Full Description
Building on the historical study of cultural translation, this volume brings together a range of case studies and fresh approaches to early modern intellectual history by scholars from across Europe reflecting on ideological and political change from c. 1600 to 1840.
Translations played a crucial role in the transmission of political ideas across linguistic and cultural borders in early modern Europe. Yet intellectual historians have been slow to adopt the study of translations as an analytical tool for the understanding of such cultural transfers. Recently, a number of different approaches to transnational intellectual history have emerged, allowing historians of early modern Europe to draw on work not just in translation studies, literary studies, conceptual history, the history of political thought and the history of scholarship, but also in the history of print and its significance for cultural transfer. Thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of texts in translation can place them more accurately in time and space. This book provides a better understanding of the extent to which ideas crossed linguistic and cultural divides, and how they were re-shaped in the process.
Written in an accessible style, this volume is aimed at scholars in cognate disciplines as well as at postgraduate students.
Contents
1. Introduction: Ideas across Borders Part 1: Religious and Scholarly Translation 2. From the Islamic world to Rome and Florence: translations and prints across early modern Europe 3. David Friedrich Megerlin (1698-1778) and his German Qur'an Part 2: Translation Networks and the Dissemination of Texts 4. The tasks of the translators: social networks and the publication of continental European writings during the English Revolution, 1641-1660 5. Pierre Des Maizeaux and the (Huguenot) business of translation in the early eighteenth century Part 3: Delayed Translation 6. Translation before translation: The dissemination of Harrington's republican ideas in French in the eighteenth century 7. Translations of James Harrington's political works during the French Revolution: Genre, materiality, and intention 8. Ancient wisdom for troubled times: Late eighteenth-century Dutch translations of the classics 9. Non-contemporaneous contemporaries: translating the (long) Enlightenment in Reform Era Hungary (1830s-1840s) Part 4: Translation as Cultural Mediation 10. Anglo-Italian cultural relations 'through the lens of translation': The first Italian editions of William Robertson's History of Scotland 11. Algernon Sidney in German: The reviewer as an agent of cultural translation Part 5: Maps and Images in Translation 12. A Printer's View of Hugo Grotius' Mare liberum (1633), 13. Transforming the Carte de Tendre into A Voyage to the Isle of Love: The cultural transmission of a map of courtship from Madeleine de Scudéry's French salons to Aphra Behn's English readers Part 6: Failed Translation 14. The manifold strategies of seventeenth-century translators: the case of Du Verdus as translator of Thomas Hobbes 15. Untranslatable, unsellable, unreadable?: Obstacles, delays and failures in cultural translation in print, 1640-1800
