Printers without Borders Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance

This innovative study shows how printing and translation transformed English literary culture in the Renaissance. Focusing on the century after Caxton brought the press to England in 1476, Coldiron illustrates the foundational place of foreign, especially French language, materials. The book reveals unexpected foreign connections between works as different as Caxton's first printed translations, several editions of Book of the Courtier, sixteenth-century multilingual poetry, and a royal Armada broadside. Demonstrating a new way of writing literary history beyond source-influence models, the author treats the patterns and processes of translation and printing as co-transformations. This provocative book will interest scholars and advanced students of book history, translation studies, comparative literature and Renaissance literature.

1. 'Englishing' texts: patterns of early modern translation and transmission; 2. Caxton, translation, and the Renaissance reprint culture; 3: 'Bastard Allone': radiant translation and the status of English letters; 4. Compressed transnationalism: John Wolfe's trilingual Courtier; 5. The world on one page: an octolingual Armada broadside; 6. Macaronic verse, plurilingual printing, and the uses of translation; Afterword; Appendix; Bibliography.

A. E. B. Coldiron is Professor of English and History of Text Technologies and affiliated faculty in French at Florida State University. She is the author of Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation (2000) and English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 (2009). She has also published numerous articles on translation, Renaissance literature, print culture and poetics. She serves on the board of directors of SHARP and on the editorial board of the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations.