The general editors’ ambitions that “the MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations [series] will extend our understanding of the English Renaissance through its representations of the process of cultural transmission from the classical to the early modern world and the process of cultural exchange within the early modern world” (xi) are brilliantly realized in its ninth volume, English Renaissance Translation Theory. Edited by Neil Rhodes with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson, this carefully curated portfolio of fifty-six entries comprised of selections from William Caxton’s The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy (1473–74) to George Wither’s The Psalms of King David Translated into Lyric Verse (1632), provides an excellent survey of the poetics and politics of translation practices in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. While acknowledging at the outset that Renaissance translation “as a distinct category of composition … is at least open to debate” (1), Rhodes’s substantial introductory essay critically considers the title’s key terms — translation, Renaissance, theory, and English — in order to historicize the primary materials and engage with twenty-first-century conceptual concerns such as “transnationalism and cultural transposition” (4). In so doing, Rhodes points out that “there is no work that could be described as an English theoretical treatise on translation” (4). Nonetheless, the ensuing extracts show how English Renaissance writers respond to the period’s linguistic and social pressures by variously navigating the principles of translating word for word or sense for sense.

The volume’s tripartite structure, “Part One: Translating the Word of God,” “Part Two: Literary Translation,” and “Part Three: Translation in the Academy,” offers distinctive but integrated contexts. Given that the introduction reminds us that “it is difficult to think of a more dangerous literary activity, or one in which the stakes could be higher, than translating the Bible into English in the 1520s” (6), and that both men were “executed for their beliefs” (15), it is fitting that the book opens with excerpts from William Tyndale’s and Thomas More’s volatile exchanges about “the transparency or otherwise of Holy Scripture” (13). Corresponding tensions are apparent in the later dialogue between Gregory Martin — the translator of the first Catholic Bible into English — and the Protestant theologian William Fulke. The edition clearly shows how these foregoing sensibilities, together with those found in the works of Miles Coverdale, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Norton, Thomas James, and Francis Marbury, influence the production and afterlife of the King James Bible.

Passages from Wither’s psalter (1619, 1632) provide a skillful segue into the fulsome review of the broadly defined topic of literary translation. Kendal’s rendition of select passages from Laurence Humphrey’s Interpretatio Linguarum (The translation of languages [1559]) is one of the volume’s highlights. Humphrey aligns both religious and secular translation precepts and, according to Rhodes, he provides “the most comprehensive account of the theory and practice of translation to be written by an Englishman during the sixteenth century” (1). Primarily promoting a “straight-forward but learned, elegant but faithful” approach to translation (that is, “the ‘middle way’” [268]), Humphrey also offers a list of “English translators of recent times” (287) and draws on the expertise of contemporary thinkers, such as the advocate of the so-called double translation method, John Cheke, an important figure for part 3’s interest in pedagogy and for English translation theory in general.

Rhodes observes that “it was in the context of print publication that theorizing about the nature of translation tended to take place” (48), hence the volume relies on extracts from Elizabeth Tudor (as Princess Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth I), Mildred Cecil, and Margaret Tyler to exemplify women’s contributions to the field. By situating these authors’ writings alongside texts such as George Chapman’s hierarchical addresses “To the Reader” (Seven Books of the Iliads [1598], 538) and “To the Understander” (Achilles Shield [1598], 362), Wither’s remarks on the “captious reader” (The Psalms [1619], 209), and Philemon Holland’s desire to produce a translation of Pliny for “all sorts of people living in a society and commonweal” (The History of the World [1601], 381), the edition does a splendid job of illuminating the ideological dynamic between translators and their audience. Alert to recent critical and digital resources, English Renaissance Translation Theory is highly conscious of the needs of its own variety of readers, from undergraduates to informed academics. Each entry is accompanied by a short contextual piece, explanatory footnotes, cross-references, and suggestions for further reading; the book is concluded by Louise Wilson’s detailed textual notes, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. In sum, this is an invaluable work that will shape future directions in early modern translation studies.