The collected chapters of this impressive volume address issues across what A. E. B. Coldiron calls “a range of practices related to printing and translation” (57), three centuries, and a number of languages (from Chinese and Hebrew through Latin and Western European vernaculars to Massachuset, an indigenous language from New England). The inclusion of printing as a thematic category is applicable to most of the volume; apart from the notion of translation — including “cultural translation” as well as what Margaret Ferguson notes that Jakobson called “translation proper” (122) — many of the articles include detailed analyses of the networks of printing and publication that produced, reproduced, and disseminated the works at hand. Numerous other threads connect the chapters, including epistemological concerns, language politics and early modern linguistic self-consciousness, and contemporary theoretical discussions of translation, resulting in a richly textured and wide-ranging volume that is still coherent and readable as a unified whole.

The volume includes twelve chapters, a substantial introduction, and a lyrical “Coda” by translator Edith Grossman. The introduction by Newman and Tylus creates a background of literary-theoretical approaches to translation and early modern articulations and examples of translation. The first chapter, by Peter Burke, approaches the movement of architectural knowledge and style through translation, travel, and the book trade, following Vitruvius’s treatise and several early modern works. Gordon Braden’s chapter focuses on Ovid’s exile poems and how they are translated and incorporated into early modern literature by figures such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Queen Elizabeth, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Petrarch, and Shakespeare. The visibility of translation and plurilingualism are the focus of Coldiron’s chapter, which explores how the intersection and juxtaposition of languages was used to create meaning. Another progress of knowledge from classical sources is outlined in Katharina Piechocki’s chapter on Ptolemaic errors in mapping Eastern Europe and their persistence in early modern sources. Ann Rosalind Jones explores gender in Robert Greene’s translation of Louise Labé’s Folie, examining both the gendered politics of the text and the gendered realities of writer and translator. At the center of the volume, Ferguson proposes a reading of The Taming of the Shrew that situates the text at the center of various networks of text, narrative, language, and translation. Jacques Lezra explores movement, motion, and pilgrimage in La Celestina and in Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramática de la lengua castellana before turning to Don Quixote and its own movement into England. Naomi Tadmor looks at the implications of Hebrew translation in early modern England, focusing particularly on shifts in terms having to do with government and rulership, while Sarah Rivett explores sacred translation as part of the language politics of New England, enmeshed in discussions of civilization and savagery as well as the theorization of indigenous Americans as the lost tribes of Israel. Carla Nappi’s chapter moves furthest from the Western European Renaissance, exploring the structures surrounding the production of multilingual glossaries in China, for the use of translators and interpreters involved in trade and diplomacy. The translation work of Katherine Philips is contextualized by Line Cottegnies in terms of contemporary discourses on translation itself, emphasizing Philips’s role as translator and poet. Finally, László Kontler’s chapter explores the contexts of translations of histories by the Scottish William Robertson into German, with a focus on how the texts fit into particular concepts of history, at levels from the governmental context to etymological difficulties. Grossman’s “Coda” wraps up with an exploration of translation and of her own work translating Don Quixote.

One slightly disappointing aspect of the work, from the perspective of translation studies, is the reliance on old standbys from the literary-theory end of the field of translation theory, and the omission of equally relevant or even more relevant texts and authors. Given the suggestion in the introduction that the contributions show that early modern translation can be “an ideal locus for considering . . . [translation’s] theoretical dimension” (2), the actual connection with theory seems a bit limited. That said, the essays are already quite dense, so perhaps it is work for another day to connect these ideas more explicitly with, for example, the work of translation theorists on gender, sociological approaches, postcolonial third spaces and negotiations of identity, or rewriting.