subject: The Roles That Translator Play In The Domestication Of Foreign Literature [print this page] Each of the remaining seven essays offer nuanced discussions of the ways in which 'borders sites, hospitals, brothels and piracy', individual writers and even printed books themselves construct and contest textual, spatial, and ideological limits. Margaret Healy's 'Highways, Hospitals and Boundary Hazards' moves with ease and intellectual rigour through an examination of the hospital as a 'charitable institution' in the Byzantine Empire to its transformation into a 'lazaretto'. In doing so, Healy produces an impressive 'journey around Europe's border sites of healing, 'hospitality' and segregation'. 'Alien Desires: Travellers and Sexuality in Early Modern London' by Duncan Salkeld begins by taking Roger Ascham's familiar Links Of London Bracelets diatribes against Italian travel in The Schokmaster as a way of introducing the comparatively neglected topic of prostitution and travelers to London.
The English city's taxonomy of prostitution was apparently different from its Italianate counterpart; the term' "curtizan" does not occur at all in the Bridewell Minute Books, as if to suggest that such women never existed'. However, Salkeld's engaging argument demonstrates that 'a sexual economy, run by a loosely associated network of individuals, operated in early modern London much as it did in Rome or Venice, though perhaps with less display'. If the London prostitutes' sexual liaisons with travellers were kept on the margins of the city, and texts, pirates, the early modern figures which are the subject of Claire Jowitt's rousing essay,'Rogue Traders: National Identity, Empire and Piracy 1580-1640' trouble the Links Of London Charms boundaries which determine 'licit and illicit ventures'.
Mike Pincombe's 'Life and Death on the Habsburg-Ottoman Frontier: Balint Balassi's "In Laudem Confiniorum" and Other Soldier-songs' makes an assiduous case for the importance of the frontier for shaping a martial, masculine identity at odds with the usual critical reception of the Hungarian soldier-poet as a 'Christian Hero'. David Baker's '"Idiote": Politics and Friendship in Thomas Coryate' deftly undermines early modern English perceptions of Thomas Coryate-a 'publicity-mad "Idiote" at home' by showing how 'he takes the domestic politics of early Stuart Britain on the road and performs it... outside the realm'. In ' "Returning from Venice to England": Sir Henry Wotton as Diplomat, Pedagogue and Italian Cultural Connoisseur' Melanie Ord very ably considers the strategies employed by this distinctive seventeenth-century traveller endeavouring to settle back in England. Shifting focus to the circulation of writing, Andrew Pettegree examines the 'Translation and the Migration of Texts', specifically the European dissemination of Amadis de Gaul, to raise important questions about 'cross-cultural literary movements' and the roles that translators play in the domestication of foreign literature.
