Studies of women's roles in the secular literary world, as patrons, authors, readers, and characters in secular literature. This second volume of proceedings from the `Women and the Book' conference, held at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1993, brings together fifteen papers dealing with women's experience in the secular literary world. It covers the whole variety of roles women might take, as patrons, authors, readers, and characters in secular literature; encompassed in its range are well-known characters, real and fictional, such as Christine de Pisan and the Wife of Bath, and the more obscure but no less fascinating topic of women in Chinese medieval court poetry. Like its predecessor Women, the Book, and the Godly(Brewer, 1995), this volume illuminates the world of medieval women with carefulscholarship and attention to sources, producing new readings and new materials which shed fresh light on an increasingly important field of study. Contributors: PATRICIA SKINNER, PHILIP E. BENNETT, JENNIFER GOODMAN, CHARITY CANNON-WILLARD, BENJAMIN SEMPLE, ANNE BIRRELL, JEANETTE BEER, MARK BALFOUR, CAROL HARVEY, HEATHER ARDEN, KAREN JAMBECK, JULIA BOFFEY, JENNIFER SUMMIT, MARGARITA STOCKER

At no time in the history of the West has translation played a more vital role than in the Middle Ages. Centuries before the appearance of the first extant vernacular documents, bilingualism, and preferably trilingualism, was a necessity in the scriptorium and chancery; and since the emergence of Romance had rendered the entire corpus of classical literature incomprehensible to all but the literati, both old and new worlds awaited (re)discovery or, to use Jerome's metaphor, conquest. The diversity of medieval translation is illustrated, although not encompassed, by the diversity of chapters in the present volume. Authors treat the methods and reception of translators of vernacular to Latin and vernacular to vernacular, texts of a variety of genres and many different languages and periods. The collection will present a welcome offering of different scholarly approaches to the critical issue of medieval translators and their craft.

Translation and the Transmission of Culture between 1300 and 1600 is a companion volume to Medieval Translators and their Craft (1989) and, like Medieval Translators, its aim is to provide the modern reader with a deeper understanding of the early centuries of translation in France. This collection works from the premise that translation never was, and should not now be, envisaged as a genre. Translatio was and continues to be infinitely variable, generating a correspondingly variable range of products from imitatively creative poetry to treatises of science. In the exercise of its multi-faceted set of practices the same controversies occurred then as now: creation or replication? Literality or freedom? Obligation to source or obligation to public? For this reason, the editors avoided periodization, but the volume makes no pretense at temporal exhaustiveness-the subject of translation is too vast. The contributors do, however, aim to shed light on several aspects of translation that have hitherto been neglected and that, despite the earliness of the period, have relevance to our understanding of translation whether in France or generally. Like its companion, this collection will be of interest to scholars of translation, textual studies, and medieval transmission of texts.

The collection of essays in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages arose from a translation symposium at the twenty-eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The authors treat a wide range of topics: translation between Latin and romance languages, the rise of vernacular canonicity, the interplay of Latin and French in the court of France, the theory of translation evident in Alfred the Great's ambitious program of translation of religious works from Latin into Old English, questions of the impact of classical admonitions on medieval translation, interpretive translation used to render traditionally masculine heroes as feminine, the interplay of word and image relating to gender issues, and bilingualism, concluding with translation of medieval texts in the modern era. The scholarship on offer here presents a spectacular collection of modern questions of medieval translation, certainly an essential text for all scholars of related issues.

It is fast becoming dogma that French prose emerged out of poetry by a process of deversification in the thirteenth century. Since the earliest extant example of written French prose dates back to the eighth century, this premise cannot be taken at face value. Prose had been the medium of the clercs for many centuries before the thirteenth. It had been honed by constant use to all manner of functions whether legal, diplomatic, epistolary, or edificatory (to name only those exemplified in this study). Early Prose in France is above all a reevaluation, an attempt to call into question the assumption that deversification could have been responsible for the emergence of such lengthy prose works as the crusading chronicles and the encyclopedic translations of the early thirteenth century. In this volume Beer demonstrates the sophisticated stylistic propensities of Early French prose, an effort long needed that does a great service to all French literary scholars.