Medieval Translations and their Readers
Edited by Pavlina Rychterova Edited by Jan Odstrcilik
The volume presents proceedings from the XI Cardiff conference on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, 2017, March 15-18. It collects essays on various European vernacular languages, with focus on interactions of translators and their readers.
The papers gathered in this volume focus on ‘Medieval Translations and their Readership’, the special strand of the 11th Cardiff Conference on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. The volume discusses the role of the reader in the process of translation, communities of readers and their active participation in translators’ choices, and the translation as a result of a dialogue between author, text and its reader. Translations of works of theology and religious education, the focus of most of the contributions to this volume, constitute excellent material for research into medieval lay audiences. Vernacular religious educational texts from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century show a great deal of conformity. Individual authors resorted to similar strategies and techniques to meet any translation challenges, to fulfil educational aims, or to relate to their readers and to accommodate their expectations. Simultaneously, the readers played a crucial role as they shaped the production of texts in many ways. Research into Middle English pastoral and devotional literature and the conditions of its production still dominates scholarly work in the field. Religious texts in vernaculars other than Middle English have so far received little attention. This volume tries to tackle this lacuna by offering a careful comparative analysis of relevant vernacular texts across Europe, including Slavonic works, using historiographical, philological, and linguistic methods as well as literary scholarly approaches. The sixteen chapters are organized in three sections. The first one, ‘Authors and Readers’, brings together articles examining the idea of a model reader as expressed in translations of biblical texts and texts of religious instruction. The contributions in the second section, on the ‘Dissimination of Knowledge’, focus on how translators addressed readers, how people read, and how they used the manuscripts and printed books made for them. The target audience or model reader of the first section is here put into perspective with the help of discussions of reading practices. The last section, ‘Religious Education in Transition’, comprises contributions which focus on textual material from the period when printed books gradually changed, the relationship between languages, texts, authors, and readers.
- Edited by Pavlina Rychterova
- Edited by Jan Odstrcilik
Other Titles in this Series
Linguistic Fragmentation and Cultural Inclusion in the Middle Ages
Translation, Plurilingualism, Multilingualism
Volume 22
Pursuing a New Order I
Religious Education in Late Medieval Central and Eastern Central Europe
Volume 17.1
Booldly bot meekly
Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis
Volume 14
Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse
A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790
Volume 9
The Translation of the Works of St Birgitta of Sweden into the Medieval European Vernacular
Volume 7
Song of Songs in European Poetry (Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries)
Translations, Appropriations, Rewritings
Volume 21
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