English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557

by Coldiron,Anne E.B.

• ISBN13: 9780754656081
• ISBN10: 075465608X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Bringing to light new material about early print, early modern gender discourse, and cultural contact between France and England in the period, this book focuses on a dozen or so of the many early Renaissance verse translations about women, marriage, sex, and gender relations.Anne Coldiron here analyzes such works as the Interlocucyon; the Beaute of Women; Fyftene Joyes of Maryage; and the Complaintes of the Too Soone and Too Late Maryed as well as translations of writings of Christine de Pizan. Her selections represent an insufficiently discussed strand of English poetry, in that they are non-elite, non-courtly, and non-romance writings. She investigates the nature of the translations, showing how some French poems don't change much of their substance in the conversion, but others end up meaning something different in their new context, and some are even completely transformed. Coldiron also attends to the formal and presentational dimensions of the early modern poetic book, assessing the real differences the printers' paratexts and visual presentation strategies make to the meaning and value of the poems.A series of appendices presents the author's transcriptions of the texts that are otherwise inaccessible, never having been edited in modern times.