Translation's Challenge to Critical Categories: Verses from French in the Early English Renaissance

From their birth, translations challenge major critical categories: language, nation, authorship, period. This essay describes and theorizes a large, unstudied corpus of category-challenging translations. Most poetry coming from the first English presses (1476-1557) was translated; of the vernaculars, most by far was translated from French. As translations do, the 100,000+ printed lines taken from French both foreground and suppress the foreign. They disrupt accepted accounts of English Petrarchism and literary nation-formation, revealing a post-colonial French-English biculturalism lingering centuries after 1066. These translations challenge fixed critical narratives about Renaissance poetry and linear "source-influence" methods, inviting a comparative historicist methodology.