Two English Translations of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical Histories: A Lexical Analysis

With over three hundred quotations, Meredith Hanmer’s translation of Eusebius' "Auncient Ecclesiastical Histories" (London, 1577, STC 10572) is one of the top 1000 sources of the Oxford English Dictionary. Hanmer was not the first translator of the Church history, however. The first five books survive in a manuscript translation by the niece of Sir Thomas More, Mary Roper Clark Basset, which has been dated between 1547 and 1553. No study of the relationship between Hanmer’s and Basset’s translations has been undertaken so far, a gap in the state of the art that this note intends to remedy starting from a comparison of their vocabulary.