This book is concerned with the principle enunciated by Saint Jerome that for scripture and matters of religion the translator should produce a literal rendition of the source text, and that only in secular literature is a looser, sense-for-sense translation allowable. Goodrich begins by arguing that too much discussion of translation in early modern England has focused on the translator’s perceived creative autonomy or lack of it. Taking her cue from Thomas Norton’s preface to Calvin, which follows Jerome in equating good translation with faithful translation, Goodrich focuses on a group of female writers pursuing conservative translation strategies, “who took advantage of the authorial multiplicity inherent in translation to pursue a number of agendas that made their work central to the cultural landscape of early modern England” (5).

The first chapter deals with the private or domestic tradition of the female translator, but also suggests that translations by Thomas More’s daughter (Margaret Roper) and granddaughter (Mary Basset) had an obliquely public role in the way that they helped to shape perceptions of More himself. This chapter offers close readings of Roper’s translation of Erasmus’s paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer and Basset’s translation of More’s last treatise, De Tristitia Christi, written in the tower, which was published in the 1557 Workes. Here Goodrich makes the interesting point that Basset’s deviations from the source text “consistently portray timorous martyrdom” (60).

While chapter 1 addresses a Catholic tradition of translation within the domestic sphere, chapter 2 addresses the much more public role of translations by women in the driving forward of the English Reformation under Edward. The focus here is on the translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases on the New Testament, supervised by Katherine Parr and printed in 1548, to which Mary Tudor contributed part of the paraphrase on John; and on her sister Elizabeth’s translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, published in the same year. Here again Goodrich’s close readings are revealing as she suggests how Mary resisted Protestant bias by rendering poenitentia as “penance” and vices as “vicar” (85). This work could hardly have been more public, since copies of the English Paraphrases were placed in every parish church in the country.

In chapter 3 Goodrich turns to manuscript translations and to the genre of princely counsel. Her subjects here are Mary Herbert’s translation of the Psalms, which extended her brother’s ardent support for international Protestantism, and Queen Elizabeth’s late translation of Boethius on The Consolation of Philosophy. In the case of Elizabeth, translation is not really in the advice-to-princes genre, for obvious reasons, but it does show her using her humanist education as a means of self-presentation. The final chapter moves into the seventeenth century and to work produced by dissident religious groups, where anonymous translation offered “a potent means of defining their faction’s views” (147). Here Goodrich returns to the Catholic subjects of chapter 1, discussing the Ignatian monastic piety of work by Mary Percy and Potentiana Deacon, and, in a revealing departure from (or variation of) her theme of “faithful” translation, shows how Percy removes elements of excessive self-abasement from her source text.

The conclusion moves the discussion into some wider considerations of the role of translation in the early modern period, making the significant point that it offered writers “an extreme form of polyvocality” among various ways of using “intertextuality to create literary authority” (191). Some opportunities are missed: the best known use of the term “faithful translator” is Horace’s fidus interpres, which goes unmentioned; nothing is said about Laurence Humphrey’s advocacy of “fidelity” as a central principle of translation; in view of the claims for “authorial multiplicity” and “polyvocality,” there might have been some discussion of the practice of using multiple source texts; and it is a pity that Anne Cooke Bacon’s translation of Jewel’s defense of the Church of England does not put in an appearance, given C. S. Lewis’s verdict that she was the best translator of the whole period. But these points aside, this is a valuable and scholarly contribution to an important and expanding subject area.