Early modern culture was multilingual, and so were many of the works produced across Europe and beyond its borders. The contributors to this volume draw new interrelations between different humanistic traditions and multilingual and translational writing practices using a wide range of primary sources—documents produced in Norwich, scientific treatises by Galileo and Stevin, travel accounts and dictionaries by James Howell, translations an retranslations of Antoine de Nervèze’s moral letters, Aljamiado documents and short comic plays in Spain, Jesuit pedagogical theater in New France, grammars, dictionaries and historiographical accounts in missionary contexts, and a mining law code in South Central Europe—that highlight the significance of polyglossia in early modern cultural production and transmission. Covering a wide range of languages, including Latin, Nahuatl and Turkish, their analysis invites comparison with today’s polyglot practices in a globalized world, as we also adapt to new technologies and ever-changing realities.
Adrian Izquierdo is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. Previously, he was a professor at Hunter College, the City University of New York (CUNY), and Baruch College (CUNY), where he also directed the Multilingual Translation Minor program. He has held research fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York, the Folger Institute in Washington, D.C., the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS), and the Université d’Orléans. He is the author of the books Pierre Matthieu en España: Biografía, política y traducción en el Siglo de Oro (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2019) and La reñida canonización de Góngora: primeras «vidas» y primeras ediciones de sus obras (Paris, e-Spania Books, 2023).
List of Figures and Tables Abbreviations Notes on Contributors
Early Modern Polyglotism and Translation: an Overview
Part 1: Latin and the Vernaculars
1 Norwich, an English Quadrilingual City in the Early Modern Period Christopher Joby
2 James Howell, a Polyglot among the Erudite; or, Languages Like Laws, Coins, and Rivers Adrián Izquierdo
3 Galileo Galilei and Simon Stevin: Publishing in Vernacular or in Latin? Filip A.A. Buyse
Part 2: Spanish and Its Many Others
4 Polyglotism in Francisca de Passier’s Translation: Trilingual Paratexts and Bilingual Parallel Texts Noelia Pousada-Lobeira
5 Emotional Sounds: Arabic Words in Castilian Aljamiado Texts Álvaro Garrote Pascual
6 Dance as Discourse: Imperialism and Linguistic Diversity in the Spanish Interlude Las lenguas (The Languages) Erin A. Cowling and Tania De Miguel Magro
Part 3: Europe, the Fringes and the Wide World
7 Early Modern Global Translatability: the Missions Connected to the Portuguese Empire and World History Periodization Angelo Cattaneo
8 Representing Interpreters in Theater and History in Seventeenth-Century New France Weiao Xing
9 Polyglot Mediations and Sites of Untranslatability in Juan de Tovar’s Manuscript (c.1586) Miguel Ibáñez Aristondo
10 Slavic Words in Arabographic Discourse. A Late Medieval Serbian Law and Its Early Modern Ottoman Users Marijana Mišević
The book will appeal to scholars and students of the early modern and later periods, to historians of science and of religion as well as to anyone interested in multilingual practices, translation studies, early modern Ottoman studies, and early modern European expansion.