Translation and the Non-literary Text: from Early to Late Modern English

Introduction to Issue no. 17 (2019) of Status Quaestionis, which investigates ‘non-literary’ texts - defined as texts whose main aims are not of an aesthetic nature but rather of a communicative, informative, didactic, persuasive, and/or descriptive one - in translation in a historical-linguistic perspective, with particular regard to the early and late modern English periods. Travel writing, historiographical discourse, religious language, and language devoted to didactic concerns are explored alongside medical and scientific texts – all areas of interest when investigating the rise of English as a language of learned communication, gradually replacing Latin and incentivizing the translation of texts from continental languages.