This superb book — volume two of the five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English — makes an essential contribution to the fields of both historic translation studies and early modern literary studies. The stated intention of the Oxford History as a whole is to “present for the first time a critical and historical overview of the development of this art or craft in the English-speaking world,” and to “show how literary translation has challenged, enriched, and transformed the native traditions” (viii). By any reckoning, this volume more than exceeds expectations in the fulfillment of these aims. Like other volumes, it is a transatlantic enterprise, featuring valuable contributions from the three editors and eighteen other distinguished scholars from the UK and North America. Simultaneously scholarly and highly readable, the book covers roughly a century of translation practice in the early modern period, a time when the translation of foreign works had become central to textual production in the anglophone world.

The book begins with three chapters that situate translation within the wider cultural life of the period: chapter 1, “The Corpus of Translations and their Place in the Literary and Cultural World, 1550–1660,” provides a general introduction and sections on the pedagogical use of translations, translation and the English language, religious belief, and literary innovation. Chapter 2, “Translators and their Milieux,” considers the various cultural and material contexts in which translations were produced, with sections on “Commerce, Print, and Patronage,” “Translating at Leisure: Gentlemen and Gentlewomen,” and case-studies of four emblematic translators of the period, George Chapman, Anthony Munday, Mary Sidney Pembroke, and Thomas Stanley. Chapter 3, “Approaches and Attitudes to Translation,” examines how translation was conceptualized in the early modern period, with sections on “Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice,” “Dictionaries and Commentaries,” and “Commonplaces and Metaphors.” Chapters 4–9 then cover specific translations according to genre: the Bible and biblical commentary, nondramatic verse, drama, history and politics, prose fiction, and moral, philosophical, and devotional writing. Each of these chapters is made up of further subsections by different authors, giving a truly remarkable depth and coverage of the field. The concluding chapter presents short biographies of about eighty translators active in the period from 1550 to 1660.

In addition to this enormously detailed study of the translations and translators themselves, the volume also benefits from an impressive suite of paratextual accoutrements: a general bibliography of translations, a bibliographical index to source authors, and a final index. Perhaps the most important of these is the general bibliography of translations (471–560), a major contribution to research in itself, which lists all the primary works cited in the main text of the book (some 3,000 items), ordered by translator. Crucially, this general bibliography foregrounds the work of the translators over their source material, thereby rendering them less “invisible” in the production of the period, and at the same time displays in an instantly apprisable form the scale and range of literature translated into English between 1550 and 1660.

In the very high quality of its contributions and exhaustive coverage of early modern translation activity, this is a simply outstanding book. It is very much a work that derives from literary studies as they have been traditionally figured in the humanities, and one potential criticism could be the way in which the editors avoid a formal engagement with contemporary critical approaches, including those deriving from the academic discipline of translation studies. (However, the influence of such approaches can be found in various sub-chapters, e.g., in relation to issues of gender, which are addressed in contributions by Hosington, Wright, and Coldiron). Another possible gripe is that a secondary bibliography is given with each sub-chapter, rather than appearing in a single final bibliography. These criticisms should not detract from the book’s great strength, though, which is to provide a densely learned resource for the study of early modern translations and their translators. Overall, this is a landmark publication that will do much to recast the position of translation within wider early modern literary studies, and that will serve to underpin our engagement with the subject for the foreseeable future.