Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance . By A. E. B. Coldiron.

Abstract

This is a book about translation and book history, about translators and printers, and about how they together shaped the trajectory of English literature between William Caxton's earliest enterprise, during the 1470s, and the late sixteenth century. A. E. B. Coldiron offers a compelling challenge to traditional source-influence models of literary history, by showing how printers and translators negotiated the sense of the foreign and England's place within a polyglot European intellectual and textual society. The book is organized around a series of case-studies. These reveal translators grappling with the comparative paucity of England's vernacular creative tradition while at the same time seeking ingenious ways to position the English language as a viable participant in wider cultural and literary-aesthetic debates. The book also shows how printers manipulated paratext, such as prefaces, typefaces, and mis-en-page, in order to accentuate and negotiate these very senses of the foreign. Along the way, Coldiron explores the specific relationship among diverse languages, especially English vis-à-vis French and Latin; prominent genres, literary modes, and poetic forms common in those and other vernaculars; and material textual features present in the printed books (and broadsheets) that contain translated works. By bringing together insights from the overlapping subfields of the history of the book and translation and philological studies, Coldiron convincingly examines the position of vernacular texts within their own received traditions and places both texts and traditions in dialogue around evolving questions of identity and foreignness. The book argues that ‘fundamental phenomena, processes, and patterns of literary change’ (p. 284) and a more ‘accurate picture of what was actually being written, produced, and read’ (p. 283) emerge most clearly when scholars approach the overlapping subjects of early modern translation and the book trade in this fashion.