Conclusion: ‘Shall I Apologize Translation?’

Summary

Shall I apologize translation?

– Florio, ‘To the Curteous Reader’

For the writers considered in this study, the intersection of the medium of manuscript translation with the conventions of early modern gift culture offered a space in which to circulate ideas that participated in current religious and political controversies. As prior scholarship on translation of this period has made abundantly apparent, translations cannot not be considered inferior works simply by virtue of their status as translations, and they frequently operated as a vehicle for the articulation of complex sociopolitical ideals and affiliations by both men and women translators. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the translations of Bassett, Lumley, Seager, and Inglis would not have been regarded as derivative productions or attempts at writing crippled by a societal demand for women's silence. Instead, these and other women's translations of the period could and did circulate as scribal publications that performed the work of creating and furthering religio-political and economic alliances. Furthermore, the religious nature of many of the works in translation of this period should not convince us they are therefore without political import. In fact, the religious import of these works was often what made them such potent literary and political productions.

It is important to consider these translators and their works as a related group because their practices of dissemination share an awareness of and participation in early modern gift culture. Rather than achieving print in an anonymous or mediated way (as did many women's translations in this period), these women retained some degree of control over their textual productions as they circulated them to specifically targeted readers. While two of the translators I have considered, Bassett and Lumley, come from the privileged social background we might expect of early modern women translators, Inglis and Seager do not. Although the image of a translator labouring in her craft so as to avoid idleness is one of the contemporary tropes available to both women and men when adopting a stance of humility in their dedicatory paratexts, for none of these women was translation simply an exercise designed to keep her from indolence. Bassett writes with a sense of urgency and community as she shares the words of Eusebius with like-minded Catholics under pressure from a reformist state and dedicates her work to their highly symbolic figurehead, Mary Tudor.