Introduction - Special issue on Transit and Translation in Early Modern Europe

The aim of this special multidisciplinary issue of Intralinea is to take a close look at the circulation of European Renaissance texts between Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. Recent studies have begun to shift attention to the vast historic and cultural significance of translation in early modern Europe, with the aim of balancing the traditional tendency of looking at translated texts from a solely linguistic or literary perspective (Burke, Po-Chia Hsia 2007). The last twenty years have seen the rise of a new interest in the practices and theories of early modern translation (Hermans 1996; Bistué 2013), the role of cultural mediators played by translators and printers (Höfele-Von Koppenfels 2005), the innovative function of translated works with regard to specific aspects of culture in the early modern period (Di Biase 2006; Scarsi 2010) and in the history of print culture, including translated books (Barker-Hosington 2013). The improvement of technologies for online and data-base cataloguing (see for instance the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue[1]), together with the possibility of directly accessing digitized primary sources, have opened up new avenues of exploration, which have so far produced interesting results that are mostly limited to individual authors. This issue hopes to add to this evolving debate by outlining the field of inquiry, in the interests of looking at a well-defined phenomenon in terms of space and time: textual relationships, that is, between Italy, the Netherlands, the British Isles and the Scandinavian countries in the early modern age.