Eneados

The Eneados is a translation into Middle Scots of Virgil's Latin Aeneid, completed by the poet and clergyman Gavin Douglas in 1513. Description The title of Gavin Douglas' translation "Eneados" is given in the heading of a manuscript at Cambridge University, which refers to the "twelf bukis of Eneados." The title of the first printed edition (London, 1553) was The xiii Bukes of Eneados of the famose Poete Virgill. The work was the first complete translation of a major classical text in the Scots language and the first successful example of its kind in any Anglic language. In addition to Douglas's version of Virgil's Aeneid, the work also contains a translation of the "thirteenth book" written by the fifteenth-century poet Maffeo Vegio as a continuation of the Aeneid. Douglas supplied original prologue verses for each of the thirteen books, and a series of concluding poems. There is also an incomplete commentary, covering only part of the first book, written as marginal notes (almost certainly in Douglas's own hand) in the Cambridge manuscript. In the first general prologue Douglas compares the merits of Virgil and Chaucer as master poets and attacks the printer William Caxton for his inadequate rendering of a French translation of the Aeneid.