Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain
Writing Distant Travels and Linguistic Otherness in Early Modern England (c. 1550–1660)
As Britain’s global interests expanded from the mid-sixteenth century geographic mobility encouraged many forms of multilingual practices in English writings. Translations lexical borrowings and records of exchanges between travellers and far-off lands and peoples diversely registered communicated engaged and politicised encounters with alterity. Meanwhile earlier continental European translations also influenced and complicated the reception of distant otherness entailing questions of linguistic hybridity or pluralism.
This volume explores some of the practices and strategies underpinning polyglot encounters in travel accounts produced translated or read in England as well as in artistic and educational materials inflected by those travels. Drawing on linguistic lexicographic literary and historical methodologies the twelve chapters in this volume collectively look into the contexts and significances of textual contact zones. Particular attention is paid to uses of multilingualism in processes of identity construction defining and promoting national or imperial agendas appropriating and assimilating foreign linguistic capital or meeting resistance and limits from linguistic and cultural otherness refusing to lend itself to a subjected or go-between status. Treating of indigenous languages newly anglicized words and new artistic and instructional materials the volume makes the case for the vibrancy and influence of early modern English engagements with polyglossia and the need for multiple scales of approach to – and interdisciplinary perspectives on – the subject.
Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England
Translation, Transmission, Transfer
In the early modern period the humanist practice of translation of sacred as well as secular texts created new readerships in the vernacular for authoritative texts religious or classical. As the circulation of languages within Europe reshuffled hierarchies between classical languages and vernacular tongues transmission via translation was not only vertical but also horizontal and the contacts between European languages enabled the expansion of local lexicons from sources other than Latin or Greek.
This volume focuses on the role of translation and lexical borrowing in the expansion of specific English lexicons (erudite technical or artisanal) as evidenced in printed texts from the early modern period. It considers how language shapes identity in social religious philosophical artistic and literary contexts and is in turn shaped by claims of social religious philosophical artistic and literary identity.