Philemon Holland (1552 – 9 February 1637) was an English schoolmaster, physician and translator. He is known for the first English translations of several works by Livy, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch, and also for translating William Camden's Britannia into English.

Family

Philemon Holland, born at Chelmsford, Essex, in 1552, was the son of John Holland (died 1578), a member of the same Norfolk family as Sir John Holland, 1st Baronet (1603–1701). The Norfolk branch claimed kinship with the Hollands of Up Holland, Lancashire, but this is questionable. Holland's grandfather, Edward Holland, was from Glassthorpe, Northamptonshire. Holland's father, John Holland, was one of the Marian exiles with Miles Coverdale during the reign of Mary I, when Catholicism was re-established. After the accession of Elizabeth I in November 1558, he returned to England, and in 1559 was ordained priest by Bishop Edmund Grindal. before going on to Trinity College, Cambridge about 1568, where he was tutored by John Whitgift, later Archbishop of Canterbury. Holland received a BA in 1571, and was elected a minor Fellow at Trinity on 28 September 1573 and a major Fellow on 3 April 1574. His fellowship was terminated automatically when he married in 1579.

On 11 July 1585 Holland was incorporated MA at Oxford, On 23 January 1628, when he was 77 years of age, the mayor and aldermen of Coventry appointed Holland head schoolmaster;

On 24 October 1632 the mayor and alderman granted him a pension of £3 6s 8d for the ensuing three years, "forasmuch as Dr. Holland, by reason of his age, is now grown weak and decayed in his estate."

thumb|right|upright|Mural tablet to Philemon Holland in [[Holy Trinity Church, Coventry]]

On 11 April 1635 a licence was granted by Henry Smythe, Vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge to the Masters and Fellows of all colleges at Cambridge to bestow such charitable benevolence on Holland as they should see fit, considering his learning and his financial need. Holland's wife, Anne, who died in 1627 at the age of 72, is also buried in the church, where there is a Latin epitaph to her composed by her son, Henry. Considine says of it:

<blockquote>This encyclopaedia of ancient knowledge about the natural world had already had a great indirect influence in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but had not been translated into English before, and would not be again for 250 years. Indeed, after four centuries, Holland is still the only translator of this work to attempt to evoke its literary richness and beauty.</blockquote>

In 1603 Holland published The Philosophie, commonly called, the Morals, dedicating it to King James. Holland is said to have claimed that he wrote out the whole of his translation of the Moralia with a single quill, which was later preserved by Lady Harington:

In 1609 he published his translation of the surviving books of Ammianus Marcellinus's history of the Roman Empire in the later 4th century AD, dedicating it to the mayor and aldermen of Coventry. The Corporation paid £4 towards the publication.

In 1610 Holland translated the 1607 edition of William Camden's Britannia into English. Although he appears to have been solely responsible for the translation, the work was expanded with a certain amount of new material supplied by Camden. One of the printer-publishers of the volume was John Norton, to whom Holland's son, Henry, had been apprenticed, and it was probably Henry who recruited his father to the project. Philemon in turn found a patron in Elizabeth, Lady Berkeley, whose son, George, he would later tutor: she appears to have offered £20 towards the publication, and considered doubling this to £40. However, when the first printed pages were circulated, it was reported that Camden "misliketh it & thinketh he [i. e. Holland] hath don him wrong", and Lady Berkeley may have reconsidered her support: her patronage is not mentioned in the published volume. At the last minute, Coventry Corporation contributed £5 towards the publication. adding to Thomas's original some 6000 words and meanings culled from the works of both ancient and modern Latin authors. In the following year he published Theatrum Imperii Magnae Britanniae, a translation from English into Latin of Speed's The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine.

In 1617 he translated the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, publishing it together with Thomas Paynell's earlier translation of Arnaldus de Villa Nova's commentary on the Regimen. When fragments of poetry were cited in the works Holland translated, he usually versified them into couplets.

Reputation

Holland was well regarded in his lifetime, both for the quantity and quality of his translations. A piece of doggerel, composed after the publication of Suetonius's Historie in 1606 (and playing on Suetonius's cognomen), ran:

<blockquote>Phil: Holland with translations doth so fill us,<br>

He will not let Suetonius be Tranquillus

However, his colloquial language soon dated. John Aubrey, reading his translations of Livy and Pliny as an undergraduate in the 1640s, compiled lists of examples of what he saw as quaint and archaic terms. Twentieth-century critics were more generous. It has been suggested that "Holland's Pliny is sometimes superior, despite the antiquated language he uses, to the 20th-century English translations commonly available", and that there are passages in his translation of Plutarch's Moralia which "have hardly been excelled by any later prose translator of the classics."

Marriage and issue

On 10 February 1579 Holland married Anne Bott (1555–1627), the daughter of William Bott (alias Peyton) of Perry Hall, Handsworth, Staffordshire, by whom he had seven sons and three daughters, including the poet Abraham Holland, the publisher and miscellanist Henry Holland, the print publisher Compton Holland (died 1622), the surgeon William Holland (1592–1632), whose treatise on gout, Gutta Podagrica, was published posthumously in 1633, and Elizabeth Holland, who married a London merchant, William Angell.