1st Edition
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.
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Jan Bloemendal
Preface
Peter Auger and Sheldon Brammall
- ‘Introduction: Historical Ethnography of Multilingual Texts and Practices’
Peter Auger - ‘From Multilingual to Multimodal: Educational French-Dutch Translation in Early Modern Times’
Alisa van de Haar - ‘Multilingualism as Cultural Capital: Women and Translation at the German Courts’
Hilary Brown - ‘The "Berlaimonts": Europe on a Page? Seeking Cultural and Linguistic Common Ground in Early Modern Europe’
Susan Baddeley - ‘Why Print in Two Languages? Bilingual French-Spanish Books: Teaching, Commerce, and Diplomacy in Early Seventeenth-Century France’
Aurore Schoenecker - ‘Collaborative Translation as a Model for Multilingual Printing in Early Renaissance Editions of Aesop’s Fables’
Belén Bistué - ‘Fixity and Fluidity in Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua’
Sheldon Brammall - ‘Adventures in Early Modern Multilingualism: "Exceptional" England?’
Anne Coldiron - Afterword
Mark Sebba
Part I: Producing and Using Multilingual Texts
Introduction
Peter Auger and Sheldon Brammall
Part II: Multilingual and Monolingual Literatures
Introduction
Peter Auger and Sheldon Brammall
Bibliography
Index
Notes on Contributors
Peter Auger
Peter Auger is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. His research examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Scottish literature in relation to other languages and literatures, especially French. He is the author of Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland (2019). Shorter publications have addressed topics including literary reception, translation and imitation practices, language learning, and cultural diplomacy.
Susan Baddeley
Susan Baddeley is a professor of Early Modern British History and Culture at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines / Paris-Saclay, and a member of the DYPAC (Dynamiques Patrimoniales et Culturelles) research centre. She specializes in the history of cultural and linguistic relations between Britain and France, especially during the sixteenth century. She has published extensively on the subject, and is currently editing a catalogue of French-English and English-French printed translations from 1500 to 1600.
Belén Bistué
Belén Bistué is a Tenured Researcher for the Argentine Research Council (CONICET) at the Comparative Literature Centre of Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Argentina. She specializes in translation history, with a focus on Renaissance collaborative and multilingual translations practices, and she is the author of Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe (2013).
Jan Bloemendal
Jan Bloemendal is a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), and PrivatDozent at the Ruhr University Bochum. His research interests include Erasmus, reception of the Classics, early modern drama, and multilingualism. He edited Bilingual Europe: Latin and Vernacular Cultures – Examples of Bilingualism and Multilingualism c. 1300–1800 (2015).
Sheldon Brammall
Sheldon Brammall is Associate Professor in Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555–1646 (2015) and is currently completing a monograph on the reception of the Appendix Vergiliana in Renaissance Europe.
Hilary Brown
Hilary Brown is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on the cultural history of translation, 1500–1800. Her latest monograph is Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation: Beyond the Female Tradition (OUP 2022).
A. E. B. Coldiron
A. E. B. Coldiron (M. E. Krafft University Professor, Florida State University, USA, and Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews, UK) researches translation, poetics, and early modern literature and is author of books and essays on those topics. Currently finishing an edition of the Tudor translations of Christine de Pizan for the Modern Humanities Research Association, and a monograph about those translations for the University of Toronto Press, she is also coordinator of a special topic issue of PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association on translation, slated for mid-2023.
Alisa van de Haar
Alisa van de Haar is Assistant Professor of French Literature and Culture at Leiden University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Groningen (2018, cum laude), and she is the author of The Golden Mean of Languages: Forging Dutch and French in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1540–1620 (Brill, 2019). Her project ‘Languages as Lifelines: The Multilingual Coping Strategies of Refugees from the Early Modern Low Countries’ (2022–2026), is funded by the Dutch Research Council.
Aurore Schoenecker
With an agrégation in modern French literature and a doctorate from the Université de recherche Paris Sciences et Lettres, Aurore Schoenecker defended a thesis in 2017 entitled: ‘French Translations from Spanish and the Book Market (1600–1660). Inquiry into a Writing Practice’. Her work is situated between literary studies and book history in all its forms, quantitative, material, and cultural. Previously a member of the Casa de Velázquez and Associate Researcher in the Rare Books Reserve of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, she is currently researching aristocratic literary culture in the modern era from a transdisciplinary and transnational perspective.
Mark Sebba
Mark Sebba is Reader Emeritus in Sociolinguistics and Language Contact at Lancaster University. Starting from an initial interest in contact languages like pidgins and creoles, he turned towards research in bilingualism more generally, including the study of the bilingual practice of code switching in conversation. From there, he developed an interest in the writing of non-standard languages, and wrote a book, Spelling and Society, on the Sociolinguistics of Orthography, a relatively unexplored field which examines the cultural and social aspects of spelling and writing systems. More recently he has published research on written texts of different genres which contain a mixture of languages. His most recent work has been on the language questions in national censuses.
Biography
Peter Auger is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. His research examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Scottish literature in relation to other languages and literatures, especially French. He is the author of Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland (2019). Shorter publications have addressed topics including literary reception, translation and imitation practices, language learning, and cultural diplomacy.
Sheldon Brammall is Associate Professor in Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555–1646 (2015) and is currently completing a monograph on the reception of the Appendix Vergiliana in Renaissance Europe.