This groundbreaking 2007 volume gathers an international team of historians to present the practice of translation as part of cultural history. Although translation is central to the transmission of ideas, the history of translation has generally been neglected by historians, who have left it to specialists in literature and language. This book seeks to achieve an understanding of the contribution of translation to the spread of information in early modern Europe. It focuses on non-fiction: the translation of books on religion, history, politics and especially on science, or 'natural philosophy', as it was generally known at this time. The chapters cover a wide range of languages, including Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish and Chinese. The book will appeal to scholars and students of the early modern and later periods, to historians of science and of religion, as well as to anyone interested in translation studies.

The fourteen essays in Early Modern Cultures of Translation present a convincing case for understanding early modernity as a "culture of translation."

This book explores modalities and cultural interventions of translation in the early modern period, focusing on the shared parameters of these two translation cultures. Translation emerges as a powerful tool for thinking about community and citizenship, literary tradition and the classical past, certitude and doubt, language and the imagination.

This book offers the first cultural history of translation in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868.

This collection underscores the role played by translated books in the early modern period. Individual essays aim to highlight the international nature of Renaissance culture and the way in which translators were fundamental agents in the formation of literary canons. This volume introduces readers to a pan-European story while considering various aspects of the book trade, from typesetting and bookselling to editing and censorship. The result is a multifaceted survey of transnational phenomena.

The relationship between travel and translation might seem obvious at first, but to study it in earnest is to discover that it is at once intriguing and elusive. Of course, travelers translate in order to make sense of their new surroundings; sometimes they must translate in order to put food on the table. The relationship between these two human compulsions, however, goes much deeper than this. What gets translated, it seems, is not merely the written or the spoken word, but the very identity of the traveler. These seventeen essays—which treat not only such well-known figures as Martin Luther, Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Milton, but also such lesser known figures as Konrad Grünemberg, Leo Africanus, and Garcilaso de la Vega—constitute the first survey of how this relationship manifests itself in the early modern period. As such, it should be of interest both to scholars who are studying theories of translation and to those who are studying “hodoeporics”, or travel and the literature of travel.

This volume provides the first transnational overview of the relationship between translation and the book trade in early modern Europe. Following an introduction to the theories and practices of translation in early modern Europe, and to the role played by translated books in driving and defining the trade in printed books, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of translated-book history - language learning, audience, printing, marketing, and censorship - across several national traditions. This study touches on a wide range of early modern figures who played myriad roles in the book world; many of them also performed these roles in different countries and languages. Topics treated include printers' sensitivity to audience demand; paratextual and typographical techniques for manipulating perception of translated texts; theories of readership that travelled across borders; and the complex interactions between foreign-language teachers, teaching manuals, immigration, diplomacy, and exile.