Aretino Jesuited: an English Translation of the Sette Salmi in Seventeenth‐Century Douai

Abstract

This article offers the first focused analysis of John Hawkins's 1635 English rendering of Pietro Aretino's Parafrasi sopra i sette salmi della penitenza di David, situating the translation within its Catholic and translingual context. Nearly a century after Thomas Wyatt's versified treatment of the Sette Salmi, a sequence of seven Psalms framed within the narrative of a penitent King David, this prose version appeared in Douai, a city known for its English Catholic university. I analyse this translation's discursive and bibliographical elements in relation to the dynamic book trade supplying England's Catholics with religious texts, and with particular emphasis on the ways Hawkins's rendering dresses the Sette Salmi in the rhetoric of imaginative contemplation for devotional purposes. ‘Contemplate on the subiect following’, he urges in a preface to the reader; in his English treatments of the paraphrases' prologues, meanwhile, the translator embroiders the text with emphases on both ‘phantasy’ and heightened suffering. Though Hawkins never names Aretino explicitly, this translation takes part in a transnational effort to revisit the Sette Salmi and to rehabilitate an author known commonly in the Anglophone world, if not more widely in Europe, as the ‘scourge of princes’ and author of the scandalous Ragionamenti.