our Landry[142], written
in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. This book, destined for
the instruction of the author's three daughters, is composed of Bible
stories, moral tales from ordinary literature and from the writer's
experience, precepts and rules of conduct, and so forth; in short, a
Whole Duty of Girls. Most however of the works of this sort which were
current were, as may be supposed, not original, but translated, and
these translations played a very important part in the history of the
language. The earliest of all are translations of the Bible, especially
of the Psalms and the book of Kings, the former of which may perhaps
date from the end of the eleventh century. Translations of the fathers,
and of the Lives of the Saints, followed in such numbers that, in 1199,
Pope Innocent III. blamed their indiscriminate use. The translation of
profane literature hardly begins much before the thirteenth century. In
this it becomes frequent; and in the following many classical writers
and more mediaeval authors in Latin underwent the process. But it was
not till the close of the fourteenth century that the most important
translations were made, and that translation began to exercise its
natural influence on a comparatively unsophisticated language, by
providing terms of art, by generally enriching the vocabulary, and by
the elaboration of the peculiarities of syntax and style necessary for
rendering the sentences of languages so highly organised as Latin and
Greek. Under John of Valois and his three successors considerable
encouragement was given by the kings of France to this sort of work, and
three translators, Pierre Bersuire, Nicholas Oresme, and Raoul de
Presles, have left special reputations. The eldest of these, Pierre
Bersuire or Bercheure, a friend of Petrarch, was born in 1290, and
towards the end of his life, about 1352, translated part of Livy.
Nicholas Oresme, the date of whose birth is unknown, but who entered the
College de Navarre in 1348, and is likely to have been at that time
thirteen or fourteen years old, and who became Dean of Rouen and Bishop
of Lisieux, translated, in 1370 and the following years, the _Ethics_,
_Politics_, and _Economics_ of Aristotle (from the Latin, not the
Greek). He died in 1382. Oresme was a good writer, and particularly
dexterous in adopting neologisms necessary for his purpose. Raoul de
Presles executed translations of the Bible and of St. Augustine's _De
Civitat