English Women Catholic Translators

The concept of a linear transmission of source to target text was inherited from the humanist theory of the translatio studii, the transfer of an ancient work to a new receiving language and culture. However, the trajectories of transmission are far more complex, constituting a matrix of intersecting and interrelating lines that crisscross, not simply linguistic, but also social and cultural spaces. One way in which scholars can map such pathways is by examining the networks in which translators and all those involved in the whole process of textual transfer and transmission participated, both directly (original authors, intermediate translators, printers, editors, booksellers, patrons, commissioners, some dedicatees) and indirectly (family members, friends, social contacts, facilitators, co-religionists, recipients of translations as gifts). This entry will discuss the ways in which English Catholic women translators between 1500 and 1640 exercised agency by means of being actors in such networks and by transmitting, through their translations, foreign texts to a new and wider reading public, often using them as effective tools in ideological and political matters where other forms of intervention were forbidden to women.