Essays examining both the theory and practice of medieval translation. Engaging and informative to read, challenging in its assertions, and provocative in the best way, inviting the reader to sift, correlate and reflect on the broader applicability of points made in reference to a specific text orexchange. Professor Carolyne P. Collette, Mount Holyoke College. Medieval notions of translatio raise issues that have since been debated in contemporary translation studies concerning the translator's role asinterpreter or author; the ability of translation to reinforce or unsettle linguistic or political dominance; and translation's capacity for establishing cultural contact, or participating in cultural appropriation or effacement.This collection puts these ethical and political issues centre stage, asking whether questions currently being posed by theorists of translation need rethinking or revising when brought into dialogue with medieval examples. Contributors explore translation - as a practice, a necessity, an impossibility and a multi-media form - through multiple perspectives on language, theory, dissemination and cultural transmission. Exploring texts, authors, languages and genres not often brought together in a single volume, individual essays focus on topics such as the politics of multilingualism, the role of translation in conflict situations, the translator's invisibility, hospitality, untranslatability and the limits of translation as a category. EMMA CAMPBELL is Associate Professor in French at the University of Warwick; ROBERT MILLS is Lecturer in History of Art at University College London. Contributors: William Burgwinkle, Ardis Butterfield, Emma Campbell, Marilynn Desmond, Simon Gaunt, Jane Gilbert, Miranda Griffin, Noah D. Guynn, Catherine Leglu, Robert Mills, Zrinka Stahuljak, Luke Sunderland

An examination of medieval historican writings through the prism of violence. The concept of medieval historiography as "usable past" is here challenged and reassessed. The contributors' shared claim is that the value of medieval historiographical texts lies not only in the factual information the texts contain but also in the methods and styles they use to represent and interpret the past and make it ideologically productive. Violence is used as the key term that best demonstrates the making of historical meaning in the Middle Ages, through the transformation of acts of physical aggression and destruction into a memorable and usable past. The twelve chapters assembled here explore a wide range of texts emanating from throughout the francophone world. They cover a range of genres (chansons de geste, histories, chronicles, travel writing, and lyric poetry), and range from the late eleventh to the fifteenth century. Through examination of topics as varied as rhetoric, imagery, humor, gender, sexuality, trauma, subversion, and community formation, each chapter strives to demonstrate how knowledge of the medieval past can be enhanced by approaching medieval modes of historical representation and consciousness on their own terms, and by acknowledging - and resisting - the desire to subject them to modern conceptions of historical intelligibility. Noah D. Guynn is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis; Zrinka Stahuljak is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Contributors: Noah D. Guynn, Zrinka Stahuljak, James Andrew Cowell, Jeff Rider,Leah Shopkow, Matthew Fisher, Karen Sullivan, David Rollo, Deborah McGrady, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Simon Gaunt