ANNE E. B. COLDIRON, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557.

Abstract

ENGLISH Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557, is a remarkable work of recovery. It revisits a little explored phenomenon in the first seventy-five years of English print culture—verse translation of French misogamist and misogynist texts associated with the late medieval querelle des femmes—and offers a comparative account of the mediations which these texts effected ‘between cultures, between languages, between media, and indeed between the genders’(xii). From Caxton imprints through to the work of Tudor printer John Rastell, this book charts largely unmapped territory, bridging the period between the early fifteenth century and the English pamphlet wars on gender of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In the process, it reveals a lively and popular culture of printed translations about women, men, marriage, sex, and economics that will have a significant impact on early modern studies. Coldiron considers a heterogeneous mix of texts in her attempt to recover this unique stage in the history of Anglo-French cultural exchange. Chapters on Christine de Pizan's early English translations and reception, and John Heywood's first play, A Mery Play (1533), bookend three chapters on less well-known interventions in the battle of the sexes. One of the great virtues of Coldiron's archival trawl is the provision of both primary transcriptions and interpretative gloss for a number of works that are otherwise inaccessible to many scholars. The rarest of these pieces—the ‘Letter of Dydo to Eneas’ from Pynson's The Boke of Fame (1526); The Beaulte of Women (1525); the paratexts from Wynkyn de Worde's The Fyftene Joyes of Maryage (1509); and Robert Copland's mal-marié tracts: A Complaynt of them that be to Soone Maryed and The Complaynte of them that ben to Late Maryed (1535)—are available in appendices. For this reason alone the work is an invaluable resource for future research.