The nine essays collected in this volume draw attention to the variety of cultural realms in sixteenth-century England where translation played a significant role. They offer glimpses at practices and conceptualizations of translation that had an impact in such fields as language learning, vernacular and Latin humanism, religious scholarship, historiography, women’s writings, reformation controversies, migrant communities, and the development of vernacular literature. As Fred Schurink states in his insightful introduction, these works contribute to the field of translation studies by moving beyond the dominant “focus on translation as an independent area of intellectual endeavour and [the] tendency to study the history of translation in the light of current practice” that have characterized the work done in this field (4).

The main value I see in this work is the serious engagement with specific translation practices that can be found in most of the contributions. Schurink’s essay explores the continuity of humanist practices across the Tudor period through a comparison of Gabriel Harvey’s marginal annotations of Livy’s third decade and Anthony Cope’s English translation of Livy, and the key to this comparison is Harvey’s own practice of reading Livy’s Latin text side-by-side with Cope’s English version. Andrew Taylor discusses the role translators could play in church-doctrine debates when they compared manuscript and printed editions of Greek texts, since, through this comparison, they could contest the authority of readings based on the printed editions. In his analysis of Christopher Watson’s translation of Polybius, Warren Boutcher also deals with multiple readings and versions. Focusing on the custom of translating passages of large works and, again, on translators’ movements between texts, Boutcher develops a nuanced analysis of Watson’s movements between and juxtaposition of Niccolὸ Perotti’s Latin version of Polybius and Edward Hall’s chronicle. Through the analysis of Watson’s topical movements, Boutcher sheds light on the more general conceptual operation of reading English and Ancient histories side by side.

Moving into the early years of the seventeenth century, Gordon Braden looks at Edward Fairfax’s strategies for rendering into English an Italian epic (Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata), and he considers the relations Fairfax’s version establishes not only with the Italian source, but also with a larger textual corpus (Tasso’s classical sources and the work of writers and translators contemporary to both Tasso and Fairfax). In the closing essay, Robert Cummings offers a brilliant study of a practice that characterized English translations of Du Bartas’s Semaines. Placing this practice in the history of English literature, Cumming defines it as a hunt for “detachable beauties,” based on fragmentary readings in search for local effects rather than for the unified meaning of the poem. I also want to note that, even when it does not offer an analysis of particular strategies, the first piece of the volume, by Joyce Boro, brings to the table a fascinating, and rather neglected, topic: the production of polyglot translations (combinations of different versions of a work, in different languages, on the same text). Boro highlights the popularity of polyglot translations of Spanish sentimental romances, and she places them in the context of humanist language pedagogy.

These specific practices, which involve fragmentary readings and multiple versions, were common in early-modern England and in the continent, but they tend to remain outside the scope of literary analysis. The attention paid to them gives Tudor Translation a solid base for historical contextualization and makes this book a useful resource for future historical study of translation practices. In addition, those interested in the better-studied field of translators’ theoretical reflections will find a meaningful contribution in Helen Moore’s essay. It proposes that the frequent use of the term “profitable” to qualify translators’ activity in Elizabethan times reveals a conception of the social function of humanist translation as a remedy for the body politic — a conception that bears ties to medieval medical uses of the term.

Coherently organized and carefully edited, Tudor Translation achieves its double purpose of contextualizing translation and offering new insights on the literary activity of the period. It should be of interest to advanced students and scholars in the fields of translation studies, translation history, and the history of English literature.