Translation and the Non-Literary Text: from early to late modern English. Issue no. 17 of Status Quaestionis

Issue no. 17 (2019) of Status Quaestionis, an open access journal of the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, investigates ‘nonliterary’ 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. The authors in this issue explore travel writing, historiographical discourse, religious language, and language devoted to didactic concerns 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. The contributions show how blurred lines were in the period between the literary and the non-literary, and paint a lively picture of translation in early modern Europe.