Historicizing Vergil: Translation and Exegesis in Enrique de Villena's Eneida

Enrique de Villena's relationship to the intellectual movement known broadly as humanism has been the subject of much debate in recent years. This article makes an intervention in that debate through an analysis of the Prohemio to Villena's vernacular translation of Vergil's Aeneid. Roughly modeled on the medieval accessus ad auctor, the Prohemio provides an introduction to both Virgil and his work. In the context of the debate over Villena's standing as a humanist, two aspects of this introductory material stand out: the particular use that Villena makes of Vergil's biography and his engagement with the question of translation. With regard to the first of these, Villena offers an anachronistic depiction of Vergil as the official chronicler of Augustus which he then uses to measure the deficiencies in the historical chronicles of his own age. The interest in historiography may be said to confirm Villena's humanist sympathies while his inability to posit a remedy for this narrative of medieval decline suggests the implicit limitations of these humanist tendencies. Similarly, the very fact of Villena's translation of the Aeneid into the vernacular places Villena at the heart of one of the defining debates of Renaissance humanism, while his inability to conceive of his work as anything more than a extensive "explication" of Vergil's text reveals the extent to which he cannot shake off certain medieval habits of exegesis that inhibit a more self-conscious rewriting of the poem of the kind that would mark later encounters with Renaissance imitatio.