Laetitia Sansonetti, Rémi Vuillemin, eds. Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer
Sansonetti, Laetitia. Vuillemin, Rémi, eds. Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022, 297 pages, ISBN: 978-2-503-59814-7.
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1Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England : Translation, Transmission, Transfer is a collection of essays dedicated to considering how translation and adopting words and phrases from other languages contributed to the expansion of communities of specialist knowledge in England. Covering a vast array of early modern printed texts, this book is an exploration of the ways in which language impacts numerous communities that centre their identity around texts, including social, scientific, philosophical, religious, artisanal, and literary networks. The book covers an impressively wide range of research, with multidisciplinary contributors coming from the fields of literature, language, linguistics, history, and more. Whilst this ensures that the book is rich and diverse in perspective, there is no detraction from the connectedness of these essays. All contributors share an early modern and translation specialism, meaning the essays complement each other, and offer a common thread. As Sansonetti and Vuillemin highlight in their introduction, and as is clear from the book’s title, there is a focus on community. This concept of translation contributing to community and identity in a myriad of ways is a fascinating idea that permeates throughout the book.
2This is an aesthetically pleasing book interspersed with twenty-two illustrations in total. These include informative additions such as tables and graphs as well as enriching images of relevant manuscripts and original documents. The essays are helpfully divided into groups of three (or two, in the case of the last) thematic sections. These are “Roots, Germanic, and Latinate: English as a Hybrid Language”, “Language and Universality: The Transmission of Religious Dogma and Philosophical Concepts”, “Transnational Poetic Communities: Appropriating Continental Models”, and “The Language of Artistic Transfer”.
3The first essay in “Roots, Germanic, and Latinate” is Philip Durkin’s “An Expanding or a Fragmenting Lexicon?”. Within it, Durkin discusses the benefits for scholars to carry out in-depth studies on lexical borrowing. Durkin demonstrates the capabilities of online databases and argues the case that large scale surveys of lexical history can interact productively with detailed analysis of particular word histories. This is a fitting and informative opening to the book, where in essays that follow authors carry out these types of analysis to varying degrees. In the second essay of the collection, “A little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure” Jean-David Eynard innovatively draws attention to the early modern European interest in the language used by criminals, demonstrated by the increasing printed publications of books focused on criminals and their jargon. He then uses Thomas Dekker’s work as an example of an author who used monetary imagery to describe the production of cant. Iolanda Plescia’s “Strange Roots in Roman Shakespeare” takes the play Sir Thomas More as its focus and the essay takes its title from a line within the play. Plescia acknowledges the play to be a collaboration but emphasises Shakespeare’s key contribution, as a three-page hand-written revision in the manuscript is now largely considered to be in his hand. Throughout the chapter Plescia analyses the phrase “strange roots”, considering it as a culinary metaphor that also speaks to the concerns native Londoners had to those from other cultures coming in. This section is a fascinating opening to the book, highlighting the importance of remembering the multicultural sources of words to truly appreciate the complexity of the English language and to acknowledge the range of influences on it.
4The second section of the book, “Language and Universality”, continues to consider the hybridity of English that the first section emphasised, while also being focused on “the transmission of religious dogma and philosophical concepts”. Susan Baddeley’s essay “Writing Catholic, Translating Protestant” opens this section and considers the question of how translators in protestant England dealt with theological references in the Catholic works they were translating. She emphasises their dilemmas as they attempted to avoid offending a protestant English readership. While pointing out examples where translators omitted words, phrases, and sections to avoid offence, Baddeley interestingly moves on to discuss “chameleon words” and highlights that there were many words which did not in fact need removing due to their malleability of meaning depending on their doctrinal context. Baddeley thus argues that translation can demonstrate that doctrinal divergences were not as marked as it is sometimes assumed. Baddeley’s conclusion reminds us that close textual comparison when analysing translations is essential, as it is the minute changes made to texts that can reveal a lot about differences of opinion between cultures. Next, Élodie Cassan’s “Bacon’s English and Latin expositions of the doctrine of idols” takes Bacon’s concept of the idol as a case study. Cassan examines Bacon’s philosophical ideas, emphasising the importance of considering him as a polyglot writer as opposed to a philosopher self-consciously foregoing tradition when choosing to express his ideas in the vernacular as opposed to Latin. Finally for this section, Fabien Simon’s “A Universe over the Channel” examines John Wilkins, and his ambitious scheme to build a new universal language suitable for philosophical (that is, scientific) discussion, with the aim that scientific correspondence could flow fluently across countries and cultures. Whether concerned with philosophical or religious perception of them, each of these chapters highlights the importance placed on creating particular identities through carefully crafted literary transfers.
5A joint chapter by Enrica Zanin and Rémi Vuillemin entitled “Petrarchism as the European Language of Poetry” opens the third section, “Transnational Poetic Communities”. In this chapter, Zanin and Vuillemin argue that Petrarchism should be recognised to have shaped numerous European vernaculars, not only English, and to have contributed to the development of commonality between them. By collecting an impressive 60 imitations from across Europe of Petrarch’s sonnet 248 from Canzoniere, Zanin and Vuillemin consider the impact of Petrarch’s poetry in Europe using an impressive trans-linguistic corpus. The next chapter in this section is by Pádraic Lamb, entitled “Traducing Ronsard”. In it, he argues that Ronsard was a poet English verse writers wished to imitate as an authority to compare themselves to, somewhere between Pindar and Petrarch. The last chapter in this section is Agnès Lafont’s ‘Echo’s ‘Repercussive Voix’”. An interesting argument Lafont makes is about the term “echo” itself, being used in the many English poems that imitated Ovid’s echo as a “self-referential rhetoric device”. This chapter shows how crucial imitation of both continental European and Ancient literary models was for poets in England concerned with constructing literary identity.
6The final section, “The Languages of Artistic Transfer”, starts with Chantal Schütz, “Their Ditties Englished”. Here, Schütz examines a collection of French Court Aires published by Edward Filmer, and dedicated to Lady Henrietta Maria in 1629. Schütz argues that rather than these being intended to be set to music as they were in France, they represent an example at attempting to naturalise new poetic forms from France. This chapter is followed by Anne-Valérie Dulac’s “Miniatures in Translation”, which considers changes in the term “miniature”, and its French influence, comparing the word to the more typically English “limning” through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ending the collection with this chapter gives it a sense of circularity, as Dulac’s study demonstrates just how much can be discovered when closely examining the translatory uses of just a single word, but also considers the lexical borrowing in detail, exemplifying Durkin’s claim that this type of research produces fruitful results.
7Whilst covering a huge range of exemplifications of the concept of language commonality in literary communities, the editors and contributors have done an excellent job of drawing out the connections between their focuses, bringing their varied examples back to discussing how translation, transmission and transfer impacted on the circulation of the specific material examined in each individual chapter.
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Amelia Mills, « Laetitia Sansonetti, Rémi Vuillemin, eds. Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer », XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 81 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 14 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/13868 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130qs
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