Philip Numan


Philip Numan was a Flemish lawyer and humanist, a writer in prose and verse, sometimes under the pen name Hippophilus Neander.

Life

Numan was appointed city secretary of Brussels in 1583, and planned the joyous entries into the city of Archduke Ernest of Austria in 1594 and of Albert VII, Archduke of Austria in 1596.
His account of the miracles attributed to the intercession of the local cult of Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel was published in Dutch and French, and soon translated into Spanish and English.
He translated a number of Latin and Spanish works into Dutch. When he was translating Diva Virgo Hallensis by Justus Lipsius, Lipsius wrote to him on 9 April 1605 that he should not translate too literally, but in his own natural style, because "each language has its own character and as it were its own genius, which cannot be conveyed in another language". In preliminary verses to Richard Verstegan's Neder-duytsche epigrammen Numan wrote in praise of the "genius" of Dutch as a literary language.

Works

As author