Elsewhere. Women Translators and Travellers in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin in the Age of Enlightenment

Travel as sentimental education, travel as cultural transfer and translation of texts, ideas, and emotions. Travel literature is an amalgam and hybridisation that can be analysed from different disciplinary perspective. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this area became a sphere of expression not only for women philosophers, scientists and religious figures, but also for translators. Translation was mostly considered a non- creative activity, subordinate to the primacy of the author and hence devoid of the risk that the translator could independently promote ideas or foster controversies. However, there were women translators who consciously used translation and descriptive narrative as a tool for spreading new and sometimes provocative ideas. This chapter focuses on the analogy between two worlds, both involving strategies of cultural mediation and mutual diachronic and geographical bonds: the world of translation that interprets works to offer them to new contexts of reception, and the world of travelling, of journeys lived, narrated, and translated, that make distant and unknown places intelligible. I will concentrate on the figures of women travellers, translators, and writers, especially in the Levant and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on the cases of Anne-Marie Fiquet du Boccage and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.