This volume provides the first transnational overview of the relationship between translation and the book trade in early modern Europe. Following an introduction to the theories and practices of translation in early modern Europe, and to the role played by translated books in driving and defining the trade in printed books, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of translated-book history – language learning, audience, printing, marketing, and censorship – across several national traditions. This study touches on a wide range of early modern figures who played myriad roles in the book world; many of them also performed these roles in different countries and languages. Topics treated include printers’ sensitivity to audience demand; paratextual and typographical techniques for manipulating perception of translated texts; theories of readership that traveled across borders; and the complex interactions between foreign-language teachers, teaching manuals, immigration, diplomacy, and exile.

Table of Contents

1. Marketing adaptations of the Ship of Fools: the Stultiferae naves (1501) and Navis stultifera (1505) of Jodocus Badius Ascensius Paul White
2. Translation, Sermo Communis and the book trade José María Pérez Fernández
3. Language manuals and the book trade in England Rocío G. Sumillera
4. The heroes in ‘The World’s Marketplace’: translating and printing an epic in Renaissance Antwerp Miguel Martínez
5. The politics of translation and the German reception of Dante: Johannes Herold’s Monarchey Daniel DiMassa
6. Translation trajectories in early modern European print culture: the case of Boccaccio Guyda Armstrong
7. Glosses and oracles: guiding readers in early modern Europe Edward Wilson-Lee
8. Spenser’s Dutch uncles: the family of love and the four translations of A Theatre for Worldlings Stewart Mottram
9. Translation, re-writing and censorship during the Counter-Reformation Simona Munari
10. The publication of Iberian romance in early modern Europe Louise Wilson
Afterword Neil Rhodes.

Editors

José María Pérez Fernández is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Translation at the University of Granada. His research interests focus on the relations between translation and diplomacy and the book trade, and on the relations between the international republic of letters and the early modern idea of Europe. Pérez Fernández is currently working on a book project entitled Translation and the International Republic of Letters.

Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow and the Director of Studies in English at Sidney Sussex College, where he teaches medieval and early modern literature. He has published on a wide range of early modern subjects, from broadside ballads and Surrey’s Aeneid to printed chivalric romances and Shakespeare’s mathematics. Wilson-Lee is currently working on the reception, translation, and performance of Shakespeare in East Africa.