Throughout Patience, the Pearl Poet’s Middle English retelling of the book of Jonah, the poet consistently expands upon passages and images that feature sailors, the act of sailing, and the seascape. This article argues that the poet foregrounds maritime words and imagery in order to cause the audience to sympathize with poem’s pagan sailors, who are figured using language that would have been familiar to the audience. By using this empathy-building technique, the poet better directs the audience to the poem’s religious messages. 

This essay will take up two of the critical issues presented by George Buchanan’s Baptistes (1577): that of its relationship to Buchanan’s more famous political theory, and that of its possible allegorical relationship to contemporary politics. I will argue that figural language in Baptistes that echoes the Medeas of Euripides and Seneca—language that been largely neglected by previous scholarship—clarifies both of these issues. Buchanan’s active reception of Euripides has been better studied in his second drama, Jephthes (1554), but by tracing the figural echoes of Medea in Baptistes and by placing them within the broader networks of Buchanan’s political writings and early modern polemics against Mary Queen of Scots, it becomes clear that the published version of Baptistes operates partially as an dramatic restructuring of tropes that also appear in Buchanan’s critique of Mary, and that would also diffuse widely in political discourse. Classical reception and political intervention, here, are mutually constitutive: the Euripidean tragic is used by Buchanan to perform political, religious, and pedagogical functions, but also to dialogically and theatrically refine political rhetoric that he and others used to devastating practical effect in the years surrounding Mary’s deposal.

By examining classical reception through Buchanan’s intertextual knot of of drama, political theory, and political polemic, we can expand the question of classical reception in Elizabethan drama to address the networks of classical reception(s); or, to the myriad ways, unbounded by form, in which humanist engagement with literary antiquity shaped the trajectory not only of Elizabethan drama, but also the shape and tenor of political life.

Despite the recent surge of interest in racial discourse in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, representations of race in early modern lyric poetry have gone largely unstudied. This critical neglect is all the more surprising given that early modern poetic fascination with beauty, aesthetics, color, gender, and exoticism make it a particularly rich site for negotiating the changing meanings of racial difference in the period. In “‘Nature’s Negromancy,’” I examine four poems from the seventeenth-century poetry miscellany Parnassus Biceps, showing how they theorize blackness in a variety of fascinating yet often mutually contradictory ways. These poems, by Walton Poole, Abraham Wright, Henry King, and Henry Reynolds, position a gendered blackness as diametrically opposed to yet mutually constitutive of whiteness; as intrinsic and natural yet plastic and prosthetic; as symbolic of virtue yet also of witchcraft and sexual availability; and as a source of both agency and bondage. In short, the incoherencies of the significations of Black bodies, and particularly Black female bodies within and across these poems crucially mirror the incoherencies, changes, and tensions in early modern English constructions of racial difference.

By interrogating the figure of the simian within Frances Burney’s 1778 epistolary novel, Evelina, her interests in the ossification of gendered and patriotic identities might be made clear. Close attention to the unpleasant figure of Captain Mirvan complicates reading Burney’s novel as solely a fiction of a girl’s “entrance to the world,” instead confirming an omnidirectional interest in gender. Mirvan’s violent attitudes towards women shape what Joanne Cutting-Gray describes as the novel’s “world of duplicity and evil” and introduce the metaphor of the monkey as a potent symbol of Britain’s expanding marine world (1990). This paper nuances understandings of the fixity of identity in the text by highlighting Mirvan’s own temporal, and geographical, displacements. By arguing for Mirvan’s profane crassness as the obverse of the out-of-place Evelina, this paper contributes to understandings of gendered identity in the eighteenth-century novel’s reckoning with a pluralization of identities reflecting Britain’s eighteenth-century worlds.

Introduction to Special Double Issue

Indirect Translation in Early Modern Britain 

Guest Edited by Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington

England’s first printer, William Caxton, was also a prolific translator. Reading Caxton’s moment as profoundly consequential, this essay acknowledges economic motives for such a large translation corpus (providing new, page-based estimates of its size), yet sees Caxton’s translations as driven by an appetite for polychronic cultural variety. With many English works readily available for print production, Caxton nevertheless took greater trouble, during a brief two decades, to print thousands of pages of translated-foreign materials. Indirect translation via French-language intermediation was Caxton’s chief means of reactivating more than a Millennium’s foreign materials for an expanding English readership. “French,” however—no unified linguistic-cultural filter—actually provided regionally, socially, and aesthetically varied intermediations. Caxton’s translations had less to do with linear empire-transfer (translatio imperii et studii) than with cross-cultural harvesting and redistribution. In translating so many deeply polychronic, foreign works, Caxton created less a “native English” corpus than an anti- insular, anti-presentist, “englished” corpus.

John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes is, like much of his oeuvre, an indirect translation, channelling the Latin prose of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium through Laurent de Prémierfait’s fifteenth-century French version and numerous other sources into English rhyme royal. This article explores the transmission of this multivocal work in early modern print, arguing that it was precisely its openly displayed cultural and generic hybridity that enabled it to survive the radical political and religious changes of the period. In particular, Lydgate’s Fall is shown to suit the cultural moment of Marian England, when it was twice reprinted by John Wayland and Richard Tottel in 1554. Examining these editions within the wider context of Marian cultural poetics and their printers’ overall activity provides important insights not only into the characteristic bi-focality of Marian literary culture but also into the innovative potential of this hybrid and Janus-faced moment in English literary history.

This essay reconsiders indirect translations of ancient Greek texts made by Queen Elizabeth and Jane Lumley, Tudor noblewomen who received cutting-edge humanist educations during the middle of the sixteenth century. Although the very existence of these works once served as confirmation of their translators’ extraordinary learning, modern scholars have discovered to their disappointment that both women worked from intermediary Latin translations made by Erasmus. This essay offers an alternative perspective on Elizabeth and Lumley by borrowing the concept of remediation from media theory in order to propose that translation involves the remediation of a text’s cultural, formal, linguistic, and material elements. Within this framework, Erasmus, Elizabeth, and Lumley can be identified as participants in a humanist tradition of remediating classical texts. This case study demonstrates the previously overlooked cultural value of indirect translation within sixteenth-century England and provides a theoretical framework for redressing the modern critical bias toward direct translation.

1527 saw the posthumous publication in print of Claude de Seyssel’s translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, whose original manuscript had been previously distributed among aristocratic circles ca. 1515. Although this was the first translation of the text into French, Seyssel had not rendered it from its Greek original, but from Lorenzo Valla’s first Latin translation of 1452. Seyssel and his subsequent editors offered Thucydides’s History to the French monarchy and its courtly elites as a catalogue of patterns for political communication and military strategy. This French translation in its own turn generated the first rendering of Thucydides into English, penned by Thomas Nicolls from Seyssel’s text (French paratexts and all), which he published in 1550 with a dedicatory preface for John Cheke, regius professor of Greek in Cambridge and tutor to Edward VI. In his own preface Nicolls invoked the authority of both Seyssel and Valla as mediators between the political doctrine, the oratorical exempla, as well as the diplomatic and military strategies locked in the Greek original, on the one hand, and his new English readers on the other. Rather than focus on just one of these versions, this article samples some relevant milestones that punctuate the path traced by Thucydides’s text as it circulated first from Valla’s Latin on to Seyssel’s French and finally Nicolls’s English version. The essay stresses how these translations were not the result of a single agent, but were rather determined by the mediation of the intersections that made them possible. This must perforce include an overview of the political, religious and intellectual environments which are indispensable for their proper interpretation. Some of the most relevant episodes in this general overview are used as case studies to exemplify the appropriation of Thucydides’s History for political purposes and to illustrate the role played by these indirect translations, their paratexts, and their editorial design as a singular chapter within the long history of the reception of Thucydides in early modern Europe.

Self-translations—works rewritten in a second language by their own authors—represent a significant subset of early modern translations. Generally taking place between Latin and a vernacular, self-translation enabled authors to expand and diversify their readership while retaining control over their message. But what happened when self-translations were translated into other languages by “ordinary” translators? Was either version—the Latin or the vernacular—more commonly taken as the basis for further translations, or did translators seek to take both versions into account where possible? What can the choices made by these translators tell us about shifting language dynamics, strategies of cultural mediation, and material access to foreign language books in early modern Europe? This article tackles these questions by focusing on Franco-Latin works translated into English according to three possible scenarios: translations based on a composite text (e.g. Knolles’s translation of Bodin’s République / De republica), translations based on the Latin version (e.g. English translations of Ramus’s Dialectique/ Dialectica), and translations based on the vernacular version (e.g. Carew’s translation of Estienne’s Apologia pro Herodoto / Introduction au traité de la conformité). Overall, the article argues that the translation of self-translations can be considered as a special case of indirect translation in which the mediating translation itself comes from the original author.

This essay examines a little-studied English book of Psalms, John Standish’s All the French Psalm tunes with English words, first published in 1632 and re-edited in 1650. The collection gathers metrical versions of the Psalms to be sung to the original tunes of the Geneva psalter. It also provides plain musical notation for each piece, the volume’s main function being to allow English travelers abroad to participate in reformed church services in their own tongue. While explicitly presented as translated from the Hebrew, Standish’s Psalms are in fact the result of multiple processes of mediation. At the musical level, obviously, the English arrangements are shaped by the constraints of the “French tunes.” At the textual level, the English version is indebted to the Geneva psalter by Marot and De Bèze—but it also adapts existing English versions, notably by Philip and Mary Sidney. This essay explores the various forms of translation at work in this multi-mediated book, setting them against the backdrop of seventeenth-century controversies over Psalm translation, Continental influences on Anglican liturgy, and the place of song in reformed spirituality and worship.

In Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995), Gideon Toury included “directness of translation” in his list of “preliminary norms.” Is it “permitted at all?” he wondered. And in translating from what “source languages/text types/periods”? These questions are particularly relevant if applied to the early modern age—i.e., to the time when people began to legislate on translation, and to worry about the interlingual processes which were to be considered acceptable, prestigious or dubious. In this context, was indirect translation permitted, prohibited or simply tolerated? Also taking its cue from a recent flowering of secondary literature on the topic, this article interrogates texts and paratexts of a few versions of the Aeneid and of Guarini’s Pastor fido in order to evaluate the status of indirect translation in early modern England.

Some years ago, E. G. Stanley published an edition of an Old English eschatological homily which contained some rhythmic passages and some poetic passages intercalated into conventional Old English prose. This text has been reedited by Christopher A. Jones in his volume Old English Shorter Poems I: Religious and Didactic for the DOML series. Neither Stanley nor Jones comment in any detail on the eschatology of the text—the DOML series does not encourage commentary and Stanley was not interested in eschatology—but the interesting motif of Christ as an impassible, imperturbable Judge who is “read” differently by the damned and the blessed, occurs in the homily and is closely paralleled in the Old English eschatological poem Christ III.

In Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the reader is informed that it was the goddess Cybele who created the daisy in honor of the God of Love’s wife, Alceste. This narrative detail is generally thought to be Chaucer’s own invention with many scholars supporting the theory that it was inspired by Froissart’s vernacular Dittié de la Flour de la Margherite in which the daisy is sprung from the tears of Herès. Another theory is that Chaucer was inspired by mythographers who noted that Cybele’s cognomen, Berecynthia, meant ‘flower of Spring.’ This article builds on the explanatory power of natural allegoresis and, in doing so, submits that Chaucer’s invented mythology of the daisy, particularly lines F.125–129, 183–185 and 531, has an antecedent in the mutualistic figures of Cybele and Attis in section 74.12 of Remigius of Auxerre’s Commentum in Martianum Capellam.

Pride and Prejudice is notable for the exquisite harmony achieved at the end of the novel when Elizabeth and Darcy finally are united after resolving their misunderstandings. This article contends that the felicity of this marriage is due to the complex interweaving of motifs of credit and connections that create the powerful foundation for their union. In a novel that contains multiple characters associated with trade, the Gardiners are notable for insuring the felicitous outcome. Their prominence invites readers to revise their first impressions of trade and points to the importance of credit and economy in the novel. This article takes a fresh look at Pride and Prejudice to reveal the ways Jane Austen engages with contemporary attitudes toward trade, particularly the literary stereotype of the cit, to establish a new understanding of the role of merchants in literature and society.