Rethinking Medieval Translation


Book Description

Essays examining both the theory and practice of medieval translation.




Making and Rethinking the Renaissance


Book Description

The purpose of this volume is to investigate the crucial role played by the return of knowledge of Greek in the transformation of European culture, both through the translation of texts, and through the direct study of the language. It aims to collect and organize in one database all the digitalised versions of the first editions of Greek grammars, lexica and school texts available in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, between two crucial dates: the start of Chrysoloras’s teaching in Florence (c. 1397) and the end of the activity of Aldo Manuzio and Andrea Asolano in Venice (c. 1529). This is the first step in a major investigation into the knowledge of Greek and its dissemination in Western Europe: the selection of the texts and the first milestones in teaching methods were put together in that period, through the work of scholars like Chrysoloras, Guarino and many others. A remarkable role was played also by the men involved in the Council of Ferrara (1438-39), where there was a large circulation of Greek books and ideas. About ten years later, Giovanni Tortelli, together with Pope Nicholas V, took the first steps in founding the Vatican Library. Research into the return of the knowledge of Greek to Western Europe has suffered for a long time from the lack of intersection of skills and fields of research: to fully understand this phenomenon, one has to go back a very long way through the tradition of the texts and their reception in contexts as different as the Middle Ages and the beginning of Renaissance humanism. However, over the past thirty years, scholars have demonstrated the crucial role played by the return of knowledge of Greek in the transformation of European culture, both through the translation of texts, and through the direct study of the language. In addition, the actual translations from Greek into Latin remain poorly studied and a clear understanding of the intellectual and cultural contexts that produced them is lacking. In the Middle Ages the knowledge of Greek was limited to isolated areas that had no reciprocal links. As had happened to many Latin authors, all Greek literature was rather neglected, perhaps because a number of philosophical texts had already been available in translation from the seventh century AD, or because of a sense of mistrust, due to their ethnic and religious differences. Between the 12th and 14th century AD, a change is perceptible: the sharp decrease in Greek texts and knowledge in the South of Italy, once a reference-point for this kind of study, was perhaps an important reason prompting Italian humanists to go and study Greek in Constantinople. Over the past thirty years it has become evident to scholars that humanism, through the re-appreciation of classical antiquity, created a bridge to the modern era, which also includes the Middle Ages. The criticism by the humanists of medieval authors did not prevent them from using a number of tools that the Middle Ages had developed or synthesized: glossaries, epitomes, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, translations, commentaries. At present one thing that is missing, however, is a systematic study of the tools used for the study of Greek between the 15th and 16th century; this is truly important, because, in the following centuries, Greek culture provided the basis of European thought in all the most important fields of knowledge. This volume seeks to supply that gap.




Medieval Translatio


Book Description

Variance characterises the textual culture of the Middle Ages on all levels. Analysing this variance is paramount to understand the norms and transformations involved in the process of establishing a literate culture. This series focuses on the literate output in the Nordic region, from the perspective of Modes of Modification. In order to place the region in a larger context, it also encourages comparative studies with a wider European view.




Rethinking the New Medievalism


Book Description

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction. The New Philology Comes of Age -- 1 New Challenges for the New Medievalism -- 2 Reflections on The New Philology -- 3 Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106-26) -- 4 Dialectic of the Medieval Course -- 5 Religious Horizon and Epic Effect: Considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the Nibelungenlied -- 6 The Possibility of Historical Time in the Crónica Sarracina -- 7 Good Friday Magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Transformation of Medieval Vernacular Poetry -- 8 The Identity of a Text




Experiencing Translationality


Book Description

This innovative book takes the concept of translation beyond its traditional boundaries, adding to the growing body of literature which challenges the idea of translation as a primarily linguistic transfer. To gain a fresh perspective on the work of translation in the complex processes of meaning-making across physical, social and cultural domains (conceptualized as translationality), Piotr Blumczynski revisits one of the earliest and most fundamental senses of translation: corporeal transfer. His study of translated religious officials and translated relics reframes our understanding of translation as a process creating a sense of connection with another time, place, object or person. He argues that a promise of translationality animates a broad spectrum of cultural, artistic and commercial endeavours: it is invoked, for example, in museum exhibitions, art galleries, celebrity endorsements, and the manufacturing of musical instruments. Translationality offers a way to reimagine the dynamic entanglements of matter and meaning, space and time, past and present. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies as well as related disciplines such as the history of religion, anthropology of art, and material culture.




The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England


Book Description

The first full-length examination of the medieval Charlemagne tradition in the literature and culture of medieval England, from the Chanson de Roland to Caxton. The Matter of France, the legendary history of Charlemagne, had a central but now largely unrecognised place in the multilingual culture of medieval England. From the early claim in the Chanson de Roland that Charlemagne held England as his personal domain, to the later proliferation of Middle English romances of Charlemagne, the materials are woven into the insular political and cultural imagination. However, unlike the wide range of continental French romances, the insular tradition concentrates on stories of a few heroic characters: Roland, Fierabras, Otinel. Why did writers and audiences in England turn again and again to these narratives, rewriting and reinterpreting them for more than two hundred years? This book offers the first full-length, in-depth study of the tradition as manifested in literature and culture. It investigates the currency and impact of the Matter of France with equal attention to English and French-language texts, setting each individual manuscript or early printed text in its contemporary cultural and political context. The narratives are revealed to be extraordinarily adaptable, using the iconic opposition between Carolingian and Saracen heroes to reflect concerns with national politics, religious identity, the future of Christendom, chivalry and ethics, and monarchy and treason. PHILLIPA HARDMAN is Readerin Medieval English Literature (retired) at the University of Reading; MARIANNE AILES is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol.




Reinventing Babel in Medieval French


Book Description

How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way translation negotiates with, and inscribes asymmetries among, languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what later became the hegemonic global languages we know today.




Translating Christ in the Middle Ages


Book Description

This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.




Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance


Book Description

New approaches to this most fluid of medieval genres, considering in particular its reception and transmission.Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and has been understood most productively as a genre that continually refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. In taking this multilingual approach, this volume proposes a re-centring, and extension, of our understanding of the corpus of medieval Insular romance, which although long considered extra-canonical, has over the previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon - a canon which we might now begin to unsettle, and of which we might ask new questions.The topics of the essays gathered here range from Dafydd ap Gwilym and Walter Map to Melusine and English Trojan narratives, and address topics from women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both. women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both. women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both. women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both.uistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both.




The Medieval Literary


Book Description

Essays studying the relationship between literariness and form in medieval texts.