DOES, Dirk van der et al and SCHOOCK, Martin

Scarce first edition of this entertaining miscellany of 'echo' poetry, edited by the humanist translator Dirk van der Does (1580-1663), with poems in Latin, Dutch, Greek and English, including by Sir Philip Sidney, to which is appended a scholarly treatise on the echo by the young Dutch polymath and mathematician Martin Schoock (1614-1669), known for his virulent attacks on René Descartes.

Dirk van der Does's father, known as Janus Dousa, was a famous humanist poet, translator and historian, who was the first curator and librarian of Leiden University. In 1603 Janus published a poetical miscellany called Echo, of which this is an imitation; his Latin poem by this name, along with a selection of his shorter poems and satires from that volume, are reprinted here. The form of Dousa’s poem, which became a popular rhetorical game in the Renaissance, involves either the whole or a portion of the last word of each line, couplet or epigram being repeated as an ‘echo’, which often takes the form of an answer to a question posed in the preceding line. His son Dirk adopts this form for poems on gardening, wine and beer, Greek philosophers, and a salacious poem punning on ‘horns’, etc.

There follow contributions or excerpted poems, all following the echo form, in Greek, Latin, Dutch, French, German, Italian and English, including anti-papist verses in Dutch, what appears to be a German imitation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, poems in French by du Bellay and du Bartas, etc., and Latin poems by Daniel Heinsius, Scaliger, Erasmus, Rudolph Goclenius, and Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-78), regarded in her time as one of the most highly educated women in Europe. One of van Schurman's poems is addressed to Queen Henrietta Maria on the occasion of the birth of her daughter Elizabeth Stuart. The excerpts in English include Sir Philip Sidney's echo poem Philisides and Echo, from Book II of the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. There is also a Latin echo poem at the end by an English author celebrating the failure of the Gunpowder Plot.

The scholarly work appended to the poems, by Martin Schoock, is an extremely learned and pseudo-scientific treatise on the sense of sound, the voice, and the phenomenon of the echo, including discussions of natural echoes and where one is likely to encounter them, artificial echoes, e.g. using musical instruments, the philology of the word echo in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and literary analysis of classical poems in which echoes appear, including Book 3 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which tells the tale of Echo and Narcissus. In the 1640s Schoock became notorious for his attacks on Descartes, who accused him of libel.