Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation


Book Description

Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation: Beyond the Female Tradition is a major new intervention in research on early modern translation and will be an essential point of reference for anyone interested in the history of women translators. Research on women translators has often focused on early modern England; the example of early modern England has been taken as the norm for the rest of the continent and has shaped research on gender and translation more generally. This book brings a new European perspective to the field by introducing the case of Germany. It draws attention to forty women who can be identified as translators in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany and shows how their work does not fit easily into traditional narratives about marginalization and subversiveness. The study uses the example of Germany to argue against reading the work of translating women primarily through the lens of gender and to challenge claims about the existence of a female translation tradition which transcends the boundaries of time and place. Broadening our perspective to include Germany provides a more nuanced and informed account of the position of women within European translation cultures and forces us to rethink gender as a category of analysis in translation history. The book makes the case for a new 'woman-interrogated' approach to translation history (to borrow a concept from Carol Maier) and as such it will provide a blueprint for future work in the area.




Early Modern Cultures of Translation


Book Description

"Would there have been a Renaissance without translation?" Karen Newman and Jane Tylus ask in their Introduction to this wide-ranging group of essays on the uses of translation in an era formative for the modern age. The early modern period saw cross-cultural translation on a massive scale. Humanists negotiated status by means of their literary skills as translators of culturally prestigious Greek and Latin texts, as teachers of those same languages, and as purveyors of the new technologies for the dissemination of writing. Indeed, with the emergence of new vernaculars and new literatures came a sense of the necessary interactions of languages in a moment that can truly be defined as "after Babel." As they take their starting point from a wide range of primary sources—the poems of Louise Labé, the first Catalan dictionary, early printed versions of the Ptolemy world map, the King James Bible, and Roger Williams's Key to the Language of America—the contributors to this volume provide a sense of the political, religious, and cultural stakes for translators, their patrons, and their readers. They also vividly show how the very instabilities engendered by unprecedented linguistic and technological change resulted in a far more capacious understanding of translation than what we have today. A genuinely interdisciplinary volume, Early Modern Cultures of Translation looks both east and west while at the same time telling a story that continues to the present about the slow, uncertain rise of English as a major European and, eventually, world language. Contributors: Gordon Braden, Peter Burke, Anne Coldiron, Line Cottegnies, Margaret Ferguson, Edith Grossman, Ann Rosalind Jones, Lázló Kontler, Jacques Lezra, Carla Nappi, Karen Newman, Katharina N. Piechocki, Sarah Rivett, Naomi Tadmor, Jane Tylus.




Trust and Proof


Book Description

Translators’ contribution to the vitality of textual production in the Renaissance is still often vastly underestimated. Drawing on a wide variety of sources published in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, German, English, and Zapotec, this volume brings a global perspective to the history of translators, and the printed book. Together the essays point out the extent to which particular language cultures were liable to shift, overlap, shrink, and expand during one of the most defining periods in the history of print culture. Interdisciplinary in approach, Trust and Proof investigates translators’ role in the diffusion of discourse about languages and ancient knowledge, as well as changing etiquettes of reading and writing.




Elizabeth I in Writing


Book Description

This collection investigates Queen Elizabeth I as an accomplished writer in her own right as well as the subject of authors who celebrated her. With innovative essays from Brenda M. Hosington, Carole Levin, and other established and emerging experts, it reappraises Elizabeth’s translations, letters, poems and prayers through a diverse range of approaches to textuality, from linguistic and philological to literary and cultural-historical. The book also considers Elizabeth as “authored,” studying how she is reflected in the writing of her contemporaries and reconstructing a wider web of relations between the public and private use of language in early modern culture. Contributions from Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatelen and Giovanni Iamartino bring the Queen’s presence in early modern Italian literary culture to the fore. Together, these essays illuminate the Queen in writing, from the multifaceted linguistic and rhetorical strategies that she employed, to the texts inspired by her power and charisma.




Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

David B. Ruderman's groundbreaking studies of Jewish intellectuals as they engaged with Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment have set the agenda for a distinctive historiographical approach to Jewish culture in early modern Europe, from 1500 to 1800. From his initial studies of Italy to his later work on eighteenth-century English, German, and Polish Jews, Ruderman has emphasized the individual as a representative or exemplary figure through whose life and career the problems of a period and cultural context are revealed. Thirty-one leading scholars celebrate Ruderman's stellar career in essays that bring new insight into Jewish culture as it is intertwined in Jewish, European, Ottoman, and American history. The volume presents probing historical snapshots that advance, refine, and challenge how we understand the early modern period and spark further inquiry. Key elements explored include those inspired by Ruderman's own work: the role of print, the significance of networks and mobility among Jewish intellectuals, the value of extraordinary individuals who absorbed and translated so-called external traditions into a Jewish idiom, and the interaction between cultures through texts and personal encounters of Jewish and Christian intellectuals. While these elements can be found in earlier periods of Jewish history, Ruderman and his colleagues point to an intensification of mobility, the dissemination of knowledge, and the blurring of boundaries in the early modern period. These studies present a rich and nuanced portrait of a Jewish culture that is both a contributing member and a product of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Ruderman has fostered a community of scholars from Europe, North America, and Israel who work in the widest range of areas that touch on Jewish culture. He has worked to make Jewish studies an essential element of mainstream humanities. The essays in this volume are a testament to the haven he has fostered for scholars, which has and continues to generate important works of scholarship across the entire spectrum of Jewish history.




Luise Gottsched the Translator


Book Description

By focusing on Luise Gottsched's extraordinary volume and range of translations, Hilary Brown sheds an entirely new light on Gottsched and her oeuvre. Critics have paid increasing attention to the oeuvre of Luise Gottsched (1713-62), Germany's first prominent woman of letters, but have neglected her lifelong work of translation, which encompassed over fifty volumes and an extraordinary range, from drama and poetry to philosophy, history, archaeology, even theoretical physics. This first comprehensive overview of Gottsched's translations places them in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual, literary, and cultural history, showing that they were part of an ambitious, progressive program undertaken with her famous husband to shape German culture during the Enlightenment. In doing so it casts Gottsched and her work in an entirely new light. Including chapters on all the main subject areas and genres from which Gottsched translated, it also explores the relationship between her translations and her original works, demonstrating that translation was central to her oeuvre. A bibliography of Gottsched's translations and source texts concludes the volume. Not only a major new addition to a growing body of research on the Gottscheds, the book will also be valuable reading for scholars interested more broadly in women's writing, the history of translation, and the literature and culture of the German (and European) Enlightenment. Hilary Brown is Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.




Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800


Book Description

Her book is a sustained reflection on the aims and methods of contemporary translation studies and the most complete account available of the role of translation during a critical period in European history."--BOOK JACKET.




Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

This groundbreaking 2007 volume gathers an international team of historians to present the practice of translation as part of cultural history. Although translation is central to the transmission of ideas, the history of translation has generally been neglected by historians, who have left it to specialists in literature and language. This book seeks to achieve an understanding of the contribution of translation to the spread of information in early modern Europe. It focuses on non-fiction: the translation of books on religion, history, politics and especially on science, or 'natural philosophy', as it was generally known at this time. The chapters cover a wide range of languages, including Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish and Chinese. The book will appeal to scholars and students of the early modern and later periods, to historians of science and of religion, as well as to anyone interested in translation studies.




Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France


Book Description

In Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France, the rehabilitation of female curiosity between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries is thoroughly investigated for the first time, in a comparative perspective that confronts two epistemological and religious traditions. In the context of the early modern blooming “culture of curiosity”, women’s desire for knowledge made them both curious subjects and curious objects, a double relation to curiosity that is meticulously inquired into by the authors in this volume. The social, literary, theological and philosophical dimensions of women’s persistent association with curiosity offer a rich contribution to cultural history.




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.