Multilingual Texts and Practices in Early Modern Europe
This collection offers a cross-disciplinary exploration of the ways in which multilingual practices were embedded in early modern European literary culture, opening up a dynamic dialogue between contemporary multilingual practices and scholarly work on early modern history and literature. The nine chapters draw on translation studies, literary history, transnational literatures, and contemporary sociolinguistic research to explore how multilingual practices manifested themselves across different social, cultural and institutional spaces. The exploration of a diverse range of contexts allows for the opportunity to engage with questions around how individual practices shape national and transnational language practices and literatures, the impact of multilingual practices on identity formation, and their implications for creative innovations in bilingual and multilingual texts. Taken as a whole, the collection paves the way for future conversations on what early modern literary studies and present-day multilingualism research might learn from one another and the extent to which historical texts might supply precedents for contemporary multilingual practices. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, early modern studies in history and literature, and comparative literature.
Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe
Focusing on team translation and the production of multilingual editions, and on the difficulties these techniques created for Renaissance translation theory, this book offers a study of textual practices that were widespread in medieval and Renaissance Europe but have been excluded from translation and literary history. The author shows how collaborative and multilingual translation practices challenge the theoretical reflections of translators, who persistently call for a translation text that offers a single, univocal version and maintains unity of style. In order to explore this tension, Bistué discusses multi-version texts, in both manuscript and print, from a diverse variety of genres: the Scriptures, astrological and astronomical treatises, herbals, goliardic poems, pamphlets, the Greek and Roman classics, humanist grammars, geography treatises, pedagogical dialogs, proverb collections, and romances. Her analyses pay careful attention to both European vernaculars and classical languages, including Arabic, which played a central role in the intense translation activity carried out in medieval Spain. Comparing actual translation texts and strategies with the forceful theoretical demands for unity that characterize the reflections of early modern translators, the author challenges some of the assumptions frequently made in translation and literary analysis. The book contributes to the understanding of early modern discourses and writing practices, including the emerging theoretical discourse on translation and the writing of narrative fiction--both of which, as Bistué shows, define themselves against the models of collaborative translation and multi-version texts.
Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe
Focusing on team translation and the production of multilingual editions, and on the difficulties these techniques created for Renaissance translation theory, this book offers a study of textual practices that were widespread in medieval and Renaissance Europe but have been excluded from translation and literary history. The author shows how collaborative and multilingual translation practices challenge the theoretical reflections of translators, who persistently call for a translation text that offers a single, univocal version and maintains unity of style. In order to explore this tension, Bistué discusses multi-version texts, in both manuscript and print, from a diverse variety of genres: the Scriptures, astrological and astronomical treatises, herbals, goliardic poems, pamphlets, the Greek and Roman classics, humanist grammars, geography treatises, pedagogical dialogs, proverb collections, and romances. Her analyses pay careful attention to both European vernaculars and classical languages, including Arabic, which played a central role in the intense translation activity carried out in medieval Spain. Comparing actual translation texts and strategies with the forceful theoretical demands for unity that characterize the reflections of early modern translators, the author challenges some of the assumptions frequently made in translation and literary analysis. The book contributes to the understanding of early modern discourses and writing practices, including the emerging theoretical discourse on translation and the writing of narrative fiction--both of which, as Bistué shows, define themselves against the models of collaborative translation and multi-version texts.
Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would later become, and multilingualism was rife. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, languages were coming into contact with an intensity that they had never had before, influencing each other and throwing up all manner of hybrids and pidgins as peoples tried to communicate using the semiotic resources they had available. Of interest to linguists, literary scholars and historians, amongst others, this interdisciplinary volume explores the linguistic dynamics operating in Europe and beyond in the crucial centuries between 1400 and 1800. Assuming a state of individual, societal and functional multilingualism, when codeswitching was the norm, and languages themselves were fluid, unbounded and porous, it explores the shifting relationships that existed between various tongues in different geographical contexts, as well as some of the myths and theories that arose to make sense of them.
The Golden Mean of Languages
Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both French and Dutch were spoken as local tongues.
