Abstract
Focusing on the first ‘thresholds’ encountered by early modern readers, that is, the frontispiece and title-page, Anne E. B. Coldiron analyses translators’ portraits as privileged spaces of cultural ‘visibility’ that challenge the implicit or explicit author functions of a book. First discussing a selection of translators portrayed in early modern English woodcuts and engravings, she then offers an in-depth analysis of the woodcut adorning the title-page prefacing Margaret More Roper’s translation of Erasmus’s Precatio dominica, which she reads as a particularly complex and ambiguous case of ‘anonymous visibility’.
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Notes
- 1.
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995; 2nd edition, 2008).
- 2.
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 7.
- 3.
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, pp. 35 and 34, respectively.
- 4.
Anne Coldiron, ‘Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation’, Translation Studies, 5.2 (2012), 189–200. Not all Renaissance translators are highly visible in their texts: some are signalled only with initials, others are anonymous, and still other translations are unattributed. For details, visit http://www.translationandprint.com, the SSHRC Insight Grant-supported project directed by Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington, Université de Montréal.
- 5.
Taylor Clement, ‘Moveable Types: The De-Individuated Portrait in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Renaissance Studies, 30.1 (2016), 1–24. On ‘everywoman’ factotum cuts, see Martha Driver, The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late-Medieval England and its Sources (London: British Library, 2004), pp. 62–8 and 115–50. See also Driver’s ‘Christine de Pizan and Robert Wyer: The.C. Hystoryes of Troye or L’Epistre Othea Englished’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 72 (1997), 125–39; see especially p. 131.
- 6.
Clement, ‘Moveable Types’, p. 4.
- 7.
On the early modern author portrait see Peter Burke, ‘Reflections on the Frontispiece Portrait in the Renaissance’, in Bildnis und Image: das Portrait zwischen Intention und Rezeption, edited by Andreas Köstler and Ernst Seidl (Köln: Bohlau, 1998), pp. 150–62; Ruth Mortimer, ‘The Author’s Image: Italian Sixteenth-Century Printed Portraits’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 7 (1996), 7–87; Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550–1600 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
- 8.
Those implications I shall pursue as part of a new book project, tentatively titled Translation and Authorship in Early Modern England.
- 9.
Nathalie Hancisse and Stéphanie Vanasten, ‘Transl[a]ut[h]ors: Questions de traduction à l’écriture: Regards croisés sur la littérature et les échanges culturels entre le XVIème et le XXIème siècles’, International Conference held at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), 10 September 2015.
- 10.
Sarah Howe, ‘The Authority of Presence: The Development of the English Author Portrait, 1500–1640’, PBSA: Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102.4 (2008), 465–99, whose excellent list of ninety author portraits, seven of which are actually translator portraits, makes many important interventions; however, she calls, for example, Harington’s portrait in his translation of the Orlando Furioso an author portrait (discussion on pp. 470–2), and lists Florio’s portraits as author portraits, where he is in one case a compiler and in the other a translator (p. 472, note 13).
- 11.
The question of different styles of portrayal and what they signified, like the questions of connection to other media, will be treated in the tentatively titled Translation and Authorship in Early Modern England.
- 12.
Two chief essays (containing citations of previous work) on this frontispiece are Joseph Dane, ‘“Wanting the first blank”: Frontispiece to the Huntington Copy of Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67.2 (June 2004), 315–25; and Lotte Hellinga-Querido, ‘Reading an Engraving: William Caxton’s Dedication to Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy’, in Across the Narrow Seas: Studies in the History and Bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries Presented to Anna E. Simoni, edited by Susan Roach (London: British Library, 1991), pp. 1–15; thanks to Susan Baddeley for signalling and generously sharing a copy of it, April 2016. On the monkey in the scene, see also Colin Davey, ‘Monkey “besynesse”: Primates, Print , and Patronage , or the Ape and the Book’, Durham and Newcastle Late Summer Lecture Series, 17–18 September 2013; available digitally on Academia.edu, exhaustively surveying the history of the monkey image in multiple contexts. My ‘Caxton’s Ape: A Bilingual Visual Pun?’ (unpublished at this writing) cites other scholars on this image, proposes that key visual elements suggest an awareness that the new means of production, the printing press, has intervened in ‘authorial’ work, and argues that both the problem of imitation and the problem of mechanical reproduction are being raised around this first English printed book.
- 13.
Most usually authors were depicted, but, as we would expect in a scribal culture that valued compilatio, scribes and translators also appear as presenters. Classic, easily accessible medieval presentation scenes include the large, haut-de-page illumination of Christine de Pizan, who kneels before the patron queen Isabel de Bavière, giving her the ‘works’ volume that is now BL MS Harley 4431; see James Laidlaw’s project at the University of Edinburgh, http://www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/. For an example of a presentation miniature portraying a translator, see Royal Library of Belgium, MS 9242, the Chroniques de Hainault (c.1447), the Latin original by Jacques de Guise and the translation by Jean Wauquelin, depicted presenting his book. Andrea Rizzi and John Griffiths, however, note that translators worked in collaborative modes: ‘Often cloaked in anonymity, premodern translation is in most cases the result of collaboration, as Belén Bistué recently demonstrated’; ‘Review Essay: The Renaissance of Anonymity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69 (2016), 200–12 (p. 210). Belén Bistué, Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
- 14.
See A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
- 15.
The little ape may also indicate an awareness of the work of print production, as I propose in ‘Caxton’s Ape: A Bilingual Visual Pun?’
- 16.
See Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts 1480–1535, with additions and corrections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), entries 926–7 and 2373; see examples in the Kalender of Shepherdes (1518? and 1528), Wynkyn de Worde’s reprinting of The Dyctes and the sayenges of the philosophers (1528), and several works by Stanbridge, including a re-copied cut in Accidentia (Skot, 1529?), inter alia.
- 17.
Familiar examples contemporary with A Deuout Treatise include title-page portraits of Skelton, usually named as Laureate but otherwise unindividuated, in A ryght delectable treatyse upon a goodly garlande or chapelet of laurell by mayster Skelton poete laureat (London: Richard Faukes, 1523); Skelton Laureate agaynste a somely sowstrowne (London: J. Rastell, 1527); Divers balettys and Dyties solacyous deuysed by master Skelton Laureat (London: J. Rastell, 1528?). A well-known portrayal of a female author, Christine de Pizan, is repeated four times inside the Boke of the Cite of Ladyes (London: Pepwell, 1521; sigs [Aa1–v, [Aa4]v, [Pp6]v, [R3]v). This image shows a scholarly woman, working at a desk, surrounded by open and closed books (also otherwise unindividuated except in verbal paratexts). Christine de Pizan, like author Skelton but unlike translator Roper, enjoys the enhanced authority of a cathedra or covered chair in her author image (that is, authorship beats gender in marked status, in this case).
- 18.
William Tyndale, trans., The New Testament (Antwerp: Martin Emperor, [1534]), STC 2826. Lanfranco of Milan, trans. John Hall, A Most Excellent and Learned Work of Chirurgerie, Called Chirurgia Parua Lanfranci (London: Thomas Marshe, 1565), STC 15192.
- 19.
Howe, ‘The English Author Portrait’, Appendix, item 3, ‘pasted onto singleton bound opposite TP in BL C.23.a5’, p. 493.
- 20.
STC 15192, 1565; one variant has this title verso portrait; another is blank, and another has a paste-in slip on the title verso.
- 21.
Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and ‘Harington , Sir John (bap. 1560, d. 1612)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2015), online: http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/view/article/12326, accessed 2 July 2016; and Joshua Reid, ‘Serious Play in Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse’, unpublished at this writing.
- 22.
This title-page imitates that of the Venice edition of 1584, where Peace with a cornucopia occupies the prime, central bas-de-page position that Harington’s image usurps.
- 23.
I omit here discussion of the portraits of Francis Hawkins (1628–81), child-translator of An Alarum for Ladies (1638) from the French of Jean Puget, Monsieur de la Serre. His likeness appears under the inscription, ‘François Hawkins tirant à l’aage des [sic] dix ans’; the English poem beneath treats him as prodigy-translator. This engraved portrait, even more than the others, begs for scholarly and art-historical attention because its style and the author’s biography are unusual and suggest a less typical way of conveying what distinguishes this translator. A portrait of Hawkins at eight years old is in a later edition, Youths Behaviour (1658), thus after Howe’s date-limits.
- 24.
Thanks to Marie-Alice Belle for pointing out this image; correspondence, 9 July 2015; Ben Jonson, Q. Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry, Englished by Ben Jonson (London: J. Okes for John Benson, 1640).
- 25.
A Deuout Treatise vpon the Pater noster, made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterodamus, and tourned in to englisshe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of. xix. yere of age [i.e. Margaret More Roper] (London: Berthelet, [1526?], [1531?]); STC 10477 and 10477.5. The second edition removes this image and adds an image of Erasmus inside the book (sig. b.iiiv).
- 26.
In addition to engaging in visits and correspondence, Erasmus names Thomas More and Margaret More Roper in the title to several printings of his commentaries on Prudentius: Commentarius Erasmi Roterodami in Nucem Ouidii, ad Ioannem Morum Thomae Mori filium. Eiusdem commentarius in duos hymnos Prudentii, ad Margaretam Roperam Thomae Mori filiam. For details, see the USTC, online: http://ustc.ac.uk, or the Erasmus Online Database, http://www.erasmus.org/index.cfm?itm_name=erasmusonline-EN
- 27.
Brenda Hosington, ‘Women Translators and the Early Printed Book’, in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558, edited by Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 248–71. Her discussion includes seven female translators of the period, Margaret Beaufort, Margaret More Roper, Catherine Parr, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth Tudor, Anne Cooke, Mary Clarke Basset.
- 28.
Jaime Goodrich, ‘Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: A Case for Rethinking Woman’s Participation in the Early Modern Public Sphere’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 39 (2008), 1021–40 (p. 1031).
- 29.
Johnston explains that although A. W. Reed and others following him have identified the Deuout Treatise as an edition of 1526, and as one of printer Thomas Berthelet’s editions that were censured in that year by vicar general Geoffrey Wharton, there is no real documentation for this assumption; she outlines reasons to think otherwise. She further notes that ‘copies of the unauthorized version might not survive in the light of its suppression’. Johnston’s essay is found online, at http://gateway.proquest.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:screen:intro:39961080
- 30.
For example, Caxton has utterly displaced the author in the Recuyell presentation frontispiece ; see my ‘Caxton’s Ape’. Translators come to occupy the author portrait space on title versos and frontispieces (e.g. Samson Lennard, Abraham Darcie, John Florio, George Chapman, Francis Hawkins). On some title-pages, both author and translator appear, and the relation is often ambiguous (e.g. Harington or Holland).
- 31.
On vertical versus horizontal translation see Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation’, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 55–67.
- 32.
See n. 3 for full citations.
- 33.
Hosington, ‘Women Translators and the Early Printed Book’, p. 253. The excluded parts are at the viewer’s right, showing a schoolroom scene in which the woman at the desk is obviously the instructor of several child-like figures. Thanks to Brenda Hosington for pointing out the prior use as Sapientia (conversation, March 2016, RSA Boston).
- 34.
Patricia Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 70.
- 35.
Considered most famously by Juan Luis Vives ; see Demers, Women’s Writing, for full discussion.
- 36.
‘This is nat the leest: that with her vertuous, worshipfull, wyse, and well lerned husbande, she hath by the occasyon of her lernynge, and his delyte therin, suche especiall conforte, pleasure, and pastyme, as were nat well possyble for one vnlerned couple, eyther to take togyder or to conceyue in their myndes, what pleasure is therin’ (sig. b[1]). Later he does admit that the beauty of learning is greater than the beauty of the body, which decays (‘be it never so excellent’ [b1]v).
- 37.
Johnston, online, penultimate paragraph.
- 38.
Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 33–6. Brenda M. Hosington, ‘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 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 95–121).
- 39.
Often there is marketing at stake, as so clearly in the case of Gale or Hall . See James Raven, The Business of Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, edited by José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 40.
Thanks to Nicholas Crawford and Taylor Clement for reading an early draft of this essay and to Taylor Clement for reading suggestions.
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Coldiron, A.E.B. (2018). The Translator’s Visibility in Early Printed Portrait-Images and the Ambiguous Example of Margaret More Roper. 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_3
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