Warren Boutcher

Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais

What does the study of Tudor and early Stuart humanism amount to for the period between the pre-Marian heyday of High Renaissance Latinity and the emergence with Marvell and Milton of a respectable neoclassical tradition in the vernacular, by which time ‘humanism’ has transmuted into something else?2 The figure who instituted modern Anglo-American study of Italian Renaissance humanism, Paul Oskar Kristeller, built its foundations from a sure mix of abundant primary materials and solid historiographical data on long-term social change amongst the elite. His was nevertheless a corrective emphasis. His distinctive contribution was to show that the activity of Italian humanists was neither limited to classical scholarship nor equivalent to a general transformation of the spirit of the age. It consisted also of an educational ideal centred on the learning of classical Latin. A new programme of studies (the studia humanitatis) slowly took root in institutions and curricula and eventually yielded the modern humanities. The programme was directed to the future secretaries, chancellors and teachers who would fulfil the roles in fifteenth-century society and culture that the medieval dictatores had fulfilled in their time. There were corresponding changes in literary production. Kristeller identified in the archives a rich vein of manuscript texts consisting, generically, of letters, orations and poems.

Translation and the English Book Trade c.1640–1660: The Cases of Humphrey Moseley and William London

Warren Boutcher approaches the questions of translation and cultural exchange in the 1640s and 1650s from the perspective of booksellers’ catalogues. Concentrating on the contrasting cases of Humphrey Moseley and William London, he examines the discourse on translation and print dissemination articulated through their catalogues, and identifies their respective strategies in advertising their lists of ‘vendible’ translations. By doing so, he highlights the place and status of translated material in the English book trade, as well as the agency of booksellers in circulating ‘foreign’ books among early modern print networks and shaping English literary tastes and readerships.

From Cultural Translation to Cultures of Translation

With the publication in 1975 of George Steiner’s seminal After Babel, ‘cultural translation’ became the key concept in translation studies. Steiner took the problem of translation out of the hands of the hardcore semioticians and transformational grammarians, and gave it to all students of the humanities and social sciences, even if it is debatable to what extent they have accepted the gift. He did this by defining culture itself as the transfer of meaning across time and space. At the time, the model of human cognition, communication and culture was essentially ‘linguistic-semantic’ and text-based. Cognition was a matter of decoding meanings from signs; communication was a matter of writing signs into texts; cultures were literary texts to be read. Steiner was therefore able to claim that the fundamental process at work in any act of translation, as in any act of human communication, was ‘the hermeneutic motion … the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning’.1

Polybius Speaks British: A Case Study in Mid-Tudor Humanism and Historiography

The conference in which this volume had its origin sought to show ‘how translations of the period did not simply reproduce the meaning of their sources but recreated their sense in response to the specific historical contexts in which they were produced’. Christopher Watson’s translation of Polybius (1568) makes for a good case study, because it reveals more than is normal about its production.2 Watson’s work has featured in general studies of Tudor uses of the Roman past and of the Polybian theory of the mixed constitution.3 But, valuable as they are, such treatments are typical of the uses of translations in the historiography of ideas. They do not engage in much depth with the sources and contexts of Watson’s enterprise.

Collecting Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Late Renaissance: Naudé and the Last Duke of Urbino's Library

Abstract The library of the Duchy of Urbino is normally identified with the famous manuscript collection of Federico di Montefeltro, held at the Vatican. But when the duchy devolved to the papacy in 1631, the ducal library had been managed and expanded for sixty years by the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II della Rovere, and consisted of both manuscripts and printed books. This article places Francesco Marias late Renaissance library, and its use of manuscripts, in the context of changes in the culture of book collection between 1550 and 1650. These changes are discussed with reference to Gabriel Naudés Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque (1627). Naudé both describes and encourages a shift from the luxury market in antique manuscripts and rare incunables to the market in up-to-date information, as found in printed books, scribal copies, and manuscript texts by contemporary authors that were not in print.