Wednesday 15th March 17:00—18:30, Session 2

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Overview of programme

Session:	Authors and Readers 1
Place:	Seminarraum 2
Moderator:	Denis Renevey
Paper 1:	The Aeneid of the North: William Caxton’s Eneydos and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados Alessandra Petrina
Paper 2:	Rendering Readers’ Soulscapes: Variant Translation of Interiority in Late Medieval English and Scottish Literary Culture Ian Johnson
Paper 3:	Translated Sermons? Educating Laymen and Nuns in the Late Middle Ages in German-Speaking and Dutch Landscapes. Katrin Janz-Wenig

The Aeneid of the North: William Caxton’s Eneydos and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados

Alessandra Petrina

In this paper I will analyze two early translations or adaptations of Vergil’s Aeneid in the British Isles: William Caxton’s Eneydos, a very free version (via a French intermediary) published in 1490, and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, a translation of the Latin poem into the “Scottis” tongue, completed in 1513 and first published in London in 1553. The latter text, a far more faithful translation than Caxton’s by modern standards, presents, as well as the translation of the additional thirteenth book by Maphaeus Vegius, original prologues and marginal notes to the text, rubrics and articulate conclusive material; Caxton, on the other hand, adds a general Prologue to his work, a Prologue in which he sets out his translating and publishing policy, as is his custom in number of his works. The two writers thus use this liminal space to discuss the issue of translation and the attitude of the latemedieval/early modern scholar towards the classical text par excellence. Douglas, in fact, dedicates some lines to Caxton’s own work, which had preceded his: in his spirited attack against Caxton he also proposes his own theory of translation, a theory in which we find a harking towards the medieval practice of glossa. In his almost philological attention to the original and his preoccupation with a faithful reproduction, we can trace his consideration of translation as part of the activity of analysis and commentary of a classical authority. The models for his organization of the commentary might be both medieval (i.e., manuscripts such as Petrarch’s Virgilius Ambrosianus) and early modern, as in the case of editions of classical works: the most apt example being Jodocus Badius Ascensius’ edition of the Aeneid, printed in 1501.

These two versions thus stand on the threshold between manuscript and print, and might indicate new possibilities of use of the printing medium. In my analysis, they also offer a case study of the different directions translation may take at the closing of the Middle Ages.

Rendering Readers’ Soulscapes: Variant Translation of Interiority in Late Medieval English and Scottish Literary Culture

Ian Johnson

This paper addresses the issue of how in late medieval English and Scottish literary culture each choice of translation -- down to the smallest preposition, modulation of tone or shift of voice -- affects the configuration of reader interiorities, especially in contemplative, meditative or allegorical works that set out to engage the imaginations of their readers and to teach them not only how and what to imagine but also how to dispose themselves with regard to variable topographies of interiority. Whether a translator’s decision to treat the source materials in one way or another is consciously motivated or not, the tiniest details of such treatment entail experiential and ideological variation significant to the ongoing formation of any given reader or community of readers.

Translations that use commentaries on, and previous translations of, the same text present particularly useful opportunities for scrutinising productive variancy in linguistic quantities and features that may sometimes seem small but which may also have considerable semantic, ideological and affective reach and decisive import. A selection of examples from such translations, their commentaries and fellow-translations offers interpretative opportunities from which to extrapolate. For each example I will compare expositions of a passage made by a translator with expositions of the same passage made by commentators and fellow-translators. The focus will be on some important Middle English or Scottish renderings of Virgil’s Aeneid, Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae and the Bible. From these I hope to offer some conclusions about how important the business of translation could be to the imagining of late medieval readerly selves and of their communities of interpretation.

Translated Sermons? Educating Laymen and Nuns in the Late Middle Ages in German-Speaking and Dutch Landscapes.

Katrin Janz-Wenig

Based on one Latin sermon, which is included in a widely spread sermon collection, the paper will show, how the Latin text was translated and transformed into different vernacular sermons and treatises. Today we can look at five different vernacular versions, that are originated in a time span of 150 years. These vernacular texts – the oldest still in Middle High German language, the youngest in middle Dutch – were translated and compiled in different patterns depending on expected audience and readers. The paper will give a short overview of the mentioned patterns.