British Isles (c. 1501-1800)
More general subjects:
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.
East Central Europe and Ireland
Political, Economic, and Social Interconnections, 1000–1850
This book explores the broad scope of political economic and social aspects of relations between Central Europe (focused on Poland and the lands of the Czechs) and Ireland. Taking a longitudinal approach this study charts the interaction between the western and the central-eastern peripheries of Europe from the Middle Ages to the period after the Third Partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1795. The authors examine how the relationship between the geographically opposite ends of Europe evolved. Shaped by the shifts of ‘political tectonic plates’ they argue that the evolution can be described in general terms: from a largely unidirectional to an interconnected chain of events. This book demonstrates similarities and analyses differences in a complex yet unexplored past of the three emergent nations; nations which in the public perception were overshadowed by their mighty neighbours for far too long.
Scotland’s Royal Women and European Literary Culture, 1424–1587
Scotland’s Royal Women and European Literary Culture 1424–1587 seeks to fill a significant gap in the rich and ever-growing body of scholarly work on royal and aristocratic women’s literary culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There has to date been no book-length study of the literary activities of the female members of any one family across time and little study of Scotland’s royal women in comparison to their European and English counterparts. This book adopts the missing diachronic perspective and examines the wives and daughters of Scotland’s Stewart dynasty and their many and various associations with contemporary Scottish English and European literary culture over a period of just over 150 years. It also adopts a timely cross-border and cross-period perspective by taking a trans-national approach to the study of literary history and examining a range of texts and individuals from across the traditional medieval/early modern divide. In exploring the inter-related lives and letters of the women who married into the Scottish royal family from England and Europe — and those daughters who married outwith Scotland into Europe’s royal families — the resultant study consistently looks beyond Scotland’s land and sea borders. In so doing it moves Scottish literary culture from the periphery to the centre of Europe and demonstrates the constitutive role that Scotland’s royal women played in an essentially shared literary and artistic culture.
From the Domesday Book to Shakespeare’s Globe
The Legal and Political Heritage of Elizabethan Drama
The phrase ‘Jus Uncommon’ summarizes England’s claim to independence from Europe a claim supported by its unique legal system and Elizabethan theatre and their strong interconnexion. Elizabethan tragedy begins at the Inns of Court. It was no mere coincidence but a result of the long history of intersecting processes of law politics and theatre. This book sets out to contextualize and explore such legal and literary intersections charting the emergence of Elizabethan legal culture from its various English and European sources over the course of the four hundred years running from Magna Carta to Shakespeare. It encompasses the major strands of legal history and culture that formed the background to Elizabethan political drama republican tradition theories of monarchical sovereignty European and English theories of imperium pedagogical and rhetorical practices of the Inns of Courtlegal-antiquarian research parliamentary privilege and Tudor political pamphleteering.
Legal texts discourses and social practices constructed a pervasive intellectual culture from which Elizabethan drama – like Shakespeare’s – emerged. Shakespeare is not the central object of this study but he is central to its argument. What he knew about law was what collective memory had stored from centuries past at home and abroad. The issues characters themes theories and metaphors dramatized by the Elizabethan playwrights followed the way opened at the Inns. Emblematic figures of lawyers-writers and their Senecan patterns paved the way to Gorboduc and to Shakespeare’s histories.
Spinoza en Angleterre
Sciences et réflexions sur les sciences
Le volume s’interroge sur la place de Spinoza dans les milieux intellectuels philosophiques et scientifiques de l’Angleterre et de l’Europe du xvii e siècle et il analyse les contextes scientifiques privilégiés qui ont fourni à Spinoza plusieurs motifs de réflexion et qui ont compté ensuite parmi ses principaux lieux de réception. Le rapport entre Spinoza et le débat philosophique en Angleterre a retenu l’attention des historiens depuis longtemps. Il s’agit d’un terrain historiographique complexe où questions de sources réception des idées et enjeux polémiques se mêlent souvent. La première partie du volume a une approche plus thématique : on se focalise sur un thème de la philosophie de Spinoza pour y voir comme dans un prisme le reflet des débats croisés entre Pays-Bas et Angleterre. La deuxième partie du volume est consacrée principalement à Spinoza et à la considération du rapport avec la physique hobbesienne. La troisième partie du volume porte sur les polémiques autour des œuvres de Spinoza qui furent lues durant le dix-huitième siècle en Angleterre et sur le continent les spéculations philosophiques d’un cartésien athée et les œuvres d’un impie. Le parcours intellectuel du livre qui rassemble les contributions de A. Di Nardo R. Evangelista G. Giglioni E. Guillemeau M. Laerke F. Mignini A. Sangiacomo C. Santinelli M. Sanna C. Secretan L. Simonutti T. Verbeek s’achève par la postface de Pierre-François Moreau.
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.