Author: Vida, Marcus Hieronymus
Biography:
VIDA, Marcus Hieronymus (c. 1489-1566: Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Born at Cremona, Italy, of an impoverished noble family and baptised Marcantonio Vida, he changed his name to Marco Girolamo Vida (Latin Marcus Hieronymus Vida) when he entered the order of the Canoni Regolari Lateranenae (Canons Regular of the Lateran) as a youth. He so distinguished himself as a modern Latin poet by two didactic poems on the silkworm and on the game of chess that he was encouraged to move to the papal court in Rome, where he won the favour of Leo X (papacy 1513-21), who rewarded him with the priory of St. Sylvester at Frascati and commissioned his best-known work, the Christiad. Clement VII (papacy 1523-34) made him bishop of Alba. Vida died at Alba on 17 Sept. 1566. His most popular works were quite quickly translated into English and the versions in this bibliography belong to a well established tradition. Brief biographies of the two named translators follow. John Hampson (1753-1819) is best known for his 1791 biography of John Wesley, the first to follow Wesley’s death. Both Hampson and his father of the same name had been itinerant Methodist preachers but they left the Methodists in 1784. Hampson then went to St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford (matric. 1785, BA 1791, MA 1792), took orders, and became a Church of England minister. He served first as curate and then as rector at St. John the Evangelist, Sunderland, from 1788 until his death on 18 Dec. 1819. It is not clear whether he married or not. Edward Granan (d 1779) is harder to trace. He identifies himself as MA but is not in the records of the English universities, probably because he was a Roman Catholic and had his education elsewhere. He is almost certainly the Edward Granan or Grannan who died at Draycott-in-the-Moors, Staffordshire, and was buried in the Draycott chapel of the parish church of St. Margaret on 26 Mar. 1779, the original ms record noting that he was a “Popish priest.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911] 28: 47; NBG 46, cols. 123-6; ODNB [Hampson] 1 Feb. 2024; Yorkshire Gazette 18 Dec. 1819; CCEd 1 Feb. 2024; Alumni Oxonienses; ancestry.com 1 Feb. 2024; findmypast.com 1 Feb. 2024) HJ