The ʻGlamorgan School of Translationʼ: A No Politics Phenomenon?

This article endeavours to assess issues of politics and policies related to a particular group of texts said to have been produced in South Wales in the second half of the sixteenth century within the so-called Glamorgan school of translation. There are doubts that all of the texts listed by G. J. Williams are indeed products of a single “school” of translators. For three particular texts—the translations of The Voyage of the Wandering Knight, Dives et Pauper, and Gesta Romanorum—some generalizations about a late sixteenth century Glamorgan textual community might be attempted. It could be suggested that the selection mechanisms at work in this culture of translation were steered by the conservatism of the target audience. This is reflected in both the language and the style of the works, as well as by trends in the choice of source texts for translation. For originals of the two texts, Gesta Romanorum and Diues and Pauper were composed before the Reformation. How exactly their confessional fluidity should be interpreted remains a question. It is unlikely that what we see here is a sign of religious toleration in the modern sense. However, these examples of “simple and generally acceptable Christian piety” might be investigated further as landmarks in the complex dynamics of confessional identities in a peripheral region during a turbulent era in British history.