The Politics Of Translation In The Middle Ages And The Renaissance The Black Hole Of Public Administration The Politics Of Translation In The Middle Ages And The Renaissance The Black Hole Of Public Administration

The articles in this collection focus on politics in the widest sense and its influence and visibility in translations from the early Middle Ages to the late Renaissance - from Eusbius' translations of Virgil to Shakespeare's adaptation of the story of Titus Andronicus. No translation, this collection argues, is an innocent, transparent rendering of the original; translation is always carried out in a certain cultural and political ambience.

The articles in this collection, written by medievalists and Renaissance scholars, are part of the recent "cultural turn" in translation studies, which approaches translation as an activity that is powerfully affected by its socio-political context and the demands of the translating culture. The links made between culture, politics, and translation in these texts highlight the impact of ideological and political forces on cultural transfer in early European thought. While the personalities of powerful thinkers and translators such as Erasmus, Etienne Dolet, Montaigne, and Leo Africanus play into these texts, historical events and intellectual fashions are equally important: moments such as the Hundred Years War, whose events were partially recorded in translation by Jean Froissart; the Political tussles around the issues of lay readers and rewriters of biblical texts; the theological and philosophical shift from scholasticism to Renaissance relativism; or European relations with the Muslim world add to the interest of these articles. Throughout this volume, translation is treated as a form of writing, as the production of text and meaning, carried out in a certain cultural and political ambiance, and for identifiable - though not always stated - reasons. No translation, this collection argues, is an innocent, transparent rendering of the original.

The process of translation transports a text through time and place and, as the editors suggest, no translation is an innocent, transparent rendering of the original'. These fourteen specially commissioned essays examine the pressures of culture and society on the medieval translator and explore the personal agenda which was and is an inevitable factor in translation. The scope of this interesting collection is broad with subjects including: Eusebius' Greek version of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue; King Alfred's Boethius; Wace's Roman de Brut: Jean Froissart's Chroniques; Leo Africanus; Montaigne; Shakespeare.

Drawing on approaches from literary studies, history, linguistics, and art history, and ranging from Late Antiquity to the sixteenth century, this collection views 'translation' broadly as the adaptation and transmission of cultural inheritance. The essays explore translation in a variety of sources from manuscript to print culture and the creation of lexical databases. Several essays look at the practice of textual translation across languages, including the vernacularization of Latin literature in England, France, and Italy; the translation of Greek and Hebrew scientific terms into Arabic; and the use of Hebrew terms in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim polemics. Other essays examine medieval translators' views and performance of translation, looking at Lydgate's translation of Greek myths through mental images rendered through rhetorical figures or at how printing transformed the rhetoric of intervernacular translation of chivalric romances. This collection also demonstrates translation as a key element in the construction of cultural and political identity in the Fet des Romains and Chester Whitsun Plays, and in the papacy's efforts to compete with Byzantium by controlling the translation of Greek writings.

Understanding how medieval textual cultures engaged with the heritage of antiquity (transmission and translation) depends on recognizing that reception is a creative cultural act (transformation). These essays focus on the people, societies and institutions who were doing the transmitting, translating, and transforming -- the "agents". The subject matter ranges from medicine to astronomy, literature to magic, while the cultural context encompasses Islamic and Jewish societies, as well as Byzantium and the Latin West. What unites these studies is their attention to the methodological and conceptual challenges of thinking about agency. Not every agent acted with an agenda, and agenda were sometimes driven by immediate needs or religious considerations that while compelling to the actors, are more opaque to us. What does it mean to say that a text becomes “available” for transmission or translation? And why do some texts, once transmitted, fail to thrive in their new milieu? This collection thus points toward a more sophisticated “ecology” of transmission, where not only individuals and teams of individuals, but also social spaces and local cultures, act as the agents of cultural creativity.

The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.

Evil Lords uses the prism of bad rule or tyranny to enhance our understanding of political discourse from the ancient world to the Renaissance, elucidating premodern notions of sovereignty as well as the relation between ethics and politics, the individual and society, power, and propaganda. Eleven chapters present case studies exploring Hebrew, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, early, high and late medieval, and Renaissance conceptions and representations of bad or tyrannical government. Since bad rule is always a perversion of the norm, its shifting conceptualizations shed light on historically specific assessments of what constitutes acceptable and legitimate political behavior. Meanwhile, political debate also reflects specific power structures, authorial intent, and audience expectations. Each of the essays, therefore, examines bad rule and its agents within the ideological frameworks and societal patterns of the respective periods, thereby painting a picture of historical and intellectual change. Despite these often profound variations, however, the volume also shows that it is meaningful to think of a Western tradition of tyranny in the premodern world that derived from shared roots in Classical and biblical thought and was further defined by ongoing cross-fertilization spanning two millennia. Thus, Evil Lords offers scholars and students of Western political theory, history, and literature a critical framework through which to revisit the longue durée of premodern political reflection.

Ptolemy, considered a proto-Humanist by some, combined the principles of Northern Italian republicanism with Aristotelian theory in his De Regimine Principum, a book that influenced much of the political thought of the later Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern period. He was the first to attack kingship as despotism and to draw parallels between ancient Greek models of mixed constitution and the Roman Republic, biblical rule, the Church, and medieval government. In addition to his translation of this important and radical medieval political treatise, written around 1300, James M. Blythe includes a sixty-page introduction to the work and provides over 1200 footnotes that trace Ptolemy's sources, explain his references, and comment on the text, the translation, the context, and the significance.

"Bringing together the work of scholars from disparate fields of enquiry, this volume provides a timely and stimulating exploration of the themes of transmission and translation, charting developments, adaptations and exchanges - textual, visual, material and conceptual - that reverberated across the medieval world, within wide-ranging temporal and geographical contexts. Such transactions generated a multiplicity of fusions expressed in diverse and often startling ways - architecturally, textually and through peoples' lived experiences - that informed attitudes of selfhood and 'otherness', senses of belonging and ownership, and concepts of regionality, that have been further embraced in modern and contemporary arenas of political and cultural discourse. Contributors are Tarren Andrews, Edel Bhreathnach, Cher Casey, Katherine Cross, Amanda Doviak, Elisa Foster, Matthias Friedrich, Jane Hawkes, Megan Henvey, Aideen Ireland, Alison Killilea, Ross McIntire, Lesley Milner, John Mitchell, Nino Simonishvili, and Rachael Vause"--