Medieval Translations and their Readers is a product of the eleventh Cardiff Conference (in 2017, hosted in Vienna) on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, bringing together a variety of perspectives on the question of translation to vernacular languages in the late medieval world. Both because of the nature of the subject it studies and its nature as an edited collection of conference essays, the cohesion of the volume is more peculiar, but its results are solid and commendable. The sixteen essays span an impressive range of geographies and languages, present findings on a variety of genres of translated literature, and collectively present a view of the late medieval world that was richly multilingual. It seems quite likely that most scholars working in their particular region will find an essay or two that are stimulating, and that, for specialists in the field of translation, this collected volume will prove a useful update on projects in the field.
This collection is divided into three subsets. Although these are not entirely cohesive, they are all close enough to be in rough conversation with one another. The first section, “Authors and Readers,” presents seven essays that span a reasonably wide swath of the medieval world. Translations into Old Czech, Gothic languages, Swedish, French, Dutch, and Icelandic are all given careful examination by their authors. Of consistent emphasis in each of the chapters are the choices of the translators working in the various languages, with attention paid to both the need for vernacular neologisms and the ways in which translations presented opportunities for their authors to effectively rework the original texts into new and interesting forms. Prologues, appendices, glosses, and prefaces all play a key role in these translations as mechanisms to shape understanding. For example, in the Swedish translations of the Torah/Pentateuch, Jonatan Petersson examines both the translation project itself and the insertion of material from late medieval summae that the translators inserted as an interpretive aid. In Jaroslav Svátek’s chapter, a similar phenomenon shaped the presentation of pilgrimage accounts in early printed books: the softening of ethnic and sectarian differences in the Holy Land echoes the need (of the translators of the texts) to skirt thorny contemporary divisions between divergent Christian groups in late medieval Bohemia. The overall impact of this section, then, demonstrates the need for scholars to pay careful attention to how and by whom texts were translated, as we are regularly reminded that translation is an act of conscious re-composition across linguistic borders.
The second subset of essays in the volume is titled “Dissemination of Knowledge,” and the four essays of this section present findings that examine the ways that translators engaged the idea of readership and how readers themselves approached and shaped the work of translation in turn. Studies about Middle English lay devotional texts, Hus’s devotional treatises for women (which were themselves translations from Wycliffe) and code-switching in Hus’s work, and translations into German of Dominican theological devotional tracts make up a rather intriguing foursome of early fifteenth-century projects under study. As a group, they make clear that late medieval translators did not work on one-way streets, but instead, the texts were shaped by and for the use of late medieval readers. While the chapter are a small sample set, the focus on women who read these texts also demonstrates that literacy and access to texts was not as restricted to gender categories as prevailing patriarchal political and social norms might make it seem.
The last five essays in Medieval Translations and their Readers, in the section titled “Religious Education in Transition,” bring the frequently discussed religious context of texts (which was an occasional but not necessarily central sub-topic in each of the essays in the first two sections) to the fore. As the early printed book replaced manuscripts, the speed of textual dissemination, the essays argue, fostered conditions that were “robbing [languages, texts, authors, and readers] step by step of their ‘handwritten’ complexity” (15). Studies of translations into Croatian of moral treatises by Bernard of Clairvaux, contemplative works by the fourteenth century English philosopher Richard Rolle, the work of Honorius of Autun into both Old French and Middle English, translations into Middle English of texts for the nuns of Syon Abbey, and a Middle English translation of a compendium of maxims and proverbs from an Arabic/Latin corpus by an English Earl make clear that the growing complexity of religious sentiment in the later middle ages prompted an equally complex array of translated texts.
The great (but perhaps unexpected) advantage of this collection is that, true to form, Brepols and the editors provided ample freedom to the authors to present their conclusions in the best ways possible. Some chapters have tables oriented in landscape; others have graphs; many have multi-column translations; photographs of manuscript elements are included; sometimes these elements intrude into the otherwise carefully ruled margins. In some collections, this might seem distracting and otiose, but in a volume about translations—where glosses and annotations and doodles would have penetrated into the margins and used the space creatively—this freer-than-usual approach provides a different reading experience that seems to stimulate the imagined pages of the texts that the scholars in the volume investigated. As a scholar of the medieval Iberian Church, I found some of the linguistic elements of the volume unapproachable—I read neither Old nor modern Czech—but the rupture of the page in innovative ways helped me situate my reading into a parallel framing, allowing me to approach the conclusions of the chapters in a way that helped restore what meaning was lost in translation. The work of corralling authors in an edited volume is never easy, but I suspect that Pavlína Rychterová and Jan Odstrčilík had a considerably high amount of formatting work laid on their desks, and it is to their credit (along with their collaborators at Brepols) that the volume’s sometimes-disruptive presentation was present often enough to be meaningful but not so often as to be unhelpful to readers.
Scholars studying medieval translations in a more mediterranean context will not find much material for their use in Medieval Translations and their Readers, but sixteen essays is still a considerable contribution. Pavlína Rychterová and Jan Odstrčilík deserve congratulations for their work in collecting the volume, and the authors—Alessandro Zironi, Maria Teresa Ramandi, Jonatan Pettersson, Andrea Svobodová, Kateřina Voleková, Marco Robecchi, Jaroslav Svátek, Katrin Janz-Wenig, Elisabeth Salter, Jörg Sonntag, Andrea Radošević, Tamás Karáth, Takami Matsuda, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, and Omar Khalaf—deserve the thanks of interested readers. I suspect that, for scholars working closer to the fields of each of the studies, the returns are likely to be greater than they were for me, but a good conference volume is often just that way. This volume has made a useful contribution to the scholarly conversation about translations in the medieval world, and that alone makes it worthy of inclusion in university library collections. For scholars working on the subject, personal libraries should find this collection a spot on their shelves, too.