6 - The Case for Women Translators

Summary

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MS Kk. 1. 6 is a large, plainly decorated collection of devotional works in Middle English verse and prose compiled in the 1450s by Richard Fox, a layman in the service of St Albans Abbey and an amateur scribe and book collector. At the end of the first item, a commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms, is an ascription in red ink in Fox's hand, revealing that the text is the work of a woman, and that it has been translated from French:

Here endeth the vij Psalmus the wheche Dame Alyanore Hulle Translated out of Frensche in to Englesche

She is also credited at the end of the second item, a collection of prayers and meditations structured around the seven days of the week which are described as being ‘in party takyn of Seynt Austyn, party of Seynt Ancelm, party of Seynt Barnard, and party of oþer wrytynges’, in the same hand and red ink as the first ascription:

Alyanor Hulle drowe out of Frennsche alle this before wreten in this lytylle Booke

Eleanor Hull, an aristocratic laywoman in the service of Henry IV's second wife, Joan of Navarre, who probably made her translations at the Hertfordshire Benedictine house of Sopwell Priory in the 1420s, is the only medieval woman translating into English from either French or Latin whose name we know. Part of the second of her texts has been identified by Alexandra Barratt as a close, confident translation of a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman series of prayers and meditations, and there is every reason to suppose that her other sources, so far unidentified, were translated with similar skill. Were it not for the ascriptions in the manuscript, however, there would be no especial reason to suppose that these translations were made by a woman. Although her source material is a devotional text of the kind often associated with female audiences, there is nothing which particularly suggests a woman translator; there is no author-identifying prologue, or any other allusions to her gender. As Barratt warns in her earliest study of Eleanor's life and work, ‘if so unlikely a text turns out to have been the work of a woman, we should be wary of automatically excluding the possibility of a woman's authoring any medieval text on a priori grounds’.