Reversing Babel: Translation among the English during an Age of Conquests, c. 800 to c. 1200 (2011)
O'Brien, Bruce R. (Author)
University of Delaware Press
Physical Details: xix + 289 pp.; ill.; maps
Language: English
This work starts with a small puzzle: Why did the Normans translate English law, the law of the people they had conquered, from Old English into Latin? Solving this puzzle meant asking questions about what medieval writers thought about language and translation, what created the need and desire to translate, and how translators went about the work. These are the questions Reversing Babel attempts to answer by providing evidence that comes from the world in which not just Norman translators of law but any translators of any texts, regardless of languages, did their translating. Reversing Babel reaches back from 1066 to the translation work done in an earlier conquest---a handful of important works translated in the ninth century in response to the alleged devastating effect of the Viking invasions---and carries the analysis up to the wave of Anglo-French translations created in the late twelfth century when England was a part of a large empire, ruled by a king from Anjou who held power not only in western France from Normandy in the north to the Pyrenees in the south, but also in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In this longer and wider view, the impact of political events on acts of translation is more easily weighed against the impact of other factors such as geography, travel, trade, community, trends in learning, ideas about language, and habits of translation. These factors colored the contact situations created in England between speakers and readers of different languages during perhaps the most politically unstable period in English history. The variety of medieval translation among the English, and among those translators working in the greater empires of Cnut, the Normans, and the Angevins, is remarkable. Reversing Babel does not try to describe all of it; rather, it charts a course through the evidence and tries to answer the fundamental questions medieval historians should ask when their sources are medieval translations.
...MoreReview Ashe, Laura (2013) Review of "Reversing Babel: Translation among the English during an Age of Conquests, c. 800 to c. 1200". History (pp. 268-270).
Similar Citations
Chapter
Filius, Lou;
(2007)
The Arabic Transmission of the Historia Animalium of Aristotle
(/isis/citation/CBB000930931/)
Article
Pormann, Peter E.;
(2008)
Case Notes and Clinicians: Galen's Commentary on the Hippocratic Epidemics in the Arabic Tradition
(/isis/citation/CBB000931196/)
Article
Ofer Elior;
(2018)
The Arabic Tradition of Euclid's Elements Preserved in the Latin Translation by Adelard of Bath and the Hebrew Translation by Rabbi Jacob
(/isis/citation/CBB893277381/)
Article
Lisa Devriese;
(2021)
The Colorless History of Pseudo-Aristotle’s De coloribus
(/isis/citation/CBB271062439/)
Book
Pormann, Peter E;
(2013)
The Mirror of Health: Discovering Medicine in the Golden Age of Islam
(/isis/citation/CBB001421026/)
Article
Escayol, Maria Antònia Martí;
(2011)
Two Iberan Versions of Gottfried of Franconia's Pelzbuch. Translations and Copies in Medieval and Modern Agricultural Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001220733/)
Chapter
D'Aronco, Maria Amalia;
(2012)
A Problematic Plant Name: elehtre. A Reconsideration
(/isis/citation/CBB001252655/)
Article
Boucher, Caroline;
Dumas, Geneviève;
(2012)
Medical Translations and Practical Compilations: A Necessary Coincidence?
(/isis/citation/CBB001250260/)
Book
Patrick Manning;
Abigail Owen;
(2018)
Knowledge in Translation: Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000-1800 CE
(/isis/citation/CBB148194032/)
Book
Trabucco, Oreste;
(2010)
L'opere stupende dell'arti più ingegnose: la recezione degli Pneumatika di Erone Alessandrino nella cultura italiana del Cinquecento
(/isis/citation/CBB001210179/)
Article
Garofalo, Ivan;
(2007)
La traduzione araba del de sectis di Galeno e il sommario degli alessandrini
(/isis/citation/CBB001020833/)
Chapter
Robert Wisnovsky;
Faith Wallis;
Jamie C. Fumo;
Carlos Fraenkel;
(2011)
Introduction. Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB539508572/)
Chapter
Pieter DE LEEMANS;
(2016)
Ego, Petrus Paduanus, philosophie minimus alumpnorum. Pietro d’Abano’s Preface to his Expositio Problematum
(/isis/citation/CBB171783717/)
Article
Overwien, Oliver;
(2007)
Zur Herkunft der arabischen Übersetzung von Hippokrates' De humoribus
(/isis/citation/CBB001020835/)
Book
Bradwardine, Thomas;
Read, Stephen;
(2010)
Insolubilia
(/isis/citation/CBB001251418/)
Article
Kern, Darcy;
(2014)
Parliament in Print: William Caxton and the History of Political Government in the Fifteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001550284/)
Article
Chlench, Kathrin;
(2009/2010)
Sphera Solida---Ein Himmelsglobustraktat und seine Bedeutung in der Astronomie des Spätmittelalters
(/isis/citation/CBB001024590/)
Article
Christián C. Carman;
(2020)
Vestiges of the Emergence of Overspecification and Indifference to Visual Accuracy in the Mathematical Diagrams of Medieval Manuscripts
(/isis/citation/CBB729920864/)
Chapter
Kunitzsch, Paul;
(2008)
Science between East and West: A Domain of Translation
(/isis/citation/CBB001022258/)
Book
Leemans, Pieter De;
(2009)
The Aristoteles Latinus: Past, Present, Future
(/isis/citation/CBB001200400/)
Be the first to comment!