Towards a Spatial Early Modern Translation Studies

In recent years there have been a number of attempts to develop synthetic models for medieval and early modern translation and textual transmissions, from David Wallace's monumental transnational, de-centred literary history of Europe ( 2016), the book-historical approach proposed by Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda Hosington in their 2017 article, which develops and refines the iconic communications circuit first originated by Darnton, and now the new Canadian SSHRC-funded international project 'Trajectories of Translation in Early Modern Britain (1473-1660): Routes, Mediations, Networks'.[1]All of these are spatially attuned, inasmuch as they attend to the mobilities and trajectories of transmission and circulation within and across linguistic territories and communities, marked by literary genres, types of knowledge, class, or confessional identities.Despite these important contributions, however, geographical space and the new critical methods of cultural geography have received very little sustained attention in early modern translation studies as yet.[2] It is an uncontroversial given, these days, that translation studies and comparative historicized literary and textual studies will emphasise the mobile, the situated, and the contingent, and to this end data-driven methodologies such as network analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) are producing new narratives and modes of research across early modern studies.In early modern translation studies, scholars explicitly conceptualize translation studies in terms of trajectories, itineraries, and relational dynamics, in the world and on the page.Yet, despite the centrality of place and space to this work, (inasmuch as it is fundamentally concerned with the dynamics of textual objects and textual actors which materially originate in a specific place and move through space), to date there remains a lack of reflexivity regarding questions of space and cultural geography which we do not find, for example, in relation to gender or power.[3] While the concepts of 'space' and 'place' are commonly used in scholarly writing, they are often imprecisely deployed, and so it is important to distinguish them at the outset.A useful definition is given in The People, Place and Space Reader:Most generally, place is bounded and specific to a location, and is a materialization of social forms and practices as well as affective experience.Space tends to be understood as abstract, unlimited, universalizing, and continuous.The infinite, undefined quality of space makes us think of the cosmos, the ether of flows and travel, or the metaphorical space one needs to think.Places are often more grounded, serve as reference points in our lives, and have distinct qualities that give people a sense of belonging.This essay will thus argue for a more spatially aware and explicit engagement with place, space and the methods of critical cultural geography, as a first step towards a more coherent 'spatial' translation studies of the early modern period which situates itself in dialogue with other related disciplines, and engages with the tools of digital cartography.It will argue for a unified, and more importantly, scaled and multiscalar approach, which can encompass the radically situated space of the page, and that of the text's agents within their individual and place-specific social spaces, with a distant, macro, overview of translation dynamics and textual trajectories across diverse territories of the early modern world.In so doing, it aligns itself with recent work across the humanities disciplines, which argue for a synthesis of macro-and micro-approaches, that is, via a combination of case-studies and transnational networks, or what has (in)famously been called distant and close reading.[4] Early modern translation studies is particularly well-placed to address these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, as its practitioners come from a range of diverse discipline areas, subject specialisms, and intellectual traditions.This article thus surfaces examples of this burgeoning trend from various fields, in order to argue for a new and coherent approach which will be of use as a model not only to early modern translation, but to the wider discipline of translation studies as a whole.

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