- Philemon Holland
Philemon Holland (
1552 –February 9 ,1637 ) was an English translator.His father, John Holland, was a clergyman who fled the
Kingdom of England during the persecutions ofMary I of England . Philemon was born atChelmsford , Essex, and educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford (where, more than three hundred years later, a house was named for him), before going on to Trinity College, Cambridge. He took a degree in medicine and moved toCoventry around 1595, where he practiced among the poor but devoted most of his energy to translating. In 1628 he was made headmaster of the local free school, but he served for less than a year. His last years were passed in poverty, though he was awarded a pension in 1635 by the city council of Coventry.Holland was extremely productive, but his best known translations are of
Pliny the Elder 's "Natural History", Plutarch's "Moralia", Suetonius, Xenophon's "Cyropaedia", andWilliam Camden 's "Britannia". Holland's Pliny is sometimes superior (despite the antiquated language he uses) to the 20thcentury English translations commonly available, and there are passages in his Plutarch which have hardly been excelled by any later prose translator of the classics.ources
* [http://7.1911encyclopedia.org/Philemon_Holland "Love to Know 911"]
External links
* [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/index.html Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History] (in progress, Books IIII, VIIXIII)
* [http://www.bartleby.com/214/0107.html Philemon Holland] from "The Cambridge History of English and American Literature."
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