Two members of our network, Dr Teodora Daniela Sechel (Karl Franzens Universität and Central European University) and Dr Graciela Iglesias Rogers (University of Oxford) offer us here a few reading suggestions for the summer, including an article from one of our most eminent followers, Prof. Linda Colley (Princeton University):
KONTLER, LÁSZLÓ, Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760-1795 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
This book illustrates the difficulties German translators encountered while rendering the work of William Robertson – historian, minister, Principal of the University of Edinburgh and central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment – into their own language. The author shows how either for the sake of ascribing to language norms or for political reasons many of Robertson’s concepts and ideas were changed. Thus, the book serves to highlight the limits of translatability as well as the advantages of the cultural exchange produced by means of translations between different intellectual communities of the late eighteenth century Scotland and the German-speaking world.
BEHIELS, LIEVE; THOMAS, WERNER; PISTOR, CHRISTIAN, ‘Translation as an Instrument of Empire: The Southern Netherlands as a Translation Center of the Spanish Monarchy, 1500–1700, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 47/3 (2014/07/22 2014), 113-27.
In this article, the authors consider translation and translators as agents in globalization processes and focus on their role in the “first globalization” within the Spanish empire from 1500 onward. Combining concepts and methods from history and translation studies, they take the Southern Netherlands as a geographical center where translators, initiators of translations, printers, and other multilingual specialists were able to provide texts that circulated in the whole of the Spanish Monarchy. The authors show how a relational database comprising multiple data on translations and the people related to them helps to uncover networks among the participants in the translation process and to discover if and how authorities were involved. Finally, the database sheds light on the translation centers themselves and on the Spanish Monarchy’s language system.
COLLEY, LINDA, ‘Empires of Writing: Britain, America and Constitutions, 1776-1848‘, Law and History Review, 32/02 (2014), 237-66.
In this article, Prof. Colley – who is currently working on the transnational history of constitutions – explores the variety of British responses to the constitutional innovations associated with the American Revolution, and the implications of this for both sides of the Atlantic. She also draws on these British responses to advance wider arguments about the cultural roots of the new constitutionalism, and the persistent connections between the writing and dissemination of constitutions and evolving modes of overland and overseas power and authority.
Enjoy the reading under warm and bright sunshine!
The Network’s coordinators