In Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation: Beyond the Female Tradition, Hilary Brown asks her readers to look at early modern women's translation as a dynamic field, one with broad borders both metaphorically and geographically. Brown situates her study in the context of previous work on translation in the early modern period that has described a tradition of marginalized, and primarily English, women translators. Translation was a widely valued, important practice concerned with creative and editorial agency for men as well as women at that time, in Continental Europe as well as England. In light of this, Brown considers women's translation not as a marginal category, but as one participating in the spectrum of possibility offered by translation. With this as her starting point, Brown asks us to consider gender not as an unimportant issue, but as one factor among others, such as social class, kinship networks, and religious affiliation, that inform a “contextualizing approach” (14).
The title, which suggests we attend to multiple cultures of translation as we engage with women's literary activities, alludes to Peter Burke's “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe” (in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia [2007]: 7–38). Burke's theory—or Brown's adaptation of it—provides an organizational framework for the present monograph. Brown's chapters divide their attention between this theoretical concern and more specific literary analysis, for which Brown turns to a large group of women translators from early modern Germany—forty in all—to provide a case study. In structuring the book like this, Brown is able to provide a thorough consideration of her theoretical questions while placing English translators, who may be more familiar to some readers and have been more widely covered through scholarly work, in conversation with those German writers. In focusing on Germany, Brown does not purport to provide a single representative model for all of early modern Europe, but rather to demonstrate the ways in which women's translation practices differ substantially in these two countries due to the dissimilarity of their social and cultural circumstances. Despite demonstrating the dissimilarity in practice between women's work in England and Germany, Brown goes on to describe translation as an important activity regardless of the writer's gender, and as a means of participating in cultural reform. In doing so, Brown undermines the idea that women's translation is in any way a secondary consideration and refocuses our attention on how women's translation functions more broadly.
The book opens with a chapter on “Perceptions of Translation,” which addresses previous work on women's translation and further investigates the reception of women's translation work. The theoretical apparatus of the middle three chapters adhere most closely to Burke's. “Conditions of Translation” asks and answers the question of who translates. “Fields of Translation” interrogates what translation is. “Methods of Translation” tackles the question of the translator's approach and methodology. In each case, comparing English and German traditions of translation, Brown demonstrates the importance of considering a more comprehensive and variable cultural context beyond gender in assessing translation choices. The final chapter, “The Modes of Translation,” addresses the issue of circulation. Here, Brown suggests the need to reevaluate print and manuscript culture as existing in a hierarchy, or that to publish in manuscript is to do so out of modesty. The relative importance of print or manuscript publication is something that Brown productively complicates by establishing the symbolic value of the manuscript within early modern gift-giving culture. The volume concludes with a valuable appendix detailing the German translators and annotating their translations.
It is difficult to leave gender aside as a social and cultural factor impacting any writer's work, and Brown acknowledges this complication to her argument. As she cautions us to avoid “over-simplistic generalizations” (252) though, Brown has generously demonstrated the importance of assessing the work of early modern women writers in a more nuanced context.
