Printers without Borders
Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance

This book explores how England's first printers transformed English Renaissance literary culture by collaborating with translators to reshape foreign texts.

A. E. B. Coldiron (Author)

9781107421561, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 November 2020

355 pages, 19 b/w illus. 3 tables
23 x 15 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'This important book is indispensable reading for scholars of Renaissance translation studies, but its interdisciplinary scope makes it valuable for scholars of book history and Renaissance literatures, particularly English.' Joshua Reid, Renaissance Quarterly

This innovative study shows how printing and translation transformed English literary culture in the Renaissance. Focusing on the century after Caxton brought the press to England in 1476, Coldiron illustrates the foundational place of foreign, especially French language, materials. The book reveals unexpected foreign connections between works as different as Caxton's first printed translations, several editions of Book of the Courtier, sixteenth-century multilingual poetry, and a royal Armada broadside. Demonstrating a new way of writing literary history beyond source-influence models, the author treats the patterns and processes of translation and printing as co-transformations. This provocative book will interest scholars and advanced students of book history, translation studies, comparative literature and Renaissance literature.

1. 'Englishing' texts: patterns of early modern translation and transmission
2. Caxton, translation, and the Renaissance reprint culture
3: 'Bastard Allone': radiant translation and the status of English letters
4. Compressed transnationalism: John Wolfe's trilingual Courtier
5. The world on one page: an octolingual Armada broadside
6. Macaronic verse, plurilingual printing, and the uses of translation
Afterword
Appendix
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Printing, packaging & reprographic industry [KNTR], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature & literary studies [D], Prints & printmaking [AFH]