Notes
{{Tr|William Caxton}}, the first translation into English. The 1480 translation survives only in a single manuscript copy. Experts are uncertain as to whether it was ever published, but if it was, no copy is known to have survived. The library at UW-Milwaukee writes "there is no evidence to suggest [Caxton] ever translated a text only to be used in manuscript form. Therefore, it is likely Caxton issued a printed edition of Metamorphoses at about 1480, though no copies survive today."
Caxton's translation was made not from the original Latin but from a prose version of the French "Ovide moralisé" (Richard J. Moll), which the National Library of Australia refers to as a "French moralized version" of the work. "Caxton's handwritten and illuminated manuscript translation of Ovid's classic was separated into two halves at some point. These halves came to be known as the Pepys and the Phillipps manuscripts. They were reunited in the 1960's when the Phillipps manuscript (Books I-IX) was discovered and redeemed to Magdalene College; Pepys had left his portion (Books X-XV) to the College in his will, dated 1703." (Franklin Books) For more details on the elaborate negotiations required to marry those two halves back together, see James M. Wells, "William Caxton's Translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. William Caxton," The Library Quarterly 40, no. 1 (Jan., 1970), pp. 202-203.
- Hand-written manuscript version of the first English translation of "The Metamorphoses".
- Caxton's handwritten and illuminated manuscript translation of Ovid's classic was separated into two halves at some point. These halves came to be known as the "Pepys manuscript" and the "Phillipps manuscript". Pepys had left his portion (Books X-XV) to Magdalene College, Cambridge University, in his will, dated 1703. In 1964, the Phillipps manuscript (Books I-IX) was discovered among the papers of Sir Thomas Phillips and was then purchased by Magdalene College. To help finance this purchase, the 1968 facsimile edition was created and sold. This manuscript edition thus exists as a "limited edition" of one copy, with a 1968 "reprint" edition.
- This edition is not in WorldCat.
