Medieval Translations and Their Readers

Medieval Translations and Their Readers
Author: Pavlína Rychterová
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: History
ISBN: 9782503591902

The papers gathered in this volume focus on 'Medieval Translations and their Readership', the special strand of the 11th Cardiff Conference on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. The volume discusses the role of the reader in the process of translation, communities of readers and their active participation in translators' choices, and the translation as a result of a dialogue between author, text and its reader. Translations of works of theology and religious education, the focus of most of the contributions to this volume, constitute excellent material for research into medieval lay audiences. Vernacular religious educational texts from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century show a great deal of conformity. Individual authors resorted to similar strategies and techniques to meet any translation challenges, to fulfil educational aims, or to relate to their readers and to accommodate their expectations. Simultaneously, the readers played a crucial role as they shaped the production of texts in many ways. Research into Middle English pastoral and devotional literature and the conditions of its production still dominates scholarly work in the field. Religious texts in vernaculars other than Middle English have so far received little attention. This volume tries to tackle this lacuna by offering a careful comparative analysis of relevant vernacular texts across Europe, including Slavonic works, using historiographical, philological, and linguistic methods as well as literary scholarly approaches. The sixteen chapters are organized in three sections. The first one, 'Authors and Readers', brings together articles examining the idea of a model reader as expressed in translations of biblical texts and texts of religious instruction. The contributions in the second section, on the 'Dissimination of Knowledge', focus on how translators addressed readers, how people read, and how they used the manuscripts and printed books made for them. The target audience or model reader of the first section is here put into perspective with the help of discussions of reading practices. The last section, 'Religious Education in Transition', comprises contributions which focus on textual material from the period when printed books gradually changed, the relationship between languages, texts, authors, and readers.

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages
Author: Barbara Zimbalist
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0268202214

This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers

Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers
Author: Laurie A. Finke
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2019-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501741888

This collection brings together twelve original essays by prominent medievalists which address problems posed by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Taken together, the essays call into question the view that contemporary criticism has little to say about medieval literature and that medieval studies should remain isolated from the issues of contemporary criticism. The contributors apply a variety of critical methodologies to explore issues in textuality, intertextuality, and the role of the reader in works of medieval writers as diverse as Chaucer, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Anselm, and Talavera. Incorporating critical approaches such as deconstructionism, Marxism, feminism, new-historicism and reader-response criticism, the essays place these writers and their texts within a wider realm of cultural reference that embraces philosophy, religion, rhetoric, history, politics, and anthropology.

The Translation of Religious Texts in the Middle Ages

The Translation of Religious Texts in the Middle Ages
Author: Domenico Pezzini
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783039116003

The transition from Latin to vernacular languages in the late Middle Ages and the dramatic rise of a new readership produced a huge bulk of translations, particularly of religious literature in its various genres. The solutions are so multifarious that they defy any attempt to outline general theories. This is particularly visible when the same text is translated or rewritten at different times and in different languages or genres. Through a minute analysis of texts this book aims at highlighting lexical, syntactic and stylistic choices dictated not only by the source but also by new readers and patrons, or by new destinations of the works. Established categories such as 'literalness' and 'fidelity' are thus questioned and integrated with these other factors which, while being more 'external', do nonetheless impinge on the very idea of 'translation', and consequently on its assessment. Far from being a mere transfer from one language to another, a medieval translation verges on a form of creative writing, and as such its study becomes a fascinating investigation into the very process of textual production.

Introducing English Medieval Book History

Introducing English Medieval Book History
Author: Ralph Hanna
Publisher: Exeter Medieval Texts and Stud
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780859898713

This book offers an introduction to medieval English book-history through a sequence of exemplary analyses of commonplace book-historical problems. Rather than focus on bibliographical particulars, the volume considers a variety of ways in which scholars use manuscripts to discuss book culture, and it provides a wide-ranging introductory bibliography to aid in the study. All the essays try to suggest how the study of surviving medieval books might be useful in considering medieval literary culture more generally. Subjects covered include authorship, genre, discontinuous production, scribal individuality and community, the history of libraries and the history of book provenance.

Translating the Middle Ages

Translating the Middle Ages
Author: Karen L. Fresco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317007212

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.

Reading Medieval Latin

Reading Medieval Latin
Author: Keith Sidwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 1995-08-24
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780521447478

Reading Medieval Latin is an introduction to medieval Latin in its cultural and historical context and is designed to serve the needs of students who have completed the learning of basic classical Latin morphology and syntax. (Users of Reading Latin will find that it follows on after the end of section 5 of that course.) It is an anthology, organised chronologically and thematically in four parts. Each part is divided into chapters with introductory material, texts, and commentaries which give help with syntax, sentence-structure, and background. There are brief sections on medieval orthography and grammar, together with a vocabulary which includes words (or meanings) not found in standard classical dictionaries. The texts chosen cover areas of interest to students of medieval history, philosophy, theology, and literature.

Science Translated

Science Translated
Author: Michèle Goyens
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9058676714

Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 40Medieval translators played an important role in the development and evolution of a scientific lexicon. At a time when most scholars deferred to authority, the translations of canonical texts assumed great importance. Moreover, translation occurred at two levels in the Middle Ages. First, Greek or Arabic texts were translated into the learned language, Latin. Second, Latin texts became source texts themselves, to be translated into the vernaculars as their importance across Europe started to increase.The situation of the respective translators at these two levels was fundamentally different: whereas the former could rely on a long tradition of scientific discourse, the latter had the enormous responsibility of actually developing a scientific vocabulary. The contributions in the present volume investigate both levels, greatly illuminating the emergence of the scientific terminology and concepts that became so fundamental in early modern intellectual discourse. The scientific disciplines covered in the book include, among others, medicine, biology, astronomy, and physics.

Making the Bible French

Making the Bible French
Author: Jeanette Patterson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2022-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487539207

From the end of the thirteenth century to the first decades of the sixteenth century, Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale was the predominant French translation of the Bible. Enhancing his translation with techniques borrowed from scholastic study, vernacular preaching, and secular fiction, Guyart produced one of the most popular, most widely copied French-language texts of the later Middle Ages. Making the Bible French investigates how Guyart’s first-person authorial voice narrates translation choices in terms of anticipated reader reactions and frames the biblical text as an object of dialogue with his readers. It examines the translator’s narrative strategies to aid readers’ visualization of biblical stories, to encourage their identification with its characters, and to practice patient, self-reflexive reading. Finally, it traces how the Bible historiale manuscript tradition adapts and individualizes the Bible for each new intended reader, defying modern print-based and text-centred ideas about the Bible, canonicity, and translation.