Imperial Lexicography and the Anglo-Spanish War

Abstract

In the sixteenth century, English translators applied themselves to making literature in foreign languages available to their countrymen. This bloom in translation activity stemmed in part from a national crisis over the uncertain status of the English vernacular. Throughout the period, English intellectuals doubted whether or not their native tongue compared favorably with the emergent national languages of their Continental neighbors to the south. The mid-century scholar Andrew Boorde, for example, lamented the low estimation of English relative to other Continental languages; “The speche of Englande,” he complains, “is a base speeche to other noble speches, as Italion, Castylion, and Frenche.”² Translation offered a means to remedy this cultural inferiority complex; for it was generally believed that translations from Greek and Latin would imbue the vernacular with classical eloquence while the domestication of contemporary foreign texts would render the tongue worldlier.³ Among the spokesmen for this project was Thomas Hoby whose work imported Italian literature and courtly customs. In the dedicatory epistle of his landmark translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1561), he implores others to follow his example:

As I therefore haue to my smal skil bestowed some labour about this piece of woorke, even so coulde I wishe with al my hart, profounde learned men in the Greeke and Latin shoulde make the lyke proofe, and euerye manne store the tunge accordinge to hys knowledge and delite above other men, in some piece of learnynge, that we alone of the worlde maye not bee styil counted barbarous in oure tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in maners. And so shall we perchaunce in time become as famous in Englande, as the learned men of other nations have ben and presently are.⁴

A translator travaileth not to his own private commodity, but to the benefit and public use of his country.¹

—Nicholas Udall