A Companion to Medieval Translation ed. by Jeanette Beer (review)

This volume is one of the Arc Humanities Press's new 'Arc Companions' series, which presents commissioned overviews of topics by experts in their field, evidently aimed at a student market. It brings together informative contributions on medieval translation by established scholars, covering major projects of medieval translation—the Bible and religious texts, scientific texts, the Matter of Britain (from one European vernacular to another); the use of translation by prominent authors (Christine de Pizan, Dante, and Chaucer); translation in particular linguistic areas; theoretical approaches to the study of medieval translation; and reflections by translators (one medieval and one modern) on their work. This is very much the story of translation in the Latin West, giving most space to translation in England, France, and Italy. Scandinavia is represented in one chapter, and German and Polish translations of the Psalms are mentioned, but the wider absence of the German and Dutch speaking regions and the Iberian Peninsula is striking.

The publisher's website declares that one of their aims is to 'open students up to the idea that research is evolving, debatable, and contested and not always definitive' (<https://www.aup.nl/en/series/arc-companions>). Bearing that in mind, it would have been useful to have a quick overview of the research into medieval translation that has proliferated over the last thirty years. But while this work is amply referenced in the contributions to the Companion to Medieval Translation, the book does not engage directly with it, rather providing surveys and examples from the range of medieval translation activities (expressed as 'highlights', p. 4), with the apparent goal of enhancing the appreciation of medieval literary texts, and of 'the similarities and the differences between medieval and modern translation practitioners' (p. 11). Debate in the field is represented by the Henry Ansgar Kelly's chapter 'Bible Translation and Controversy in Late Medieval England', which argues against the commonly held scholarly position (represented in Ian Johnson's chapter, 'Middle English Religious Translation') that the translation of the whole Bible made in the fourteenth century was a Wycliffite project.

The introduction begins with some observations about the important role of translation in the medieval world in transmitting knowledge and legitimizing power. It follows this with a quite detailed consideration of the earliest fragments of translation into a Romance vernacular, framed within the differentiation of the Romance vernaculars from Latin. This framing reminds us of how much the question of translation is bound up with translating from Latin but obscures the complex patterns of translation in multilingual Europe, particularly where non-Romance vernaculars are concerned. These complexities are indeed reflected in some of the chapters, and to a certain extent acknowledged in the Historical Note at the end of the introduction, with a reference to 'medieval contexts of bilingualism and trilingualism' (p. 10).

As touched on in the introduction, the word 'translation' encompasses a variety of textual practices, from close rendering of a text into a new language, to composition using material from texts in other languages, with or without acknowledgement (a practice which medieval authors also used with vernacular texts, although none of the contributors mentions this). The chapters approach this variety from different angles. Those dealing with French and English bible translation are mostly dealing with techniques of close translation, although the chapter on psalm translation points to glossing as the earliest vernacular translation practice for biblical texts. The chapters on Christine de Pizan, Dante, and Chaucer all show authors using a variety of types of translation, sometimes themselves distinguishing, as Chaucer does, between translation per se and composition of a new work using another text as a base. Cultural adaptation is a theme in the chapters dealing with the translation of Marie de France's lais into Old Norse and with the production of liturgical dramas in French.

It would have been useful if the introduction had offered some explicit guidance on the book's rationale and...