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5 - Patterns of Availability and Demand in Middle English Translations de romanz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Rosalind Field
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
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Summary

This chapter concerned with the romance culture of Anglo-Norman England and its influence on Middle English romance culture through translation activity. It deals with the long fourteenth century, the period of changeover from French to English as the language of choice for narratives in England from the appearance of the early Middle English romances to the end of the century. Romance is a genre which is increasingly recognized as expressive of social and national identity and is therefore a focus of attitudes, both medieval and modern, to language change and choice. The romance culture of England, in the two vernaculars, provides ample evidence of the exploitation of available romance material by another generation and in another language. This is largely through a process of translation, understood as the medieval practice of enhancing, abbreviating or amplifying a text, but also one which incorporates selection, choice, rejection and reinterpretation of earlier material for a new audience.

The questions I want to examine in this paper arise from a survey of romance as translation. This indicated that there was more to be done on the assessment of patterns of translation activity in general and that there is a need to reassess assumptions about the circumstances that produced the Middle English romances from identifiable French-language sources. Providing a survey of Middle English romance as translation shows how multi-faceted translation activity is and how it has been obscured by unexamined generalizations about relationships between materials in the two vernaculars.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2010

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