1st Edition
Ideas Across Borders Translating Visions of Authority and Civil Society in Europe c.1600–1840
Building on the historical study of cultural translation, this volume brings together a range of case studies and fresh approaches to early modern intellectual history by scholars from across Europe reflecting on ideological and political change from c. 1600 to 1840.
Translations played a crucial role in the transmission of political ideas across linguistic and cultural borders in early modern Europe. Yet intellectual historians have been slow to adopt the study of translations as an analytical tool for the understanding of such cultural transfers. Recently, a number of different approaches to transnational intellectual history have emerged, allowing historians of early modern Europe to draw on work not just in translation studies, literary studies, conceptual history, the history of political thought and the history of scholarship, but also in the history of print and its significance for cultural transfer. Thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of texts in translation can place them more accurately in time and space. This book provides a better understanding of the extent to which ideas crossed linguistic and cultural divides, and how they were re-shaped in the process.
Written in an accessible style, this volume is aimed at scholars in cognate disciplines as well as at postgraduate students.
1. Introduction: Ideas across Borders
Gaby Mahlberg and Thomas Munck
Part 1: Religious and Scholarly Translation
2. From the Islamic world to Rome and Florence: translations and prints across early modern Europe
Luisa Simonutti
3. David Friedrich Megerlin (1698–1778) and his German Qur’an
Asaph Ben-Tov
Part 2: Translation Networks and the Dissemination of Texts
4. The tasks of the translators: social networks and the publication of continental European writings during the English Revolution, 1641–1660
Ariel Hessayon
5. Pierre Des Maizeaux and the (Huguenot) business of translation in the early eighteenth century
Ann Thomson
Part 3: Delayed Translation
6. Translation before translation: The dissemination of Harrington's republican ideas in French in the eighteenth century
Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq
7. Translations of James Harrington’s political works during the French Revolution: Genre, materiality, and intention
Rachel Hammersley
8. Ancient wisdom for troubled times: Late eighteenth-century Dutch translations of the classics
Wyger R.E. Velema
9. Non-contemporaneous contemporaries: translating the (long) Enlightenment in Reform Era Hungary (1830s–1840s)
László Kontler
Part 4: Translation as Cultural Mediation
10. Anglo-Italian cultural relations ‘through the lens of translation’: The first Italian editions of William Robertson’s History of Scotland
Alessia Castagnino
11. Algernon Sidney in German: The reviewer as an agent of cultural translation
Gaby Mahlberg
Part 5: Maps and Images in Translation
12. A Printer’s View of Hugo Grotius’ Mare liberum (1633),
Matthew Cleary, Edward Jones Corredera, Pablo Nicolas Dufour, Lara Muschel, Jonathan Nathan, Emanuele Salerno and Mark Somos
13. Transforming the Carte de Tendre into A Voyage to the Isle of Love: The cultural transmission of a map of courtship from Madeleine de Scudéry’s French salons to Aphra Behn’s English readers
Amelia Mills
Part 6: Failed Translation
14. The manifold strategies of seventeenth-century translators: the case of Du Verdus as translator of Thomas Hobbes
Luc Borot
15. Untranslatable, unsellable, unreadable?: Obstacles, delays and failures in cultural translation in print, 1640–1800
Thomas Munck
Biography
Gaby Mahlberg is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Newcastle University, UK. Her publications include The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration (2020) and Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game (2009).
Thomas Munck is an Emeritus Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, UK. He adopts comparative historical perspectives, as in his Seventeenth Century Europe (2005), and in his Conflict and Enlightenment: Print and Political Culture in Europe 1635–1795 (2019).
