Translators and Their Prologues in Medieval England by Elizabeth Dearnley (review)

Elizabeth Dearnley's monograph approaches medieval translation studies by concentrating on a surprisingly overlooked area: the translator's prologue. Translators' prologues grow out of the accessus tradition, Dearnley argues, but they have their own set of concerns: the speaker asserts his identity as a translator; discusses the origins of and her access to her sources, his reasons for producing the work, and her intended audience and its linguistic proficiency; and offers a statement, positive or negative, about his or her own linguistic skills. Dearnley suggests that examination of the terms by which translators discuss translation practice can shed light on medieval translation theory in the absence of existing medieval ars poeticae on translation. Dearnley is specifically interested in what translators' prologues can tell us about the emergence and development of literary culture. English prologues, Dearnley suggests, are faced with the unique task of establishing English as a literary language against the auctoritas of Latin and the cultural prestige of French, the latter occupying a particularly vexed position in the post-Conquest English literary imaginary. As a result, Dearnley writes, "[t]o study Middle English translation, through the lens of the prologues, is therefore to ponder the growth of the English language in the Middle Ages as a literary and learned medium" (p. 4). In this way, Dearnley joins the tide of scholars—such as Ardis Butterfield, Christopher Cannon, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Ad Putter, Claire Waters, and Joanna Bellis—who are complicating narratives of medieval England's multilingualism.

Dearnley focuses on twenty-six English prologues to translations from French into English, from Layamon's Brut (1189–ca. 1250) to Richard Roos's La Belle Dame Sans Mercy (ca. 1450). Dearnley selects a wide range of genres—romances, devotional works, ballade cycles, the medical writings ascribed to Trotula—that nevertheless have remarkably similar translators' prologues. This phenomenon supports her claim that translators' prologues are their own subgenre, revealing a developing technical vocabulary for conceptualizing translation among Francophone English translators.

English translators faced a peculiar challenge as they operated in a Germanic language with a Romance lexicon, much of it imported through conquest. Dearnley therefore situates her corpus within the larger history of other translators' prologues facing related challenges, namely, Latin to German, Latin to Anglo-Saxon, and Latin to Continental French. In this contextualization resides the book's biggest strength, as Dearnley uncovers a consistency in strategies used by translators to position their work both linguistically and socioculturally, which illuminates the maneuverings found in English prologues. In her first two chapters, Dearnley compares post-Conquest prologues discussing translation into Anglo-Norman with Continental prologues discussing translation into French. She observes that Anglo-Norman prologues situate themselves in a longue durée of insular translation activity going back to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin traditions; meanwhile, Continental French prologues demonstrate instead a sense of brand-new undertaking. This comparison suggests to Dearnley that post-Conquest translation into Middle English emerged with a sense that it was part of a rich literary history, as observable, for example, in John Trevisa's situating his translation of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon in a tradition running from Jerome through Alfred to his present day.

Dearnley's third chapter plumbs her corpus of French to English translators' prologues. The Cursor Mundi (ca. 1300) is the first to use the term "translaten" and asserts the importance of using English as the common language of "Ingland þe nacion," while French is "for frankis man" (the French man); other contemporary prologues are similarly assertive. Later prologues from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, note their choice of using English with little to no explication or justification, suggesting that the decision no longer produces literary anxiety. Dearnley includes here a reading of Chaucer's Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the playful negotiations of which speak, she argues, to a confidence concerning English as a literary language. Chaucer's "prologue," however, does...