'Weaving the web': Women's Translations as Dialogues in Early Modern England

CREMS Seminar

Part of the Translation Reading Group series

The Group is a discussion forum for everyone interested in translation.  It aims to promote conversations on this innately cross-period topic, and to act as a space for discovering new approaches and research directions.  

Translation Reading Group Poster Spring 2013 (PDF , 196kb)

Professor Brenda Hosington
Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick

Women’s translations in early modern England have been the subject of many articles and chapters in books over the past decade or so, although no full account of the over thirty women translators and their translations exists to date. Moreover, many discussions of the individual translations seem to have taken place outside the sphere of translation studies, probably because literary critics in early modern English studies are very often unaware of the many developments taking place in that particular area of research.  In an attempt to rectify this situation, the present paper will examine some translations made by Englishwomen from French and Italian originals in the years 1450-1650 by discussing them as dialogues between two languages, two cultures, and, last but by no means least, two genders, and by setting them within their socio-historical context.

RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

Monograph on English women translators and the relationship between their work and the early modern English world of print, tentatively entitled "Weaving the web": Women Translators and Print in England, 1500-1660.

'English Women Translators and French Seventeenth-Century Fiction'. Research conducted as Team Member of the British Academy-funded project, Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Texts and Transmission (University of London, 2013).

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Online publication

Online free access catalogue with over 6000 detailed entries of all translations into and out of all languages printed in Britain and all translations out of all languages into English printed on the Continent. The catalogue is entitled 'Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: An Annotated Catalogue of Translations in Britain, 1473-1640 (See Projects page).

Books

Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print, and Culture in Britain, 1473-1640, ed. Sara K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (Leiden: Brill, 2013). [in press]

Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Cantabrigiensis. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Cambridge, 2000 (Tempe, Arizona: MRTS, 2003). [Co-Editor.]

Elizabeth Jane Weston Complete Writings (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2000). [Co-author with Donald Cheney.] [Winner of the Josephine Roberts Distinguished Edition of 2000 Award]

Anne, Margaret and Jane Seymour, Mortem Margaritae Valesiae; Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Navarre. Edition with Introduction. Vol. 16 of The Printed Writings of Early Modern Englishwomen, 1500-1640 (London and New York: Scholar Press, 2000). [Author.]

Refreshments available 15 mins before the start