Abstract
The introduction revisits Gérard Genette’s classic definition of paratexts as ‘thresholds of interpretation’ in the light of recent scholarship on early modern print culture, on the one hand, and of translation studies, on the other. The paratexts of early modern printed translations in Britain (1473–1660) are approached, not only as instruments of commercial advertising and hermeneutic control, but as material and interpretive shape-shifters revealing the variegated ‘cultural uses’ of translation and print in the period. Besides presenting the various contributions to the volume, the introduction clarifies the place and importance of both translation and paratexts in the examination of Britain’s literary culture in the early age of print.
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Notes
- 1.
Le Cid. A Tragicomedy, out of the French Made English … (London: John Haviland for Thomas Walkl[e]y, 1637).
- 2.
We borrow the phrase from the subtitle of Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Janet E. Lewing’s English translation of Genette’s Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987).
- 3.
Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 23ff.
- 4.
One of the most useful publications in that respect is Helen Smith and Louise Wilson’s collection, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 5.
See on this Saenger, Commodification, but also Paul Voss, ‘Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29.3 (1998), 733–56; Randall Anderson, ‘The Rhetoric of Paratext in Early Printed Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 4: 1557–1695, edited by John Barnard, Donald F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 636–44; or, more recently, Jonathan Olson, ‘“Newly Amended and Much Enlarged”: Claims of Novelty and Enlargement on the Title Pages of Reprints in the Early Modern English Book Trade’, History of European Ideas, 42.5 (2016), 618–28.
- 6.
See for example Richard McCabe’s study of dedications in “Ungainefull Arte”: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). On the role of paratexts in shaping the author’s (or translator’s) relationship to authorities and power, see also Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993).
- 7.
William R. Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
- 8.
See on this McCabe, “Ungainefull Arte”, but also Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 69–136 in particular.
- 9.
Smith and Wilson, Renaissance Paratexts, p. 6.
- 10.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, ‘The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance’, Past & Present, 45.1 (1969), 19–89, and The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). See also the works of Lucien Febvre and Henri Martin, who approach the development of print in rather similar terms in L’apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958), translated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wooton as The Coming of the Book (London: Verso, 1976). For a critique of the assumed ‘fixity’ of print, see Donald McKenzie, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, edited by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst/Boston: University of Massachusetts Press); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and more generally, Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, edited by Sabrina Alcor Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press; Washington, D.C.: in association with the Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2007).
- 11.
Smith and Wilson, Renaissance Paratexts, p. 14.
- 12.
Perhaps the best antidote to such commonplace statements is to be found in the 500-page volume of English Renaissance Translation Theory edited by Neil Rhodes, with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson (London: MHRA, 2013), which is mainly composed of excerpts from prefaces and other discursive paratexts of translations (manuscript and printed) in early modern Britain.
- 13.
See on this Anne E. B. Coldiron, ‘Metaphors and Commonplaces’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, Volume 2: 1558–1660, edited by Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 109–17.
- 14.
See, respectively, Neil Rhodes, ‘Status Anxiety and English Renaissance Translation’, in Renaissance Paratexts, pp. 107–20, and Anne E. B. Coldiron, ‘Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation’, Translation Studies, 5.2 (2012), 189–200.
- 15.
This is also argued by Brenda M. Hosington, ‘The Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue: A Witness to the Importance of Translation in Early Modern Britain’, in The Book Triumphant: Print in Transition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Malcolm Walsby and Graeme Kemp (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), pp. 253–69, and ‘The Role of Translators and Translations in Producing English Incunabula’, in Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print, and Culture in Britain, edited by Sara Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 3–20.
- 16.
Here begynneth the volume intituled and named the recuyell of the historyes of Troye … translated and drawen out of frenshe in to englisshe by Willyam Caxton … (Bruges(?): William Caxton, 1473), n.p.
- 17.
See on this last point Marie-Alice Belle, ‘At the Interface between Translation History and Literary History’, The Translator, 20.1 (2014), 44–63 (pp. 50–1). It is also important to note that some printed translations had a manuscript afterlife. This is the case for example of Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Discours de la vie et de la mort, published by Ponsonby in 1592 as A Discourse of Life and Death, several passages of which were copied and adapted as ‘A Discourse of the Tediousness of Life’ by Elizabeth Ashburnham Richardson (see Margaret P. Hannay, ‘Elizabeth Ashburnham Richardson’s Meditation on the Countess of Pembroke’s Discourse’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 9 (2000), 114–28). We are grateful to Marie-Louise Coolahan for pointing this example out to us.
- 18.
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Supplementing the Aeneid in Early Modern England: Translation, Imitation, Commentary’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 4.4 (1998), 507–25.
- 19.
Note, however, that both in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and in Harington’s translation, the marginal apparatus clearly serves to advertise the work’s relation to the classical epic tradition. On the distinction between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ translation, see Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, in English Renaissance Translation Theory, pp. 32–3.
- 20.
Helen Moore, ‘Gathering Fruit: The “Profitable” Translations of Thomas Paynell’, in Tudor Translation, edited by Fred Schurink (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 39–57 (p. 43).
- 21.
Guyda Armstrong, ‘Framing Fiametta: Gender, Authorship, and Voice in an Elizabethan Translation of Boccaccio’, in Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture, edited by Gabriela Schmidt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 299–340, and ‘Paratexts and their Functions in Seventeenth-Century English Decamerons’, The Modern Language Review, 102.1 (2007), 40–57. See also her recent work on the writings of the Italian libertine ‘Academia degli Incogniti’ and their transformations through English translation in the Cavalier circles of the 1650s (‘From Boccaccio to the Incogniti: The Cultural Politics of the Italian Tale in English Translation in the Seventeenth Century’, in Seventeenth-Century Fiction : Text and Transmission, edited by Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 159–82). On the framing of querelle texts through translation and paratext, see Anne E. B. Coldiron, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); and Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Giovanni Bruto, Alexandre de Pontaymeri, and the Tasso Cousins Cross the Channel: The Transforming Power of Translation and Paratext in the querelle des femmes’, in ‘Fideli, diligenti, chiari e dotti’: Traduttori e traduzione nel Rinascimento, edited by Elisa Gregori (Padua: CLEUPSC, 2016), pp. 259–76.
- 22.
On paratexts as a place of ‘multiplication’ and potential destabilisation of authorial voices, see also Armstrong, ‘Framing Fiametta’, and Marie-Alice Belle, ‘“Mysteries divulg’d”: Philemon Holland’s Paratexts and the Translation of Pliny’s Natural History in Early Modern England’, Meta: The Translators’ Journal, 61 (2016), 60–79.
- 23.
See Terence Cave’s analysis of the ‘duplicity’ of copia in The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); and Judith Anderson’s discussion in Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). The implications for the theory and practice of translation in early modern England are discussed in Marie-Alice Belle, ‘Elizabethan Defences of Translation, from Rhetoric to Poetics’, in Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture, pp. 43–79 (pp. 51–8). For an extreme example of the copia of translation, see Anne Lake Prescott’s ‘Urquhart’s Inflationary Universe’, in The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1600, edited by Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 175–90.
- 24.
The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Militarie Discourses: of Lord Michaell de Montaigne … now done into English by … Iohn Florio (London: Edward Blount, 1603), sig. A5v.
- 25.
McCabe, “Ungainefull Arte”, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–12.
- 26.
Fred Schurink, ‘Print, Patronage, and Occasion: Translations of Plutarch’s Moralia in Tudor England’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 38.1/2 (2008), 86–101.
- 27.
On the notion of ‘print authorship’, see Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); or again, Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
- 28.
Mary Partridge, ‘Thomas Hoby’s English Translation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier’, The Historical Journal, 5.4 (2007), 769–86.
- 29.
To quote Peter Culhane’s study of Holland’s Livy translations, ‘Philemon Holland’s Livy: Peritexts and Contexts’, Translation and Literature, 13.2 (2004), 268–86. The notion of ‘peritext’ is taken from Genette, who actually distinguishes between liminal elements immediately surrounding the text (title-pages, prefaces, addresses to the reader, etc., hence peritext) and broader paratextual devices such as promotional texts, interviews with the author, etc. (Genette, Thresholds, p. 5). Here we will use the generic ‘paratext’ to address both strictly peritextual elements and other paratextual devices such as publisher’s catalogues discussed by Warren Boutcher in this volume.
- 30.
See, among others, Patricia Demers’s introduction to her edition of Anne Cooke Bacon’s Apology or Answer in Defence of The Church Of England (London: MHRA, 2015); Jaime Goodrich’s analyses in Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014); Brenda M. Hosington and Hannah Fournier, ‘Translation and Women Translators’, in The Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France and England, edited by Diana M. Robin, Anne Larsen, and Carole Levin (Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 369–72; or the works of Micheline White, amongst which ‘Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translations: The Case of Anne Lock’s “Of the Markes of the Children of God” (1590)’, English Literary Renaissance, 29.3 (1999), 375–400.
- 31.
Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts, edited by Terence Cave (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); and Guyda Armstrong, The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
- 32.
See on this Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Translation, History, and Print: A Model for the Study of Printed Translations in Early Modern Britain’, Translation Studies, 10.1 (2017), 2–21.
- 33.
Coldiron, Printers Without Borders, pp. 172–97; Guyda Armstrong, ‘Coding Continental: Information Design in Sixteenth-Century English Vernacular Language Manuals and Translations’, Renaissance Studies, 29.1 (2015), 78–102; Joyce Boro, ‘Multilingualism, Romance, and Language Pedagogy; or, Why Were So Many Sentimental Romances Printed as Polyglot Texts?’, in Tudor Translation, pp. 18–38.
- 34.
An eloquent example of the instability of textual authority, and even of the very ‘authorial function’ (fonction auteur) in early modern printed paratexts of translations is to be found in Louise Wilson’s ‘Playful Paratexts: The Front Matter of Anthony Munday’s Spanish Romance Translations’, in Renaisssance Paratexts, pp. 121–32.
- 35.
Genette does note, concerning translated titles, that ‘we could use a whole study of this practice’, but he does not address the transfers of meaning and authority that underlie the practice, and returns to the issue of authorial control, as he ponders ‘whether the author was consulted on this point’ (Thresholds, p. 70, n. 16).
- 36.
Genette, Thresholds, p. 130.
- 37.
Genette, Thresholds, p. 263 and p. 264, n. 22.
- 38.
Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, edited by Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 46.
- 39.
Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation’, Romance Studies, 27.3 (2009), 157–73.
- 40.
See for example Douglas Robinson’s ‘Theorizing Translation in a Woman’s Voice: Subverting the Rhetoric of Patronage, Courtly Love and Morality’, The Translator, 1.2 (1995), 153–75, which confusingly attributes Jean-Pierre Camus’s prefatorial epistle to his translator, Susan du Verger (even if du Verger explicitly calls it ‘The Authors Epistle to the Reader’), and attributes Marguerite de Navarre’s preface to her Miroir de l’âme pecheresse to her translator, the Princess Elizabeth. See Brenda M. Hosington on the consequences of Robinson’s misattributions in ‘Collaboration, Authorship, and Gender in the Paratexts Accompanying Translations by Susan du Verger and Judith Man’, in Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration, edited by Patricia Pender (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 159–82.
- 41.
See McCabe, “Ungainefull Arte”, or Matthew Day’s stimulating essay on running titles (‘“Intended to Offenders”: The Running Titles of Early Modern Books’) in Renaissance Paratexts, pp. 34–47.
- 42.
The liues of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that graue learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea: Translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings priuy counsel, and great Amner of Fraunce, and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1579), sig. *iiir.
- 43.
Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties to Marcus his sonne, turned out of latine into english, by Nicolas Grimalde (London: Tottel , 1556), sig. [CCv]v.
- 44.
See Roger Chartier, ‘Introduction’ to The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, edited by Roger Chartier and translated by Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 1–10.
- 45.
Dorothee Burke and Birte Christ, ‘Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field’, Narrative, 21.1 (2013), 65–87, quoted in Andie Silva, ‘Mediated Technologies: Locating Non-Authorial Agency in Printed and Digital Texts’, History of European Ideas, 42.5 (2016), 607–17.
- 46.
On this, see also Warren Boutcher, ‘From Cultural Translation to Cultures of Translation’, in Cultures of Translation, pp. 22–40 (p. 30).
- 47.
The categories detailed below are first established in ‘Paratexts and their Functions’; Armstrong also uses them in ‘Framing Fiametta’, before discussing them again in the light of functionalist typologies of texts and translations in ‘Coding Continental’.
- 48.
Armstrong, ‘Coding Continental’, pp. 78–9.
- 49.
On the ‘translation turn’ in early modern studies, see Joshua Reid’s review article, ‘The Enchantments of Circe: Translation Studies and the English Renaissance’, The Spenser Review 44.1.6 (2014), http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-44/441/translation-studies/translation-studies-and-the-english-renaissance/, accessed 17 September 2017. For McCabe’s challenge to the marginal place of liminal materials in early modern accounts of early modern English print culture, see “Ungainefull Arte”, pp. 3–4.
- 50.
McCabe,“Ungainefull Arte”, p. 4.
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Belle, MA., Hosington, B.M. (2018). Introduction. In: Belle, MA., Hosington, B. (eds) Thresholds of Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_1
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