SOURCE: Tuve, Rosemond. Introduction to The Zodiake of Life, by Marcellus Palingenius, translated by Barnabe Googe, pp. v-xxiv. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1947.

In the following excerpt, Tuve praises Googe's translation of Palingenius's Zodiake, a philosophical poem studied by many of the translator's most important Renaissance contemporaries.

The especial interest of [The Zodiake of Life] lies in what we know of its readers. A few of those readers were men of greater genius and originality than its writer. The greatest number of them were students who studied it as a school-book, in Latin, or read Googe's translation because they were interested in a “most learned” and “pregnant introduction into Astronomie, & both philosophies.” This characterization of the book by Gabriel Harvey indicates the nature of its influence upon English thought.

Among Renaissance Latin poems it enjoyed in England a popularity perhaps rivaled only by Mantuan's eclogues; it did not...