Medieval anxieties

Abstract

My dissertation examines the concept of vernacular translation in the Middle Ages, particularly examining French and Middle English texts. It focuses on a specific genre of literature popular in the Middle Ages but relatively ignored in contemporary literary scholarship: the beast fable. My argument is that some of the principal writers of vernacular fables from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries—Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and William Caxton--subtly exhibit, through their translations, a conscious awareness of, and anxiety about, the question of authorial identification--the role, identity, and authority of the “author” during their respective periods. Beginning with a historical survey of the Western, Aesopic fable, an examination of its didactic function, and a review of how medieval audiences perceived this genre, I then provide a brief history of Western translation theory, exploring how translators from Cicero to Dante to Seamus Heaney perceive the task of the literary translator. This section ends with a description of the relatively new academic discipline of Translation Studies and how it has informed, and indeed transformed, contemporary ideas about the translation of literature. In the principal chapters of my dissertation, I analyze various fables of Marie, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Caxton, applying to these tales some of the theoretical ideas presented in earlier chapters, and I conclude by drawing a connection between these writers and translators yet also demonstrating that each expresses his or her anxieties about authorial representation and translating in a different way. For all of these writers, their self-promotion or search for authorial legitimacy expressed through fable is part of a