared in Basle in 1569. (2) But in all this activity Portugal has always been regarded as the odd man out, a staunchly Catholic and Christian country, yet throughout the sixteenth century with no Bible in its own language.

It is true that in the very early days of Portuguese printing Rodrigo Alvares brought out the gospels and the epistles, in a version based on William of Paris's Postilla super epistolas et evangelia (1497), while in Lisbon in 1505 Valentim Fernandes, at the request of the dowager Queen Leanor, issued the Acts of the Apostles in the vernacular. (3) But both these works belong to the Middle Ages. (4) The intellectual and religious ferment which in the sixteenth century led other Europeans to make new, scholarly versions of the Bible in their own languages is not recorded as having left any mark in Portugal at all. Such efforts as there were are believed to have been suppressed, as in the case of Antonio Pereira Marramaque. (5)

A chance discovery in the library of All Souls College, Oxford, however, shows that the record for Portugal is not so bare after all. There is no translation of the whole Bible, nor even of a whole testament, but there is at least one book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, in a scholarly translation, made by Damiao de Gois, today easily the best known of Portuguese humanists, whose international career, contacts with Luther and Melanchthon and friendship with Erasmus have given rise to a large quantity of scholarly work, in Portugal and elsewhere.

The little book, in octavo, Ecclesiastes de Salamam, con alguas annotacoes necessarias, was published by Stevao (Stefano) Sabio in Venice in 1538. Gois's name does not appear on the title page, but he is identified at the head of the dedication to Rui Fernandes de Almada. There is no record of the work in Francisco Leite de Faria's very full bibliography of Gois. (6) The standard Portuguese bibliographers, Barbosa Machado and Inocencio, make no mention of it either. The All Souls copy has probably been in the college since the Codrington Library was built in the early eighteenth century. It is bound together with another, almost equally rare, book by Gois, his version of Cicero's De Senectute. (7) The first edition is so rare that Leite de Faria was only able to examine the title page, conserved in the Harleian collection in the British Library. (8) The two translations were published by the same publisher in the same year and have exactly the same format, although the De Senectute, which comes second, has its own title page. Once again Gois is identified as the author at the head of the dedication. There is considerable evidence to suggest that Gois considered the two translations to form a pair, as will appear later.

The Ecclesiastes de Salamam is a true discovery, in that its existence was unknown and even unsuspected until the present day. As the only translation of a book of the Bible made into Portuguese in the Renaissance it has considerable importance, increased by the fact that its author was one of the very few Portuguese writers of the sixteenth century with a genuinely international reputation. But, as Ecclesiastes himself so often remarks, 'Nihil sub sole novum'. (9) Gois's translation is an indication that the religious tradition of Portugal is not as orthodox as is sometimes supposed, but the disappearance of his book for more than four centuries and a half shows how small an impact he was able to make on the thinking of his countrymen.

DAMIAFO DE GOIS IN ANTWERP, FREIBURG AND PADUA

Probably more is known about Damiao de Gois's life than about any other Portuguese writer of his period. (10) Here it will be necessary to draw attention only to one or two events which have a bearing on the translation. In 1521, at the age of twenty-three, Gois went to Antwerp as secretary of the Casa da India, and the Flemish city remained his base until 1534. Gois made his first contacts with humanists in Antwerp and he was also very fortunate that the Portuguese factor there was the cultivated and liberal Rui Fernandes de Almada, to whom he was subsequently to dedicate the Ecclesiastes de Salamam. Fernandes, like Gois, has attracted the attention of modern scholars and there is a good biography of him. Fernandes made the factory a centre of cultural interchange where he received figures like Durer, with whom he swapped paintings and drawings for parrots and other exotic products. (11) He took a keen interest in Lutheranism, as Gois was to do after him, and, on at least one occasion, successfully protected the interests of a prominent Portuguese New Christian, Diogo Mendes, who had been imprisoned in Antwerp. It seems to have been Fernandes, too, who first stimulated Gois's interest in Ethiopian Christianity. (12) Fernandes became Portuguese ambassador in France in 1534 and it was in this capacity that Gois dedicated his translation to him. Fernandes was a most appropriate person to receive a work of scholarship in which the contribution of Jewish exegetes is warmly recognized, and indeed he was one of the very few Portuguese capable of appreciating the implied ecumenical message of Gois's translation. He had, too, the advantage of living at a safe distance from Portugal.

In the early 1530s Gois, who had always had an interest in intellectual pursuits, gradually distanced himself from the world of commerce and diplomacy to devote himself full-time to study. In 1532 he enrolled at the University of Louvain and in 1534 travelled to Freiburg, where he was a guest of Erasmus for five months. (13) In the dedication of his De senectute Gois mentions that he discussed problems of translation with his host, (14) and there can be no doubt that this period was crucial to Ecclesiastes de Salamam too. The intellectual influence of Erasmus is evident in Gois's pairing of an Old Testament with a classical Latin text, in his free and flexible approach to the translation of the Bible and in his commentary, which in accordance with humanistic practice is brief and concentrates on elucidating the literal and moral significance of the original. (15) It is conceivable that Erasmus even suggested to Gois the texts he might translate. He himself was very attached to the De senectute, which he edited more than once, (16) and while Gois was staying with him was working on his own Ecclesiastes. That work, however, is a manual of sacred rhetoric in which the biblical Ecclesiastes is only very rarely cited.

If Gois began his translations under the influence of Erasmus in Freiburg he must have finished them in Padua, where he was a student from 1534 to 1538. The variety of sources that he quotes for his commentary on Ecclesiastes is evidence of the easy access to works of scholarship, Christian and Jewish, that was possible in northern Italy. It is likely that some of the information that he gives us about the rabbinical commentaries on the Bible came to him at first hand from members of the flourishing Jewish communities there. (17) But it was in Italy that the seeds of Gois's downfall were also sown. He continued his contacts with reformers and with members of the Catholic hierarchy who still believed in a reconciliation with the Protestants. This was a dangerous activity, for at the same time Gois came into contact with the sinister Simao Rodrigues who subsequently denounced him to the Portuguese Inquisition on suspicion of Lutheranism. (18) These denunciations, first made in the mid 1540s when Gois had returned to Portugal, had no immediate consequences. He was offered and accepted the post of 'Guarda-mor da Torre do Tombo' and published two major chronicles. (19) But in 1570 they were revived and Gois was prosecuted, convicted and ended his days as a prisoner in the monastery of Batalha. The long shadow of the Inquisition touched the Ecclesiastes de Salamam too, as we shall see.

GOIS'S READING OF THE BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES: HUMANISM AND LUTHERANISM

Gois admits that Ecclesiastes is a difficult book. However, in the course of the Argumento do Livro with which he prefaces his translation he tries to come to a clear and straightforward view of it. His initial conclusion is that everything which is not the love and fear of God is vanity. It is a reductive statement, deriving from 12.13-14, the final words of the book, and as Gois realised, it needs qualification, for in the rest of the text Ecclesiastes does not condemn everything that man does. So Gois decides that while man's religious duty towards God must always be uppermost in his mind he nevertheless is permitted, even obliged, to enjoy the good things which God has given us on this earth. He should indeed work to bring those good things about, though he must always be mindful that God gives the increase, 'Deos seraa aquelle que acrecentara nossos beens', a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 3.7.

Gois's Argumento and his notes to the text depend on this over-arching view. It does not seem particularly controversial, but to achieve it he had to steer his way through a number of extremely polemical positions, maintained by traditional Catholics, humanists, Lutherans and Jews. The polemics in which he engages are like icebergs or crocodiles: they are visible on the surface but their wider significance is hidden.

One step that Gois had to take was to define his work with respect to the moralizing tradition in the literature of his own country. Collections of proverbs and sententious sayings were widely read in Portugal in the early sixteenth century. However, in the dedications to both his translations he refers disparagingly to works of this kind. In the De Senectute he complains that many people cobble lists of philosophical sayings together, concealing the source, which result in completely worthless books, 'sem arteficio rhetorico, nem dialectico'. This is a surprising remark, given that the dedicatee, the Count of Vimioso, compiled a famous collection of Sentencas. Gois was certainly tactless at times, but his criticisms probably indicate that the count had not yet begun his work, or else that Gois had not heard of it. (20) For Gois, the humanist and friend of Erasmus, the superiority of Ecclesiastes or Cicero lay precisely in their rhetorical and dialectical skills. Taken separately or together their books reveal a power of literary organization which gives their sententiae added significance.

Taken together, it seems as though Ecclesiastes and Cicero were practically collaborators as teachers of moral truths. The link between their writings, which is implicit rather than explicit, arises from the belief, which Gois read in St Jerome, that the three wisdom books traditionally attributed to Solomon correspond to the three ages of life. So Proverbs is for children, Ecclesiastes for those in the prime of life--and therefore appropriate reading for Rui Fernandes, then at the peak of his career as ambassador to France--and the Song of Songs for the old. St Jerome and Gois follow without question the belief that this highly charged erotic work is an allegory of the love of the soul for its creator, or of the union of Christ with the church, and therefore likely to appeal to those close to death.

All this comes in the dedication of the translation of Ecclesiastes. In the All Souls volume Ecclesiastes is followed by the De Senectute, which thus by implication must be the Roman equivalent of the Song of Songs. It is difficult to avoid this conclusion, because Cicero's concerns, much more clearly than those of the Old Testament writer, are with death and, in Chapters 21-23, with the immortality of the soul. But Gois is careful not to make the identification explicit. In the dedication he calls the De Senectute a 'divina obra', and mentions Cicero and St Jerome in the same breath as translators, but goes no further. In Erasmus's colloquy Convivium religiosum one of the speakers states openly his view that the works of some of the Greek and Roman classics were of equivalent standing to holy scripture. (21) Gois belonged to a more repressive culture and had to be more circumspect. But his guard nearly drops in a note to the De Senectute, 22, 80-81, where he says: 'Este lugar he tam conforme ao Ecclesiastico de Salamam que se poderaa crer aver Cicero lido os livros do dicto, e assi os outros do velho testamento, como se cuida o ter feito Platam'.

It is probably significant that this remark is tucked away in a marginal note. Gois's misquotation of Solomon's title (Ecclesiasticus is an apochryphal book, attributed to Jesus son of Sirach) and the difficulty of identifying the passage of Ecclesiastes he has in mind lead one to suspect that he may have been trying to cover his tracks. (22) There is plenty of evidence that Gois's translations, particularly of Ecclesiastes, were intended to be read especially, if not exclusively by those who could understand their hidden significance. They at least would have the wit to appreciate for themselves the community of spirit which links Ecclesiastes and Cicero, and makes of the two translations a satisfying literary whole.

Gois's openly expressed distaste for collections of maxims derives, therefore, from a much more profound and polemical belief in the congruence of 'bonae litterae' and 'sacrae litterae'. There are plenty of other ripples on the apparently smooth surface of his book. Twice, in the concluding pages of the Argumento and in the note to 1.8, Gois engages with a group of unlearned people, as he calls them, who claim that Ecclesiastes's true purpose is to teach passivity in the face of the omnipotence of God. Here the crocodile metaphor seems a better one than the iceberg, because there is more than one group of opponents involved.

Gois's note to Ecclesiastes 1.8 is something of a watershed in Portuguese intellectual and religious history. It reads:

Alguas pessoas indoutas interpretam neste passo Salamao querer danar os estudos da philosophia, com os quaes podemos alcancar, e entender os segredos, e cursus naturaes, mas a sentenca he esta: ser tanta a vaidade, e inquietudo humana, que per nenhum sentido se podem comprender, nem com a linguoa exprimir. (23)

These words are a translation of Luther's note on the same passage in his commentary on Ecclesiastes:

Hunc Textum corruperunt Sophistae, dum hic putant Philosophorum studia taxari, quibus rerum naturas et caussas scrutantur, quasi hoc malum sit & inexplicabile, sed non est malum scrutari rerum naturas et proprietates [...] Est ergo haec sententia, se quidem velle dicere de vanitate humana, sed tam multas esse, tamque magnas illas vanitates, ut putet se non satis posse de his dicere.

To the Portuguese of the sixteenth century Luther was the fiend unchained. It was because of his personal contacts with him and some of the other reformers that Gois was condemned by the Inquisition in 1571. Gois naturally does not refer directly to Luther or his commentary in Ecclesiastes de Salamam. However, there is additional evidence that he knew it besides the translation of a note, because Simao Rodrigues deposed in the trial that Gois had lent him a copy. (24)

Gois did not just share Luther's beliefs about the value of natural philosophy. Luther was a much more forthright and polemical writer than Gois and throughout his Ecclesiastes identifies clearly those commentators who in his view had perverted the meaning of the text. Chief among those was St Jerome, who believed that the book taught contempt for the world and was a call to the religious life. Jerome's commentary is even prefaced by a letter to a would-be nun, Blesilla, to whom he recommends Ecclesiastes as an aid to devotion. (25) So the view that the book's message is that we should enjoy God's creation--on which Gois and Luther repeatedly insist--is far from bland but a challenge to the traditional intellectual authority of the Catholic church and, certainly in the case of Luther, a proof of the uselessness of the monastic life.

In the 1530s Gois came as close as he ever did to Protestantism. (26) But not even Ecclesiastes de Salamam is thoroughly Lutheran. In the first place, Luther and Gois had quite different aims as translators. Luther intended his Bible to bring the truth of religion to all the people of Germany, but there is no evidence that Gois had any such ambition for his modest work, which reads much more like a private communication between humanists. It is possible to see in it too not only disagreement with St Jerome but even with Luther himself. The difficulty here is that, though there are hints of controversy in his text, Gois was given to shadow boxing, to attacking opponents without naming them. However, one such attack seems to refer to the debate about free will in which Luther was so famously engaged.

'Alguas pessoas reputadas por doutas', with whom, he says in his 'Argumento', he frequently argued, apparently believe that the meaning of Ecclesiastes is that the good things of this world are the gift of God and may be enjoyed without any human intervention. Gois is indignant about this error, as he calls it, 'do qual nace todo genero de pecados, e tristes e mas imaginaco es'. As explained above, man's role is to work, while acknowledging God's role in any worldly success that he may achieve. The opinion which Gois attributes to his anonymous but wrong-headed opponents is exactly that of Luther, who in the introduction to his commentary says:

Est ergo (ut repetens dicam) status & consilium huius libelli, erudire nos, ut cum gratiarum actione utamur rebus praesentibus, & creaturis Dei, quae nobis Dei benedictione largiter dantur et donatae sunt, sine solicitudine futurorum.

Luther's belief in the impotence of human will is normally understood theologically as man's inability to respond to God without divine grace. But in his commentary on Ecclesiastes he does indeed repeatedly tell his readers to take no thought for the morrow (Matthew 6.34) in a purely worldly sense, because forethought, the choice of one course of action rather than another, is useless. Useless, because it is God who decrees the future, over which human beings have no control. (27) Gois, like Luther, believes that Ecclesiastes is fundamentally optimistic, but denies that man has no responsibility for his daily life on earth. In this it is possible to see at least a shadow of the famous debate between Erasmus and Luther on the question of free will, in which Gois would be seen to take Erasmus's more cautious and pragmatic view. (28)

Gois does not bring his engagement with Luther into the open, nor does he make an unequivocal statement of his humanistic belief in the equal validity of the scriptures and the classic writers of Greece and Rome. Undoubtedly reasons of self-preservation played a part in what I have called his shadow boxing, but in addition he was not dogmatic. He may by implication challenge St Jerome's monastic vision of Ecclesiastes, but unlike Luther he was happy to cite him as an authority on minor points.

Gois's commentary places great emphasis on the moral significance of the text. He knew and referred to the work of the traditional Christian commentators, Nicholas of Lyra as well as Jerome, but unlike them had little or no interest in allegory and in the traditional four-fold exegesis of the Bible. (29) Ecclesiastes is not a prophetic book, but it is surprising all the same that Gois the Catholic should be so little concerned to relate the sacred writings of the Jews to the Christian New Testament. Apart from a few marginal notes, of a traditional kind, in which references are given to parallel passages in the Old and New Testaments, in the commentary he mentions it only twice. In 1.18 he finds similarities with the parable of the faithful and unfaithful servant (Luke 12.37-48) and in 9.18 he quotes a passage from the Epistle of James (2.10). The very name of Christ is only mentioned once, in 1.18, though in 8.2 Gois cites a Christological note by St Jerome in which there is a discussion of the respective roles of God the father and God the son. (30)

This is not to say that Gois's commentary is in any way unchristian. Rather he sees Ecclesiastes as a series of reflections on life on earth and the way to live it, largely without other-worldly implications. (31) When he writes a note in his commentary it is usually to explain the moral significance of the text though, as will appear, he is also interested in making available to the reader alternative versions of parts of it.

Christians and Jews might have no difficulty in agreeing about the moral meaning of a book of the Bible, even though they differed widely as to its prophetic or spiritual significance. If the book in question can be seen as largely theologically neutral, in that it deals with how to live this life rather than with what happens after death, then, Gois may have thought, there was no harm in relying on Jewish exegesis of it. He certainly seems to have thought that the rabbinic commentators on Ecclesiastes knew more about it than their Christian counterparts, for he cites them far more often.

GOIS'S READING OF ECCLESIASTES: THE JEWISH EXEGETICAL TRADITION

Gois's emphasis on the moral, and avoidance of the traditional allegorical reading of scripture, is certainly an indication of his humanism. But the fact that he finds few signs of the New Testament in the Old also points to another extraordinary and very controversial feature of Ecclesiastes de Salamam, its dependence on Jewish exegesis. About this Gois is completely open. He mentions a number of famous Jewish scholars by name: Solomon ben Isaac (1040-1105), more commonly known as Rashi, Levi ben Gershom (1288-1344) and especially Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1164/65). Other opinions are attributed, more vaguely, to 'os judeus' or 'os doutores judeus'. Altogether, Gois provides a commentary, either exegetical or textual, on forty-five verses of Ecclesiastes (leaving aside for the moment Chapter 12, whose allegorical nature leads him to treat it in a different way from the others). Only in five of these verses does he cite a Christian source alone. On two occasions Christian and Jewish sources are quoted in the same note, without any attempt to choose between them, while in a further eight verses he relies only on Jewish exegesis. When one adds to these those notes in which Gois cites the Hebrew Bible or the Targums the commentary is beginning to have a distinctly Jewish flavour.

Without doubt, his favourite commentator, who, it is implied, was superior even to St Jerome, was Ibn Ezra (Gois calls him Aben Ezra). He calls him 'doutissimo hebreu, o qual nisto, e em muytas outras cousas me parece chegar mais a verdade que nenhum outro doutor'. One of the reasons for Gois's admiration for him was that he had been born in the Iberian Peninsula. (32) There were certainly other reasons for Gois's preference. Ibn Ezra belongs very much to the philological school of exegesis, that is, he is much more interested in the literal meaning of the Bible, peshat, than in homiletical exposition, derash. His work, then, would be more congenial to a Christian humanist with a distrust of allegory than to that of, say, Rashi, despite the enormous fame which the latter's commentaries had in the Middle Ages and later.

Ibn Ezra's commentary helped Gois in a variety of ways. In the previous section Gois's understanding of the meaning of Ecclesiastes as a whole was seen in terms of the debate between Protestants and Catholics about the significance of scripture. However, before he could come to any conclusion Gois had to solve a difficult interpretative problem, that of Ecclesiastes's apparent self-contradictions. Many commentators before and after him have had difficulty with the writer who at one point declares: 'A living dog is better than a dead lion' (9.4) and at another: 'Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive' (4.2). It was an interpretative technique used by Ibn Ezra that enabled Gois to solve the problem of inconsistency, thus making it possible to arrive at a coherent view of the book as a whole.

Gois's solution involves printing a number of seemingly contradictory statements which he then proceeds to explain as instances of a dialogue between Solomon, the supposed author, and the common herd, whose false and self-serving opinions are quoted only to be--implicitly--refuted. Neither his selection of difficult passages nor his explanation of them is original, but derives from Ibn Ezra who was responsible for finding eight of the ten pairs of statements. (33)

Gois also relied heavily on Ibn Ezra for his notes to the text, even though in the great majority of them, about twenty-eight, he cites no source. He mentions Ibn Ezra only three times by name in the commentary, in the notes to 2.8, 6.10 and 12.6, but his influence is discernible elsewhere. Here, though, it is necessary to introduce a caveat, because Gois sometimes paraphrases or glosses his source rather than quoting it directly. This happens even in 6.10, and can be explained by Gois's reliance on intermediaries to help him read the Hebrew text. (34) Despite this, it is reasonable to see the widespread influence of Ibn Ezra. In the note to 1.4-5, for instance, Ecclesiastes is at his gloomiest as he contemplates the endless procession of the generations of man. In his commentary Gois intellectualizes this into a statement about the mutability of the elements, the moral inconstancy of humanity, and the role of earth as 'may, e sepulchro', ideas that can be found in the corresponding passage in Ibn Ezra. (35) In 3.3 Gois has a marginal note, 'O hebreu diz: tempo de ferir, e tempo de sarar', which is a reference to a celebrated emendation by Ibn Ezra, who thought that the traditional reading, which means 'a time to kill and a time to heal', must be incorrect because a corpse cannot be cured. (36)

The question inevitably arises of how Gois had access to Ibn Ezra. He was not a profound scholar, and even his command of Latin has been called into question. (37) It may well be that he did not know enough Hebrew, or Greek, to translate from the original languages. Unlike the rabbinic commentator to whom he owed so much, he has no interest in Hebrew philology, presumably because he did not know the language, and he seldom quotes Hebrew words. Gois was, nevertheless, a strenuous self-improver educationally. While in Antwerp he took private lessons in Latin from a well-known humanist, Cornelius Graphaeus. Before enrolling at Padua he had become a student at Louvain, where he also took private lessons, and he returned there after leaving Italy in 1538. Whether he studied Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin is not clear. His host during his first stay in Louvain was the Hellenist Rutger Rescius, and Amadeu Torres believes that he must have learnt some Greek with him. (38) He may also have learnt some Hebrew. Louvain was one of the trilingual colleges where, since 1517, all three sacred languages were studied. One of the professors of Hebrew there, Johannes Campensis, is quoted by Gois in his commentary on Ecclesiastes. (39) Campensis was in Italy in the 1530s and moved in the same circles as Gois. (40) But none of this proves that Gois had much knowledge of Hebrew, and certainly not enough to read a difficult author like Ibn Ezra, whose commentaries did not become available in Latin until the 1560s. (41) It seems reasonable to suppose, therefore, that Gois could only have understood them with the help of a friendly rabbi, presumably one of the 'doutores' with whom he conversed in Italy. He explains that this was his method in a note to the reader at the end of his book:

Nesta tralladacam, e annotaco es posemos todo trabalho, e diligencia possivel, assi em ver os doutores christaos, e judeus, que sobr' este livro escreveram, como em nos aconselharmos com aquelles que o tempo, e oportunidade delle, nos dexou presentes comonicar.

Now is the moment to try to sum up Gois's attitude to Ecclesiastes, under three headings. First, for all his trouble over the translation (to be discussed in the next section), the book is for literary sophisticates only. Gois's ten pairs of apparent contradictions are examples only, not a complete treatment of the problem of inconsistency in Ecclesiastes. The reader has to be constantly on his guard, to use 'muita diligentia' and later 'muyta consideracao e juizo' if he is to follow the sense.

The opposition between Ecclesiastes, or Solomon, on the one hand and the misguided 'vulgo' on the other suggests that Gois had a black-and-white view of his text, but this is not always the case. He can see that Ecclesiastes may condemn a particular course of action at one point, only to praise it at another, as the lesser of two evils. He realises, therefore, just as modern commentators do, that Ecclesiastes's moral judgements are subtle ones, which only a discerning reader can properly understand. (42) The discerning reader Gois has in mind must be, like himself, schooled in Christian humanism, and accordingly capable of appreciating the links between the Old Testament and the Latin classics without too much overt explanation. Such a reader must also be used to the subtleties and ambiguities of the dialogue form, in which not every speaker need necessarily be believed, and in addition be able to read in context, to weigh statements made in different parts of the text against each other before arriving at a conclusion about their meaning. All this is a very long way from the compilations of moral maxims then so popular in Portugal and must surely be evidence of how much Gois's long residence abroad and friendship with Erasmus had influenced his intellectual development.

Secondly, Gois was not dogmatic. The uneasy union of humanistic, Lutheran and Jewish ideas which make up Ecclesiastes de Salamam is a clear indication of that. Indeed, he is quite forthright about not wanting to force his opinions on the reader. Chapter 12 is the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, and by far the most problematic. It is the chapter of the almond tree and the grasshopper (translated by Gois, once again following Ibn Ezra, as lobster), the silver cord and the golden bowl, terms which can only be understood allegorically. Gois, who had previously largely avoided allegorical explanations (there is an exception in 11.3-4) now acknowledges the need for them. However, his technique is not to invent explanations of his own, but to present the reader with a range of the extraordinarily varied solutions that had already been proposed for the problems of meaning in the chapter. The ideas of St Jerome and Nicholas of Lyra, of the Christian Hebraists of the sixteenth century and of the rabbis of the Middle Ages are all paraded. In consequence, the chapter is far more densely annotated than any of the previous ones. In the end Gois concludes that no one explanation is satisfactory (though Ibn Ezra comes nearer the mark than most) and that the reader should make up his own mind. (43)

Above all, Gois was open to religious traditions other than his own. His use of Jewish exegesis for part of his 'Argumento' and in the commentary, and his unconditional admiration for Ibn Ezra are indications that the reader is also supposed to share that tolerance which was one of the most attractive aspects of his personality. In this respect he was more advanced even than Erasmus who, like many other Christian scholars, feared that the Jewish attachment to the literal sense of the Bible was the 'letter that kills'. (44) Gois, however, never says nor implies anything that might be taken as hostile to Judaism.

Gois's attitude towards the Jewish rabbi has much in common with his equally open-minded acceptance of the Ethiopian priest Saga za-Ab (known to Gois as Zagazabo) who is the true hero of his best-known work, Fides, religio moresque Aethiopum. (45) The second half of the book, which Gois wrote while he was in Padua, in other words at the same time as he was working on Ecclesiastes de Salamam, is a translation, without comment by the author, of Zagazabo's treatise about Ethiopian Christianity. (46) Zagazabo's exposition revealed that the Ethiopians retained many religious customs derived from Judaism which Catholicism had abandoned, such as circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath and dietary restrictions. Gois was refused permission to publish his book in Portugal, because of the effect it might have on the recently converted New Christians, and even today his capacity to cross religious boundaries seems truly remarkable. (47)

THE TEXT AND THE TRANSLATION

At the time Gois wrote his translation of Ecclesiastes the Hebrew and the Greek versions of the Old Testament were available to scholars. Both appeared in the Complutensian Polyglot of 1514-17, the Greek Septuagint with an interlinear Latin translation. There were a number of other editions of the Hebrew Bible, an important centre for this activity being Venice, where Daniel Bomberg issued several Bibles and in addition printed the Targums, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, to which Gois refers by the term 'caldeu' (Chaldee). (48) The Hebrew Bible had itself been translated into Latin more than once by Christian scholars. Gois knew two such translations, those by Sebastian Munster and the Italian Dominican, Sanctes Pagninus. (49) His own translation makes use of their work, and that of other writers, but is based, sometimes freely, on the Latin Vulgate.

Reasons of prudence may lie behind Gois's use of the Vulgate as well as the simple fact, already discussed, that he is unlikely to have known much Greek or Hebrew. His translation of Ecclesiastes has a marked ecumenical flavour and its gestures towards ancient literature as well as towards the Jewish contribution to learning have already been noted. His choice of the version of the Bible traditionally sanctioned by the church may be a way of implying that orthodoxy and an inclusive attitude to different forms of spirituality are not necessarily incompatible. However that may be, he did not follow St Jerome blindly. Unfortunately Gois's 'Argumento do livro', though informative about many things, says nothing about the text or how he set about establishing it, and the principles that he followed have to be inferred from the text itself.

After a first chapter which for the most part follows the Vulgate closely, perhaps to allay suspicions, Gois introduces a number of changes. These are essentially of two kinds. Either they are readings derived from a different text from St Jerome's or they are glosses, very often of Gois's own invention, designed to bring out what he considers to be the moral significance underlying the words he is translating. (50)

In 2.8 Gois prefers the reading of the Hebrew Bible to that of the Vulgate. The Vulgate reads: 'Feci mihi cantores et cantrices et delicias filiorum hominum, scyphos et urceos in ministerio ad vina fundenda'. The Portuguese is radically different: 'e tive cantores, e molheres que cantavam, e mocas electas pera me servirem aa mesa'. There is no need to suppose that Gois is translating directly from the Hebrew text here, since he could have followed Sanctes Pagninus's Latin version of it. In a note he does give a faithful translation of the Vulgate, attributing it vaguely to 'outros', but clearly prefers the Hebrew reading, which he supports by reference to Ibn Ezra and the Aramaic paraphrase ('o caldeu').

In 4.17 Gois, once again probably following Sanctes Pagninus, adds a detail which is missing from the Vulgate: 'Guarda, e oulha com muyta diligentia o que fazes entrando na casa de Deos, porque assi seras milhor ouvido'. St Jerome has only: 'Custodi pedem tuum ingrediens domum Dei'. Gois's version gives a characteristic moral gloss as well as adding an explanatory phrase derived from the Hebrew Bible.

Gois refers to Sanctes Pagninus by name and it is reasonable to assume made use of his work. But he need not necessarily have painstakingly checked Pagninus's translation word for word against Jerome's, for that had already been done by the French scholar-printer Robert Estienne. Estienne's remarkable edition of the Vulgate contains in the margins a great number of variant readings, some taken from the Hebrew Bible and others from different manuscripts of the Vulgate itself. Estienne distinguishes between Jewish and non-Jewish sources by a system of signs and invites the reader to decide for himself which reading is to be preferred in each case. (51) In 3.18 Gois once again departs from the Vulgate, but this time the source of his translation cannot be found in Sanctes Pagninus because it is not Jewish. Where Jerome has 'Dixi in corde meo de filiis hominum ut probaret eos Deus et ostenderet similes esse bestiis' Gois reads: 'Dixe no meu coracam do estado dos filhos dos homens, no qual os ellegeo Deos pera que s'espremente, e conheca serem semelhantes aas bestas'. Estienne's marginal note reads: 'De filiis etc. de statu filiorum hominum, quomodo eligit eos Deus, et sinit apparere ac si essent iumenta inter sese'. Gois never mentions Estienne, but he would seem to have followed this reading, at least as far as 'quomodo [...] Deus'. Gois himself includes an explanatory note on this passage, but it is not easy to deduce from it what his reasons were for setting aside the reading of the Vulgate. It may well have been a case of personal taste. (52)

On a number of occasions Gois will translate the Vulgate in the main body of the text but offer an alternative translation, based on Hebrew or Aramaic, in the notes. In 4.16 and 9.1 the note implies that the non-Vulgate version is superior; on the other occasions Gois makes no comment. (53) The technique may be based on Estienne's practice. It has the effect of undermining the authority of St Jerome without explicitly doing so.

But how does Gois actually translate Ecclesiastes? Some of his practices as translator, particularly the habit of incorporating glosses into the text, are reminiscent of the medieval tradition of translation as it developed in the Iberian peninsula. But Gois had lived with Erasmus for some months before starting his version of Ecclesiastes, and his free and flexible approach to the text of the Bible indicates that he knew Erasmus's Latin translation of the Greek New Testament and the comments on that translation which Erasmus published in his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum. At one point Erasmus comments that: 'In this work I have not striven for eloquence, but I have not avoided neatness where it lay to hand'. (54) Gois too avoids embellishment, except occasionally and then for special reasons, but at the same time is concerned to render Jerome's Latin in Portuguese which is simple but natural.

In the dedication of the De Senectute, Gois claimed to have had so little contact with Portugal in the last sixteen years (one visit of four months only) that he had forgotten his own language. This is to be taken as a captatio benevolentiae, for his translation always reads like genuine Portuguese, despite one or two unexpected Latinisms, especially in the spelling of abstract nouns. (55) Gois is not excessively in awe of the original and does not translate literally. Here are some examples from Chapter 8:

v. 8: non est in hominis dicione : nam he em mao do homem

v. 9 interdum dominatur homo homini : e alguas vezes senhorea hum homem outro

v. 11: quia non profertur cito contra malos sententia : porque se loguo nam da sentenca contra os maos

v. 14: sunt iusti quibus mala proveniunt quasi opera egerint impiorum, et sunt impii qui ita securi sunt quasi iustorum facta habeant: sam alguns justos a que vem mal quasi como se fizessem obras de maos, e sam alguns maos que assi vivem seguros, e descansados, como se nunqua fizessem mal

In each case there is a minor intervention by the translator which makes his version read naturally: the idiom 'em mao de' for the Latin abstract noun (v. 8); 'um ... outro' instead of two substantives (v. 9); the everyday verb 'dar' instead of the Latinism which 'profertur' might have suggested and the avoidance of the Latin word-order (v. 11). In v. 14 Jerome makes his point by opposing two nouns in the genitive, 'impiorum' and 'iustorum'. Gois achieves the same effect, but by the repetition of a verb, 'fizessem', in opposite contexts and by a play on 'maos' and 'mal'.

Gois has a marked tendency to expand the original, as in 8.14, just quoted, where he adds an adjective, 'descansados'. He frequently uses two words where St Jerome only has one. In Chapter 9, for instance, this happens five times:

v. 5: nihil noverunt : nenhua cousa mais conheceram, nem souberam. In the same verse mercedem is translated as galardam nem premio

v. 9: perfruere : goza, e deleita

v. 10: apud inferos : na morte, e sepulchro

v. 14: munitiones : monico es, e exercito

This doubling is so common as to seem to be nothing more than a quirk of style. But Gois is very much concerned to translate meaning, rather than the literal sense, and he sometimes intervenes in the Latin text in order to convey what he conceives to be Ecclesiastes's moral message to the reader. Such interventions are typical of the medieval tradition, often more concerned with 'fruto doctrinal' to be derived from a text than its literal meaning, but are equally to be found in the work of Erasmus and other sixteenth-century translators of the Bible. (56) Gois especially likes to embellish and expand his text when Ecclesiastes turns his attention to the proper organization of society.

It is certainly the case that one of the most attractive features of Gois's writing is his concern for social justice. His famous pamphlet about the plight of the Lapps is a product of his indignation at the mistreatment of the underprivileged at the hands of the powerful, and he was well aware that in Portugal too corruption was rife. (57) Nothing in the book of Ecclesiastes engaged Gois as much as its fulminations against injustice. This led him occasionally to take considerable liberties with the text, but the strength of his feeling is most appealing. A good example is 4.1:

Vulgate: Verti me ad alia et vidi calumnias quae sub sole geruntur, et lacrimas innocentum et consolatorem neminem; nec posse resistere eorum violentiae cunctorum auxilio destitutos.

Gois: Tornei-me a cuidar em tudo o demais, e vi todallas maldades, tyranias, e oppressoes que se fazem debaixo do sol, e vi lagrimas d' inocentes, e nenhum consolador, nem poderem os pobres, desemparados de toda ajuda, resistir aas forcas de seus tyrannos, e opprimidores.

This is much more than repetition as a mere trick of style. For the relatively weak word 'calumnias' Gois finds not two but three translations, all much stronger, 'maldades, tyranias, e oppressoes', and in the second half of the verse he adds a word which is not in the original at all, 'os pobres', and replaces the pronoun 'eorum' with the much more expressive 'seus tyrannos, e opprimidores'. Here too are further signs of the way Gois avoids being bound by Latin: 'tudo o demais' for 'alia' and 'desemparados de toda ajuda' for 'cunctorum auxilio destitutos', where the pronoun 'cunctorum' becomes an adjective, 'toda'. In the same chapter, v. 16 and in 5.7 Ecclesiastes again raises the question of the oppression of the weak and once more Gois reacts with language of heightened expressivity.

For all Gois's concerns for the things of this world, and his sympathy for the Jewish interpreters of the Bible, he was and remained a devout Catholic, and his translation of Ecclesiastes is a Christian one. In 7.13 St Jerome is content to say that wisdom gives life ('vitam') to him who possesses it. Gois gives this an unmistakable Christian gloss by translating 'vitam' as 'vida verdadeira', a gloss which seems all his own, as it does not appear in Estienne, Pagninus or Nicholas of Lyra. On various other occasions Gois makes minor alterations to the original so that it becomes easily compatible with Christian teaching (6.10, 8.12 and 12.11).

It was probably Gois's Portuguese and Christian background that made him wish to tone down some of Ecclesiastes's more challenging utterances. In 8.10 Ecclesiastes implies that some evil men continue to enjoy a good reputation not only while they are alive but even after their deaths. Gois was unable to stomach this and says instead that they are 'depois da morte blasfemados, e vituperados na terra onde viveram'. Again the addition, for which there is no textual justification, seems to be Gois's own. Like other Portuguese humanists, he clearly could not tolerate the notion that in the end evil-doers might not receive their just deserts. (58)

CONCLUSION: THE MYSTERY OF ECCLESIASTES DE SALAMAM

So far the discussion of Gois's translation has concentrated on its contribution to humanistic and biblical learning in the Europe of the sixteenth century. Now it is time to consider it under another aspect, as a work of scholarship in Portuguese, and here it becomes truly mysterious.

It is a commonplace among bibliographers that small books tend to disappear, and Ecclesiastes de Salamam, even when bound together with the De Senectute, as in the All Souls copy, is a small book. But for small books never to have been recorded at all, even as it seems by their author, is extraordinary. As already stated, Barbosa Machado and Inocencio, the classic bibliographers of Portuguese literature, do not mention Ecclesiastes de Salamam, though they both record the companion work, which suggests that the two translations were sometimes bound separately.

There is another group of Portuguese scholars, little known today but highly active in their time, who might be expected to have heard of Gois's work, the professional theologians, based mainly in the universities of Coimbra and Evora, who in the second half of the sixteenth century produced a number of commentaries on books of the Old and New Testaments. (59) However, the only commentator on Ecclesiastes makes no mention of the translation or its author. (60)

It is perhaps not surprising that no one in Portugal, in Gois's time or afterwards, was aware of his labours as an Old Testament scholar, because he himself is entirely silent about them. Normally he liked to talk about his own work, in his correspondence and in print. In a letter to Clenardus of 1537 he discusses some tricky problems in his translation of Cicero, (61) and as already mentioned in the Cronica de D. Manuel he talks about the composition of Fides, religio moresque Aethiopum. It is remarkable, then, that when he gave himself the opportunity to discuss Ecclesiastes de Salamam he declined to take it. The opportunity arose in Chapter 9 of the Cronica do Pryncipe D. Joao, where apropos of some surprising discoveries in the island of Corvo, in the Azores, he says:

que se pode com rezam dizer ho que diz Salamao: nam hauer cousa que ja nam fosse, e que houue outros que ja fezerao ho que nos agora fazemos. (62)

Here is a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 1.9-10. But Gois says nothing about his special interest in the book, though in the very same chapter of the chronicle he is at pains to explain how he composed, 'em lingua Latina' his Deploratio Lappianae gentis. Clearly there was something to hide.

There were probably two things to hide. The first was that Ecclesiastes de Salamam gave much too much comfort to Jews. In the sixteenth century Portugal was a country deeply and increasingly hostile to Judaism. The Inquisition, which was finally established in 1536 in the teeth of New Christian opposition, had as one of its principal aims the extirpation of any irregularity in the faith of converts. Gois's praise of Ibn Ezra would not have pleased the inquisitors and still less their chief, the Cardinal-Prince Henry, who was alarmed by the much less forthright Fides [...] Aethiopum. Then again Gois was treading on dangerous ground by issuing any translation of the Bible. Up until the Council of Trent it was still possible to publish versions of the Bible in the vernacular for Catholics. One was produced in Germany as a counterblast to Luther. (63) But in southern Europe translations tended to be done by and for Protestants, and as the century wore on the Latin Vulgate became the only version of the Bible allowable to Catholics. Gois, who from the 1540s onwards had been under suspicion as a consorter with reformers, would certainly have wished to keep quiet about an activity which was becoming more and more associated with the enemies of the Church. This would still have been the case even though his translation could not possibly have been intended to contribute to the mass evangelization of the Portuguese.

He succeeded in keeping the secret even during his trial by the Inquisition, in 1571-72, and his apparent insouciance at that time strongly suggests that he knew that his accusers would never be able to find a copy of the translation. On 19 April 1571 he sought an audience with his judges to tell them that in his library there were only four books which might be regarded as forbidden (defesos). These were two works in Italian and two by Erasmus. By July of the following year Gois, by now desperate at his long imprisonment, made a written statement in which he challenged the inquisitors to find anything in his written works, whether in Latin or in Portuguese, that smacked of heresy. (64) They did not take up the offer--but its apparent recklessness suggests that Gois knew that there was nothing to find. Earlier in the trial the existence of the translation again came close to being revealed when Simao Rodrigues, Gois's chief persecutor, and by now a Jesuit, deposed that Gois had lent him a book about Ecclesiastes by Luther. (65) Gois was wise enough not to mention Luther by name as one of his sources but, as we have seen, he certainly knew his work. However, the inquisitors, much more interested in Gois's personal contacts with the Protestant leaders than in his writings, did not take the issue further.

Perhaps the reason why there has been such complete silence in Portugal about Ecclesiastes de Salamam is that no copy of it ever found its way there. In that case it is hard not to agree with Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. For the discovery of the translation is a novelty only in the most superficial sense. It has come far too late to make any difference to the intellectual and spiritual life of the people in whose language Gois wrote.

Oxford University

(1) For a list, see Guy Bedouelle and Bernard Roussel, Le Temps des Reformes et la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), pp. 459-61.

(2) E. M. Wilson, 'Spanish Versions of the Bible to c. 1600' in The Cambridge History of the Bible: the West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. by S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963) pp. 125-29 (pp. 127-28) and Bedouelle and Roussel, p. 408.

(3) See Bibliografia Geral Portuguesa I: Seculo XV (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1941), pp. 221-44 and F. J. Norton, A Descriptive Catalogue of Printing in Spain and Portugal, 1501-1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 507.

(4) William of Paris was a fifteenth-century writer of uncertain identity. See Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, 17 vols (Paris: Beauchesne, 1932-95), s.v. Guillaume de Paris. Mario Martins has shown that the Autos dos Apostolos are based on a text originally compiled around 1200. See his Estudos de Cultura Medieval, ii (Braga: Magnificat, 1972) p. 154.

(5) See Antonio Dias Miguel, 'Antonio Pereira Marramaque, senhor de Basto: subsydios para o estudo da sua vida e da sua obra', Arquivos do Centro Cultural Portugues, 15 (1980), 135-221 (pp. 167 and 173).

(6) Francisco Leite de Faria, Estudos bibliograficos sobre Damiao de Gois e a sua epoca (Lisbon: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1977). Gois's book has a title-page and thirty-one unnumbered folios. It measures 14 x 9 cm.

(7) LIVRO DE MARCO TULLIO Ciceram chamado Catam maior, ou da velhice, dedicado a Tito Pomponio Attico (Venice: Stevao Sabio, 1538). The book has a title-page and thirty-nine unnumbered folios. There is a later edition (Lisbon: Rollandiana, 1845).

(8) Leite de Faria, Estudos bibliograficos, pp. 15-16.

(9) Gois, like most people in his time, believed that Solomon was the author of Ecclesiastes. Modern research has proved the attribution to be impossible, and modern scholars refer to the anonymous author by the Hebrew word Quoheleth, of which the Latin Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, is a rather imprecise translation. See R. N. Whybray, Ecclesiastes (Sheffield: JSOT, 1989), pp. 16-17. In the present article, which is concerned with how Quoheleth was read in the pre-modern period, both the author of the book and its title will be referred to as Ecclesiastes.

(10) The standard modern biography is by Elisabeth Feist Hirsch, Damiao de Gois: the Life and Thought of a Portuguese Humanist, 1502-1574 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967).

(11) Maria do Rosario de Sampaio Themudo Barata, Rui Fernandes de Almada, diplomata portugues do seculo XVI, 2 vols (Lisbon: Instituto de Alta Cultura, 1971; and Coimbra: [n.p.], 1973), i, 14-15.

(12) Barata, pp. 22-25.

(13) For this famous episode in Gois's life see Feist Hirsch, pp. 64-89; Jean-Claude Margolin, 'Damiao de Gois et Erasme de Rotterdam', in Damiao de Gois humaniste europeen, ed. by Jose V. de Pina Martins (Braga: Barbosa & Xavier, 1982), pp. 17-54; and Jean Aubin, 'Damiao de Gois dans une Europe evangelique', in Le Latin et l'astrolabe, 2 vols (Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 1996-2000), i, 211-35.

(14) [Erasmo] 'afirmava nam ter achada no estudo cousa mais ardua que tralladar, nem digna de moor louvor, fazendo-se bem, nem pello contrario de moor reprehensam. Que cousa, dizia, pode ser de moor gloria, que amostrar aos latinos, em sua propria lingua, a elegantia, e prudentia graega, e aos graegos a latina? E assi das outras linguagens.'

(15) In addition, Gois shared with Erasmus a belief in tolerance and in the need for reconciliation amongst Christians. See Jose V. de Pina Martins, 'L'E rasmisme de Damiao de Gois', in Humanisme et renaissance de l'Italie au Portugal: les deux regards de Janus, (Lisbon: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1989), pp. 480-87. Jose Fernando Tavares, Damiao deGois: um paradigma erasmiano no humanismo portugues (Lisbon: Universitaria, 1999) arrived too late for me to be able to use it.

(16) See R. Hoven, 'Notes sur Erasme et les auteurs anciens', L'Antiquite classique, 38 (1969), 169-74 (p. 172).

(17) See p. 54.

(18) Feist Hirsch, p. 96.

(19) The Cronica do felicyssimo rei D. Manuel (1566-67) and the Cronica do pryncipe D. Joao (1567). The library of All Souls possesses the first editions of both these works. The All Souls copies are not listed in Leite de Faria's bibliography.

(20) The modern editor of the Sentencas believes on other grounds that the count probably wrote his book in the 1540s, that is, well after the publication of the translation of De Senectute. See D. Francisco de Portugal, i Conte di Vimioso, Sentencas, ed. by Valeria Tocco (Lucca: Baroni, 1997), p. 27.

(21) See Erasmus, Opera omnia, ed. by L.-E. Halkin and others, (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1972-), i, Book 3, 251. The key words perhaps are 'Et fortasse latius se fundit spiritus Christi, quam nos interpretamur'.

(22) Cicero's words, in Gois's translation, 'Tudo torna ao lugar donde sayo, e naceo; mas a alma soo, nem quando se delle parte, aparece, nem se vee' are quite like his version of Ecclesiastes 12. 1: 'Alembra-te de teu criador antes que se torne o poo aa terra donde sayo, e a alma se torne a Deos que a criou'. But even this is more of a gloss than a strict translation, and appears not in the text of Ecclesiastes but in the 'Argumento do Livro' which precedes it.

(23) Gois does not divide his chapters into verses. The modern system is used here to facilitate reference. It is attributed to Robert Estienne, who first introduced it in his Bibles of the 1550s. Bedouelle and Roussel, pp. 129-30.

(24) Raul Rego, O processo de Damiao de Goes na inquisicao (Lisbon: Excelsior, 1971), p. 44. Luther wrote his commentary in 1526. Gois would have known the printed version, Ecclesiastes Solomonis, cum annotationibus Doc. Mart. Luth. (Wittenberg: Joannes Luft, 1532).

(25) St Jerome, Commentarius in Ecclesiasten, ed. by Marc Adriaen, in Opera, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 72 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1959-) i, 247-361 (p. 249).

(26) Jean Aubin, pp. 219-20. For a corrective, see Jose V. de Pina Martins, 'Damiao de Gois: humaniste europeen', in Damiao de Gois: humaniste europeen, pp. xiii-xliii (p. xx).

(27) For an account of Luther's views about Ecclesiastes, see Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther in Mid-Carreer, 1521-1530, trans. by E. Theodore Bachmann (London: Darton, Longmann & Todd, 1983), pp. 565-67.

(28) On the debate between them see E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S.Watson, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969).

(29) Nicholas of Lyra (1270-1349) was the best-known Christian commentator on the Bible of the Middle Ages. His commentary, which owed much to the Jewish scholar Rashi (who was also known to Gois by the name of Rabi Salamao), was printed with the Glosa Ordinaria, based on the work of the Fathers of the Church. Gois refers to Lyra's commentary frequently.

(30) See St Jerome, i, 314-15. Generally speaking, Gois is not concerned to interpret Ecclesiastes in the light of the Gospels, thus differentiating himself once again from Luther as well as from Jerome. See Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. by Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), pp. 79-81.

(31) Exceptions are 3.15, where Gois refers in pasing to the 'geral resurreicam' and 9.1 where he says that good Christians and Solomon share a common faith in God's Providence. There is a further reference to the life after death in 3.21.

(32) Aben Ezra was born in Tudela (Spain) in 1089 and died around 1165, after a wandering life. He is referred to flatteringly as one of the great scholars of Spain in Gois's Hispania, which is an encomium of the whole Peninsula, as well as in Ecclesiastes de Salamam. See the translation of Hispania by Dias de Carvalho in Damiao de Gois, Opusculos historicos (Oporto: Civilizacao, 1945), p. 105.

(33) See Mariano Gomez Aranda, El comentario de Abraham Ibn Ezra al libro del eclesiastes (Madrid: Instituto de Filologya del CSIC, 1994), pp. 106-07.

(34) See p. 54 below.

(35) See Mariano Gomez Aranda, El comentario de Abraham Ibn Ezra, pp. 14-15. Gois concludes his note with a typically sixteenth-century comparison, not found in Ibn Ezra, of life to a stage comedy. Further borrowings from Ibn Ezra can be found in 4.2 (p. 64), 4.12 (pp. 67-68). 9.11 (p. 146) and 11.3 (p. 173).

(36) Gomez Aranda, p. 50.

(37) Jean Aubin mentions his 'amateurisme', p. 234.

(38) Amadeu Torres, Noese e crise na epistolografia latina goisiana, 2 vols (Paris: Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, 1982), ii, 166-67.

(39) In 12.6, where Gois refers to Joannes Campensis, Succinctissima et quantum phrasis hebraica permittit ad literam proxime accedens paraphrasis in concionem Salomonis Ecclesiastae (Paris: Claudius Chevallonius, 1533).

(40) Torres, i, 301. Sebastian Munster, though, taunted Gois for not knowing Hebrew. See Jeremy Lawrance, 'The Middle Indies: Damiao de Gois on Prester John and the Ethiopians', Renaissance Studies, 6 (1992), 306-24 (p. 315).

(41) Bedouelle and Roussel, p. 421n.

(42) Whybray, pp. 38-39 talks about Quoheleth's fondness for the 'Zwar-aber' or 'Yes, but ...' style of argument in a way not altogether dissimilar to Gois's discussion of 2.2, which according to him is neither wholly for or against 'o riso [...] e a allegria'.

(43) 'Estas variedades, e opinioes de doutores quis por aqui todas, o mais breve que pude, de que cada hum leitor tomaraa aquillo que lhe milhor parecer, e lhe Deos inspirar, que certo o capitolo he tam escuro, e allegorico, que creo que soo Salamao que o compos entendeo o que queria dizer, que os que o expoem nam fazem mais que adevinhar per conjecturas.'

(44) See the editor's extensive note in Erasmus, Collected Works, ed. and trans. by Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997-), xxxix, 222; and R. Gerald Hobbs, 'Martin Bucer on Psalm 22: A Study in the Application of Rabbinic Exegesis by a Christian Hebraist', in Histoire de l'exegese au XVIe siecle, ed. by Olivier Fatio and Pierre Fraenkel (Geneva: Droz, 1978), pp. 144-63 (p. 145).

(45) (Louvain: Rescius, 1540).

(46) Gois received Zagazabo's text while he was in Padua. See Cronica do felicyssimo rei D. Manuel, 4 vols (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1949-55), iii, 223.

(47) Up-to-date information about Fides ... can be found in Jean Aubin, 'Le Pretre Jean devant la censure portugaise' in Le Latin et l'astrolabe i, 183-210 (an article first published in 1980) and Jeremy Lawrance.

(48) Bedouelle and Roussel, pp. 78-80. Gois was free with the word 'caldeu' which he also used to describe Ge'ez, the language of Ethiopia. See Jeremy Lawrance, p. 311.

(49) Mu nster's complete Bible appeared in Basle in 1534-35, perhaps too late for Gois to have used it, but he certainly knew and quotes from the same writer's translation of Ecclesiastes (Basle: 1525). Pagninus's Bible was printed in 1528, apparently in Lyons.

(50) The incorporation of glosses into a text that was being translated has a long history in Western Europe. See Peter Russell, Traducciones y traductores en la penynsula iberica (1400-1550) (Bellaterra: Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, 1985), p. 40.

(51) See his address to 'Christiano Lectori' in Biblia: Breves in eadem annotationes, ex doctiss. interpretationibus, et Hebraeorum commentariis (Paris: 1532). Not surprisingly, Estienne's liberal approach to the text of scripture brought him into disfavour and he was obliged to move his activities to Geneva. See Elizabeth Armstrong, Robert Estienne Royal Printer: An Historical Study of the Elder Stephanus (Sutton Courtenay: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1986), pp. 200-20.

(52) There are many other instances where Gois and Estienne coincide. See for example 2.2, where the Vulgate reads: 'Risum reputavi errorem et gaudio dixi, quid frustra deciperis?', Estienne prints with it the following alternative: 'Risui dixi, Insanis (vel Insanire facis), & laetitiae, Quid istud facis?'and Gois translates: 'Ou riso, porque endoudeces? E ao prazer que cousa he esta?'.

(53) See 1.18, 3.11 and 10.4.

(54) 'Ut non affectavimus eloquentiam, ita munditiem si qua in promptu fuit, non respuimus'. Quoted by Erika Rummel, Erasmus as Translator of the Classics, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 92.

(55) Gois normally uses -entia as an ending for abstract nouns where in sixteenth-century Portuguese one would expect -enca or -encia. So he has diligentia, providentia, prudentia, though once in a way impaciencia and diligencia. Sentenca, however, is always spelt thus, whether in the legal or the literary sense. Abstract nouns ending in -ude usually have the Latin ending-udo: sollecitudo, inquietudo.

(56) Russell, p. 50, and Rummel, p. 81.On this trait of sixteenth-century translators and expositors of the Bible see Bedouelle and Roussel, pp. 427-31.

(57) See Deploratio Lappianae gentis (Louvain: Rutgerus Rescius, 1540) and Cronica do Pryncipe D. Joao, ed. by Graca Almeida Rodrigues (Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1977), pp. 63 and 79.

(58) Antonio Ferreira was another Portuguese humanist who believed that after death the truth cannot be hidden. See his Carta i, 5, ll. 58-72 in Poemas Lusitanos, ed. by T. F. Earle (Lisbon: Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, 2000), p. 269.

(59) See Fr Fortunato de S. Boaventura, 'Memoria, sobre o comeco, progressos, e decadencia da litteratura Hebraica entre os Portuguezes Catholicos Romanos desde a fundacao deste Reino ate ao Reinado de El-Rei D. Jose I', Historia e memorias da Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa, 9 (1825), 29-62; Friedrich Stegmuller, Filosofia e teologia nas universidades de Coimbra e Evora no seculo XVI (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1959); Manuel Augusto Rodrigues, Les Etudes hebrayques a l'universite de Coymbre (XVIe. siecle) in L'Humanisme portugais et l'Europe (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1984), pp. 111-60.

(60) Fr Francisco Sanchez, In Ecclesasten commentarium cum concordia vulgatae editionis, et hebraici textus (Barcelona: Sebastianus Matheuat, 1619). The author was undoubtedly Portuguese, described as 'Ulyssiponensi' on the title page, but is probably not the famous Francisco Sanches of Quod nihil scitur.

(61) The text can be found in Amadeu Torres, i, 139-41 and a translation pp. 305-07.

(62) See the edition by Graca Almeida Rodrigues, p. 30.

(63) Bedouelle and Roussel, pp. 212-13.

(64) Rego, pp. 93 and 206-07.

(65) Rego, p. 44. See also p. 49 above.