Translating Early Modern Science explores the roles of translation and the practices of translators in early modern Europe. In a period when multiple European vernaculars challenged the hegemony long held by Latin as the language of learning, translation assumed a heightened significance.
This volume illustrates how the act of translating texts and images was an essential component in the circulation and exchange of scientific knowledge. It also makes apparent that translation was hardly ever an end in itself; rather it was also a livelihood, a way of promoting the translator’s own ideas, and a means of establishing the connections that in turn constituted far-reaching scientific networks.
SIETSKE FRANSEN, Ph.D. (2014), the Warburg Institute, University of London, is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. She has published on language and translation in connection to early modern science and currently works on visual organization of knowledge.
NIALL HODSON is a cultural historian whose current research focuses on translation at the early modern Royal Society and the role of its Secretary, Henry Oldenburg, as a translator and intermediary in the Republic of Letters. He received his M.A. from the Warburg Institute, and has since undertaken research at Durham University and held fellowships at the Edward Worth Library and Utrecht University.
KARL A.E. ENENKEL is Professor of Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin at the University of Münster. Previously he was Professor of Neo-Latin at the University of Leiden. He has published widely on international Humanism, early modern culture, paratexts, literary genres 1300-1600, Neo-Latin emblems, word and image relationships, and the history of scholarship and science.
“this volume provides highly valuable insights into recurrent problems of terminological, conceptual, and material adequacy in the intercultural (trans)formation of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe.”
Stefanie Stockhorst, University of Potsdam. In: Isis, Vol. 110, No. 2 (June 2019), pp. 411-412.
“This collection of essays is of interest not only to those working on early modern translations into the vernacular but also to scholars of the history of philosophy, applied technologies, the history of the book, and that of readership. […] this is a volume that presents a wealth of new discoveries and offers fresh insights where the articles discuss better-known topics.” Evelien Chayes, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Vol. 72, No. 3 (Fall 2019), pp. 1046-1048.
AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsNotes on the EditorsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Translators and Translations of Early Modern ScienceSietske Fransen
Part 1: Translating Networks of Knowledge
1 Translation in the Circle of Robert HookeFelicity Henderson 2 Networks and Translation within the Republic of Letters: The Case of Theodore Haak (1605–1690)Jan van de Kamp 3 What Difference Does a Translation Make? The Traité des vernis (1723) in the Career of Charles DufayMichael Bycroft 4 ‘Ordinary Skill in Cutts’: Visual Translation in Early Modern Learned JournalsMeghan C. Doherty
Part 2: Translating Practical Knowledge
5 ‘As the author intended’: Transformations of the unpublished writings and drawings of Simon Stevin (1548–1620)Charles van den Heuvel 6 Bringing Euclid into the Mines: Classical Sources and Vernacular Knowledgein the Development of Subterranean GeometryThomas Morel 7 Image, Word and Translation in Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’s Quaestiones MechanicaeJoyce van Leeuwen 8 ‘Secrets of Industry’ for ‘Common Men’: Charles de Bovelles and Early French Readerships of Technical PrintRichard J. Oosterhoff
Part 3: Translating Philosophical Knowledge
9 Taming Epicurus: Gassendi, Charleton, and the Translation of Epicurus’ Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth CenturyRodolfo Garau 10 Ibrahim Müteferrika’s Copernican RhetoricB. Harun Küçük 11 ‘Now Brought before You in English Habit’: An Early Modern Translation of Galileo into EnglishIolanda Plescia 12 Language as ‘Universal Truchman’: Translating the Republic of Letters in the 17th CenturyFabien SimonIndex Nominum
All interested in the history of translation and communication, the Republic of Letters, the History of Science and Medicine, early modern European history, history of the book, Visual Culture, Literary history.