David Norbrook awarded Honourable Mention for Scholarly Edition

Merton Professor of English Literature David Norbrook, along with his co-editor Reid Barbour of the University of North Carolina, has been awarded an Honourable Mention by the Modern Language Association of America for their work Translation of Lucretius, volume 1 of The Works of Lucy Hutchinson.

The citation for the honorable mention reads:

With their incisive introduction and impeccable textual work, Reid Barbour and David Norbrook have produced a deeply impressive edition of Lucy Hutchinson’s sometimes labored, sometimes shimmering, always invigorated translation of Lucretius, a work that, thanks to the editors’ great erudition, can serve as a vantage from which to survey many of the ambitions and uncertainties of British intellectual life in the 1650s. Readers will be grateful to the editors and to Oxford University Press for their decision to pair the edition of Hutchinson’s manuscript translation with an equally careful edition of her printed source. The introduction details Hutchinson’s long-standing engagements with Epicureanism, while the commentary enables us to understand the translation as a tense, cunning, thrilling, and cautious rehearsal of Lucretius’s impolitic account of how "nature her administrations brings."

The Modern Language Association of America give a biennial award and honourable mention for a scholarly edition; these are presented at their annual convention, which in January 2014 takes place in Chicago, USA.

Translation of Lucretius is available from Oxford University Press. Professor Norbrook is general editor of the OUP edition of The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, which is being published in four volumes.