Writing Bilingually, 1465-1700. Self-Translated Books in Italy and France

A Leap Day! 🤩 An extra day is *so* welcome as we work hard to share our in-progress database of self-translations very soon. For those coming to the RSA in Chicago, save the date for our project panel: Friday 22 March at 5:30 pm (Palmer House Hilton - Salon 3 - Third Floor). We will share a preview of our database followed by exciting papers on medical self-translators in Italy and Pietro Bembo as a self-translator! 🤓📚🥳

Winter is coming! 🍂💨 And the Writing Bilingually team is busy at work. While Eugenia and Marco keep digging into Italian 16C self-translations, Sara is spending the month of October in Innsbruck, kindly hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies -- a fantastic environment to develop the project and plan future collaborations. If you happen to be in the area, come join for her final talk on Tuesday! 🇦🇹⛰📚

If you know where this is, then you'll know what we are busy working on... 😉 And what about you? Will we see you in March?! Stay tuned for more details!

April is the coolest month! And for us, it got busy: first stop Tübingen ✈️🇩🇪 where Marco & Sara joined a fabulous group of scholars for the international conference "The Wrong Direction: Early Modern Translations into Latin". Sara then travelled on to Paris 🚂🇫🇷 where she had a productive week hunting down self-translations at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 📚📚 We now have more than *300 works* in our catalogue - and it keeps growing! Stay tuned for more! ✌️✌️

📚📚📚 A little update from the Writing Bilingually team! Thanks to Marco and Eugenia, our Italian corpus has nearly **doubled** in the space of 2 months. And we are getting ready to share some of our latest findings! ✈️ Our first stop, in just a few weeks, will be the Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen, where we'll present at the workshop "The Wrong Direction – Early Modern Translations into Latin” (13-15 April). Stay tuned for a report!

Image: a page from Antonio Minturno's "Arte Poetica" (Venice 1563), self-translated from Latin ("De poeta", Venice 1559).

MEET OUR TEAM! Miss Eugenia Sisto will join us in January as our PhD research assistant. She will study how the theory and practice of self-translation in Renaissance Italy related to contemporaneous language debates (questione della lingua).

Eugenia hails from the University of Turin, where she recently earned an MA in Philology, Literatures, and History of Antiquity. She's a Neo-Latinist with a strong interest in the historical evolution of Latin from classical to modern times. Recently she worked on two collaborative research projects, editing and translating Neo-Latin texts from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Find out more about Eugenia on our website! https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/writing-bilingually-self-translated-books-italy-france -researcher-miss-eugenia-sisto

MEET OUR TEAM! Today we introduce Dr Marco Spreafico, our postdoctoral research assistant.

Marco has received a BA (Hons) in Romance Philology from the Università degli Studi di Milano, and an MA in Cultural and Intellectual History from the Warburg Institute, London. He completed a PhD in Combined Historical Studies at the Warburg Institute in 2018.

His broad research interests cover three main areas: historical sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of medieval and early modern Italy; the history of Italian and Latin medieval and early modern literature; Italian and European cultural and intellectual history. He is particularly interested in the formation and development of ideas, attitudes and beliefs about language, and how they contributed to the process of formation of national languages known as standardization.

On Writing Bilingually, Marco will be working on a census of self-translations printed in Italy between 1465 and 1700. His tasks will include compiling the database and annotated repertory, identifying and translating materials for the anthology of primary sources, and researching specific aspects of the corpus.

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/writing-bilingually-self-translated-books-italy-france -research-assistant-dr-marco-spreafico

🥳🤩 THE TEAM IS COMPLETE! We can't wait to start our activities on 4 January 2023. In the meantime, here's a little taster of what's coming...

Writing Bilingually, 1465-1700. Self-Translated Books in Italy and France is a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust from January 2023 to March 2026. Led by Dr Sara Miglietti, it aims to create an annotated repertory of prose self-translations printed in Italy and France from 1465 to 1700.

Early modern Europe was a multilingual world: while Latin was still the lingua franca of international scholarly exchanges, vernacular languages were increasingly being used for both literary and scientific endeavours. Many writers were actively bilingual, switching between languages depending on subject and intended audience. Some went so far as to translate their own works across different languages: usually Latin and a vernacular, sometimes different vernaculars, in rare cases even Greek and Latin.

The activities of these ‘self-translators’ are still poorly understood. Most studies to date have centred around individual case-studies, usually of canonical literary figures. Writing Bilingually, 1465-1700. Self-Translated Books in Italy and France takes a more comprehensive approach, examining the full scope of this practice not only among famous literati, but also in the more technical domains of medicine, philosophy, theology, and practical advice.

Some of the questions we aim to address include:

• Who self-translated, why, and in what contexts?
• What role did self-translations play in circulating knowledge among domestic and international publics?
• How did self-translation relate to translation tout court? Were the two commonly understood as distinct activities? Did self-translators reflect programmatically on their practice in the same way translators often did?
• How did self-translation relate to early modern language debates? What can it tell us about the interaction of Latin and vernacular, but also of multiple vernaculars, in early modern language communities?