In recent years there have been a number of attempts to develop synthetic models for medieval and early modern translation and textual transmissions, from David Wallace’s monumental transnational, de-centred literary history of Europe (2016), the book-historical approach proposed by Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda Hosington in their 2017 article, which develops and refines the iconic communications circuit first originated by Darnton, and now the new Canadian SSHRC-funded international project ‘Trajectories of Translation in Early Modern Britain (1473-1660): Routes, Mediations, Networks’.[1] All of these are spatially attuned, inasmuch as they attend to the mobilities and trajectories of transmission and circulation within and across linguistic territories and communities, marked by literary genres, types of knowledge, class, or confessional identities.

Despite these important contributions, however, geographical space and the new critical methods of cultural geography have received very little sustained attention in early modern translation studies as yet.[2] It is an uncontroversial given, these days, that translation studies and comparative historicized literary and textual studies will emphasise the mobile, the situated, and the contingent, and to this end data-driven methodologies such as network analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) are producing new narratives and modes of research across early modern studies. In early modern translation studies, scholars explicitly conceptualize translation studies in terms of trajectories, itineraries, and relational dynamics, in the world and on the page. Yet, despite the centrality of place and space to this work, (inasmuch as it is fundamentally concerned with the dynamics of textual objects and textual actors which materially originate in a specific place and move through space), to date there remains a lack of reflexivity regarding questions of space and cultural geography which we do not find, for example, in relation to gender or power.[3]

While the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’ are commonly used in scholarly writing, they are often imprecisely deployed, and so it is important to distinguish them at the outset. A useful definition is given in The People, Place and Space Reader:

Most generally, place is bounded and specific to a location, and is a materialization of social forms and practices as well as affective experience. Space tends to be understood as abstract, unlimited, universalizing, and continuous. The infinite, undefined quality of space makes us think of the cosmos, the ether of flows and travel, or the metaphorical space one needs to think. Places are often more grounded, serve as reference points in our lives, and have distinct qualities that give people a sense of belonging.

This essay will thus argue for a more spatially aware and explicit engagement with place, space and the methods of critical cultural geography, as a first step towards a more coherent ‘spatial’ translation studies of the early modern period which situates itself in dialogue with other related disciplines, and engages with the tools of digital cartography. It will argue for a unified, and more importantly, scaled and multiscalar approach, which can encompass the radically situated space of the page, and that of the text’s agents within their individual and place-specific social spaces, with a distant, macro, overview of translation dynamics and textual trajectories across diverse territories of the early modern world. In so doing, it aligns itself with recent work across the humanities disciplines, which argue for a synthesis of macro- and micro- approaches, that is, via a combination of case-studies and transnational networks, or what has (in)famously been called distant and close reading.[4]

Early modern translation studies is particularly well-placed to address these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, as its practitioners come from a range of diverse discipline areas, subject specialisms, and intellectual traditions. This article thus surfaces examples of this burgeoning trend from various fields, in order to argue for a new and coherent approach which will be of use as a model not only to early modern translation, but to the wider discipline of translation studies as a whole.

In recent years, pre-modern translation studies has excelled in work on the micro — the text, and its carrier, the material text-object — as expressive of localized translational practices and wider cultural dynamics, often informed by book-historical approaches.[5] Likewise, macro, quantitative studies of early modern translation, such as those facilitated by the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads database and the Universal Short-Title Catalogue, in recent years have revitalized the discipline by offering the hard data for many new lines of enquiry, enabling us to map both individual translation publishing events and macro, bigger-scale flows and patterns of translation activity, themselves aligned with the broader sociological turn within translation studies.[6] A more positioned and critically aware multiscalar theory of geographical space and translation will allow us to move more easily and mindfully between the extremes of these scale ranges and the points between; to model (and critique) conventional geographies and counter-geographies with more precision; to formulate new ways of conceptualizing linguistic and translational space beyond national languages and the boundaries of the nation-state; and perhaps most practically, to represent more effectively the complexities and specificities of early modern translation dynamics by means of new GIS technologies.

Geographic information systems (GIS) are locative digital technologies used to bring together, analyse, and visualize data of many types, and as such can be harnessed for all kinds of historical enquiry across interdisciplinary boundaries.[7] The many affordances of a geocritically inflected translation studies, deploying GIS tools, would be particularly pertinent for our subject as we imagine the places and spaces of the past, since they do not necessarily correspond to the places, or nations, or language communities, or translation practices, of our present day. A multiscalar approach to space will not collapse the inherent interpretative distance between us and the temporally distant objects of our study, but can none the less offer deeper insights into the fundamental role of historic translation practices in place-making and the social construction of languaged identities, on the grand and small scale.  

Transits of translation

Taken in their totality, the articles in this special issue themselves exemplify the potential of a spatialized and scaled approach to questions of translation and transmission of knowledge in the long early modern period. The diversity and variety of the texts discussed here, and their transnational trajectories and afterlives, challenge older models of the traditional translatio studii and the historical circulation of texts across Europe, revealing instead a system of deeply situated and localized textual productions performed across a geographically extensive area which extends well beyond that which is usually discussed in conventional histories of Italian cultural contacts.[8] In concentrating on transit and translation within and between specific territories of Northern Europe and Italy — the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Scotland, and England —, the editors take us beyond the confines of subject-identified national languages and the traditional narratives of, say, Anglo-Italian cultural exchange, instead illuminating lesser-discussed trajectories, relationships, and networks which deserve much more attention than they have to date. With this subtle but powerful perspectival shift, the familiar becomes rather more unfamiliar, the traditional is destabilized, and our conventional ‘centres’ find themselves suddenly more marginal: a valuable act of deterritorialization which draws our attention to the conventional positions in which we often find ourselves.

Italy remains a fundamental point of focus in this collection, but in less usual ways. In traditional histories of early modern translation (which have until relatively recently tended to mean mainly or only literary translation), the Anglo-Italian nexus dominated above all others and acquired a distorting prominence in the field. But in focusing on territories beyond those of the British Isles (which likewise has historically often meant England, or even just London, in traditional translation histories of the early modern period), the editors have exposed both the limited geographical range of earlier generations’ studies, and their almost complete indifference to England’s other North Sea neighbours beyond France.

Early modern England, as seen from Italy (and thus not approached as the centre of its own solipsistic history), is now merely the lower half of one side of the North Sea quadrant. This maritime space is bounded by Scotland and England to the west, the Low Countries to the south, and Denmark and Norway to the East, opening there at the Skagerrak to Sweden and the Baltic territories beyond. One of the many strengths of this special issue is that it writes these North Sea crossings back into English translation history, showing them not only to be an intrinsic part of the extraordinarily dense trans-continental cultural networks, but also intimately implicated in ‘English’ cultural politics: as seen, for example, with the cultural links between Denmark and Scotland which followed the marriage of Anna of Denmark to James VI of Scotland in 1589, which facilitated first the meeting between the Danish humanist Christian Barnekow with Giacomo Castelvetro in James’s Edinburgh court, and thence Castelvetro’s visit to Denmark to edit Barnekow’s collection of Italian political writings brought home from his travels in Italy.[9] With James VI’s accession to the throne of England in 1603, the Danish Queen would set up her own Italianate court in Greenwich, taking onto her staff a ‘Reader in Italian and Groom of the Privy Chamber’ in the figure of John Florio, the most famed Anglo-Italian translator of the day.[10]

Scholars and noblemen (categories which were sometimes, but not always, coterminous) would travel from the countries which bordered the North Sea and Baltic into continental Europe, congregating in particular in University towns where Protestants were tolerated; within Italy, the Northern Italian university town of Padua was especially important as a destination and point of exchange.[11] Extra-territorial Italians are also central to these knowledge networks, with figures such as Giacomo Castelvetro, who recurs in different contexts, for example as a visitor to the Scottish and Danish courts in the 1590s, or as a friend of the notorious London printer of Italian texts, John Wolfe in the 1580s;[12] others include the Englishman of Italian Protestant heritage John Florio, or indeed the fencing master Salvator Fabris who taught Italian to the King Christian IV of Denmark (a fact we know from the writings of another North Sea traveller, Otto Sperling, the physician to the king).[13]

This volume also foregrounds a specifically Scots internationally-oriented cultural politics, which is not always visible in anglophone studies of translation, as exemplified in Donatella Montini’s study of the Basilikon Doron and its transnational translation and media history. The translational ‘prehistory’ of King James (that is, his textual life before his accession to the English throne, and entrance into English translation history), is thoroughly embedded in these international networks and transnational cultural practices and textual genres, and we know that the Scots king himself materially traversed the North Sea to formalize diplomatic relations between Edinburgh and Oslo when he travelled to collect his bride.[14] The ‘foreign-ness’ of his Danish Queen Anna has now been anglicized to the very English Queen Anne, but we should not forget that her Italianate tastes and foreign-born origins were highly prominent attributes in the language-learning text authored for her by John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611).[15] And indeed, Montini shows us that James’s Basilikon Doron is one of the very few texts originating in the British Isles to travel internationally in translation, a salutary perspective to the more celebratory narratives of English literary pre-eminence.

Although the essays in this collection deal with different time frames and language transitions (Italian to the Nordic languages and English; English and Dutch to Italian; Dutch to English; and the intermediary languages of French and Latin), taken together, the essays speak of a dense network of places with an extremely high level of language contact and exchange.  Multiplicity, mobility, and multilingualism (of objects and people) is the condition of the day in all these spaces, and the essays collected here foreground the quite remarkable degree of language co-presence not only in well-known contact zones in port cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and London, or the university towns of Padua or Leiden, but also in smaller centres such as Edinburgh and Stockholm (or indeed, larger political entities, such as the vast and multilingual Dano-Norwegian kingdom).[16] As both Marco Prandoni and Nicholas Brownlees have shown us, the Dutch Republic city of Amsterdam is the exemplary hub for Northern textual and linguistic transits, a city of ‘practical multilingualism’, where ‘translation   — both oral and written, both spontaneous and highly codified — was an overall, omnipresent social practice: among merchants, jurists and notaries, at the highly Francophile court in the Hague, and of course among scholars and writers, the Republic being a world staple marker not only of goods but also of books in many languages’.[17]

The geographical and cultural proximity (as a Protestant nation) of the Dutch Republic to England meant that it was a favoured site for the processing and repackaging of European news to England, as well as generating news in its own right. In hybrid contact zones such as the great port cities, which were inherently multilingual both in terms of diverse local language communities, and the presence of mobile transnational populations originating from outwith the region, either passing through or having migrated and settled through circumstance, translation was not just an intellectual, literary exercise but instead a lived practice, profoundly embedded in the social and cultural practices and movements of the city and its people. As Warren Boutcher has noted:

Transnational circulation of literary artefacts–whether described in a particular context as ‘texts’ or ‘books’ or ‘works’ – involved ‘translations’ of various kinds: the physical movement of books, the transfer of a text from the context of one culture to another, the transfer of a whole text (as a ‘work’) or part of a text from one language to another. One or more of these kinds of transfer might apply in any given instance. […] So the circulation in question might concretely be a matter of: the publication of an edition in one state or city (e.g. to avoid censorship) that was principally intended for dissemination in other states or cities; the movement of individual copies and bundles of copies of an edition across borders –licitly or illicitly– via the book trade, social networks, and educational or diplomatic travel; the publication of identical or revised editions in the same language as the source work in different locations across or beyond Europe, whether through commercial partnerships, pirated editions (which contravene a privilege held in another country), or editions issued by commercial rivals (in locations where no privilege protects the work); the translation, adaptation and publication of the work in new languages –including multilingual editions – in different locations, whether, again, through commercial arrangements or otherwise.[18]

The complex mobilities of people and things outlined here show that it is near-impossible to conceive of an exclusively bounded opposition between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ within the early modern textual ecosystem.[19] Instead, we see a situation in which nationally-identified ‘Italianate’ (or other aspirational) scholarly practices and cultural tastes are produced and circulate independently of their supposed originating context: a system of flows or transfers between data points (comprising geographically distanced places, certainly, but also people, or texts, or the material artefacts), in which the reception of the transited object is itself a localized production. In this decentred and deterritorialized model, as espoused in this collection, there can therefore no longer be a ‘correct’, or single conventional vector of transmission.

There are, of course, dominant directions of travel, along the established trade and transmission routes, but the articles in this volume show just as clearly counter-trajectories and reversals, each contingent on the individual textual agents who undertake socially governed operations in their respective contexts.[20] We need only look at the English fortunes of Italian querelle texts discussed by Brenda Hosington, or the three different case-studies of Machiavelli’s translational fortunes included in this special issue to illustrate this point. In each of the latter, Machiavelli’s writings are radically resituated in their specific production locales: first, Paolo Marelli shows how the long-prohibited Principe was first translated into Swedish only in the mid-eighteenth century, and published there in a printed edition dedicated to the Crown Prince in a joint publication with his uncle Frederick the Great of Prussia’s critique of that text, the Anti-Machiavel. Meanwhile Anna Maria Segala and Francesca Terrenato both reflect on Machiavelli’s misogynist tale Belfagor in, respectively, Danish and Dutch translation. These two seventeenth-century translations testify to the wide readerly interest in the notorious Machiavelli and his controversial works across Europe throughout the early modern period, and exemplify the ways in which he is ‘geo-located’ to the concerns of his text-producers and their intended audiences.

Likewise (and this should be obvious, but bears repeating), early modern translation is not simply, or even primarily, enacted on and in ‘literary’ texts: literature is one privileged category of literary exchange, privileged in its historic context by the fact that it was often undertaken by elite literate practitioners, and privileged now by the fact that most of the scholars working on early modern translation are literary scholars in languages departments, and do not identify primarily as, say, historians. The very valuable essays here by Leen Spruit and Iolanda Plescia on the transmission of scientific knowledges between Italy, England, and the Dutch Republic make a major contribution to rectifying what is often a very partial representation of the situation.[21]

In the Dutch case, unlike the more conventional directionality of the traditional translatio studii, we see scientific writing circulating in a counter-direction to the usual one, with the publication of Italian-language renderings of the scientific writings of the Dutch natural philosophers Willem ’s Gravesande and Pieter van Mussechenbroek in the eighteenth century. In subject matter and language of transfer, these Dutch texts represent a kind of transit which is very different from that of just a century or so earlier, when the British scientists of the Royal Society sought to access continental scientific advances via the translation of Italian works and correspondence. Interestingly, Plescia notes that, while the types of Italian texts translated into English evolve over time, from literary and political genres to scientific writing, Italy none the less remains a privileged source of knowledge to import: the geographical coordinates and vectors remain the same, even while the time variable changes.

Thinking through the spaces of early modern translation

How, then, can all this relate to space and a multiscalar approach to transit and translation in early modern Europe? One way to approach this question might be to take a map – let us say, Willem Blaeu’s 1644 map of Europe  — and reflect on its strategies of territorial representation and their implications.[22] The Blaeu map shows the nationally bounded territories of Europe, seen from an imagined position high above the Earth, a physical location which would be impossible to achieve until more than three centuries later.[23] Yet the distance that the picture plane of this map implies, at this scale, imposes great generalization on the places below (for example, in presenting a unified, geographically bounded Italy, or Germany, with the implication that this represents a unified political nation-state, such as their neighbour France). It serves very well as a single (over)view of the basic distances and relative locatedness between territories, whilst also being a beautifully designed information object which advances a visual argument for a shared culture, politics, and geography of Europe as a single, idealized, coherent entity, an urgent requirement when defining the extra-European other in the voyages of conquest. But we need to read further into the map to see how it can also be useful conceptually as a representation of the spaces of translation, beyond its capacity as a background (that is, a materialized, two-dimensional physical space for single pushpin data points).

Figure 1: Willem Blaeu, 1644
Public Domain: [url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3144453]https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3144453[/url]

At the margins of the map image, Blaeu’s map offers other scales for the viewer’s engagement, which take us further into these territories. The map is a carte à figures, an illustrated map which contains both views of major trade and cultural centres, arrayed along the horizontal upper frame, and anthropological representations of some of its inhabitants in their typical national dress in the verticals at left and right.[24] The picture plane as a whole therefore offers a multiplicity of perspectives: for the places, three different kinds of view, pictorial (Amsterdam, Prague, Toledo, and Lisbon), axonometric (the bird’s-eye view of the cities’ layout in a naturalistic perspective, of Constantinople, Venice, and Rome), and ichnographic (in the two direct overhead views which promote the street-plan view of the cities of London and Paris). The figures of the European people, meanwhile, appear in long-shot, standing on neutral ground with no background, implying a curatorial, informational gaze. Taken in its entirety, the image suggests a coextensive whole (the territory of Europa out to its edges in the North West Atlantic, North Africa, the Levant, and Asia); which is shown to contain a dense constellation of named places, nine of the most important of which are represented at the top (with Rome in the central elevated position); and at the smallest scale, a diversity of people, each identified with a particular territory and with their own visualized subjectivities. Within the confines of the affordances of seventeenth-century printing technology, the carte à figures thus offers a multiscalar mechanism to facilitate a meditation on diversity and geography from macro to micro, just as our contemporary dynamic electronic maps allow us to move between different map layers at different scales, from the distant overhead view, through the streetplan, and down to the human-scale street view in 360-degree perspective.[25]

The problem of the spatialized conceptualization of historicized literary space has been deftly addressed by David Wallace, in his recent Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (2016). In his General Introduction, Wallace argues forcefully for ‘an expanded view of Europe’, one which is explicitly ‘not […] an agglomeration of national literary histories […], but rather […] itineraries, places drawn together through links of travel, trade, religious practice, language, and literary exchange’.[26] Conceptualized in this way, his medieval Europe becomes an account of sequences of specific locales, a ‘place-based literary history’, where mobile texts and mobile people come together at specific points in time to produce localized textual artefacts, which may then go forth and circulate within the wider network. Place, as well as space, is the essential coordinate for this model, which in turn means it is able to attend to both micro, local, considerations, and the macro dimension of a vastly complex trans-continental system, without detaining itself with anachronistic back-projections of unified nation-state space. Literary history is thus reframed away from the conventional narratives of the translatio studii, towards a richer, more contingent, and more situated exploration of relationships.

Wallace summarizes this shift from nation-state to experiential journey through a comparison of cartographic media devices: the itinerarium, which orders points of interest on the journey in a linear form; the medieval and premodern map, in which geographic representations share the space with ‘illustrative, decorative and discursive visual matter’ (as exemplified by the Blaeu map of Europe, discussed above); the nineteenth-century map, and finally, the twenty-first century GPS device:[27]

Conventional literary history, structured by nineteenth-century understandings of nation state space, seems rather to share the aspirations of nineteenth-century cartography: to view a territory from a single, superhuman point of elevation as if it were an empty space, with its lateral plane devoid of discursive and figurative matter; the literary work analogously decouples itself from any particular locale, assuming national representative importance. Curiously, however, our contemporary experience of Global Positioning Systems is returning us to aspects of the pre-modern cartographic: for we now once again move laterally through generously mapped and illustrated ground with abundant commentary — in the form, now, of a personalizable voice.[28]

While Wallace’s argument refers to the complexities of positioning premodern transnational literary histories beyond the nation state, it can be extended equally well to early modern translation studies as a subset of the larger question. The essays in this volume have shown this abundantly, with their individual studies of translational activity as instances of particular material and social practices enacted in specific locations. Translation, despite the spatial implications of its etymology as a physical ‘carrying-over’, is decidedly geographically placed, and our spatialized conceptual models need to take account as much of that as they do of the social theory-inflected models of macro systems which are currently influential in translation studies.[29]

Geography, geocriticism and the spatial turn

Space, and its multiple interpretative dimensions, has become one of the dominant paradigms of critical theory across the humanities, with the now-canonical studies by Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre firmly embedded into the post-structuralist critical canon. These now-settled spatial paradigms have infused the humanities with a deeply debated and highly granular critical framework, which extends into all the disciplines.  In a recent summary of the state of the art, Marko Juvan outlines the genealogy of the spatial turn and its application to literary studies, noting that:

in contrast to the teleological closure of the narrative model, the renovated notion of space is open, inconclusive, relational, heterarchical, multi-temporal, ontologically heterogenous (physical, mental, virtual, actual, etc.), and above all in permanent autopoiesis, through which the geometries of physical givens interact with social practices, mental mappings, and multi-directional flows on information, resources, goods, people, and capital.[30]

More pithily, as the feminist geographer Doreen Massey has it, space is ‘open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming’.[31] The appositeness of this formulation to early modern translation studies is self-evident. How, then, can we best translate this into a model which serves for the hugely complex networks and flows of translation? Is there a way to formally relate geographical space and the interpretation of early modern texts in such a way as to add value to our study of translational phenomena? As Juvan notes, the potential of geographical methods and approaches to literary studies has long been recognized, and has given rise to the emerging field of ‘geocriticism’, the main proponent of which is Bernard Westphal. For Juvan, Westphal’s geocriticism can be best understood as ‘the study of how the multi-faceted experiences of a singular place/region are, in the course of history, represented through layers of various textual perspectives’.[32] Cartographical maps and mapping, as exemplified by the work of scholars such as Franco Moretti, are thus of less relevance to this conceptualization of geocriticism than the layering of representations of geospaces around and upon single geolocated points.[33]

If Westphal’s geocriticism can be considered to be fundamentally temporally vertical in its conceptualization (i.e., centring on one place through time), other proponents of literary geographies have pursued instead dynamic models which favour a ‘horizontal’, geographic extensiveness and the relatedness of phenomena within spatially conceived territories (as does Wallace, for example). Approaching textual phenomena spatially, rather than linguistically or nationalistically (or via the historically-persistent unconscious conflation of the two), allows for a more nuanced and flexible position which can handle complex historical real-world situations of multilingualism, multiplicity, and mobility, which the traditional national- or monolingual-identified model excludes or omits.[34] It is for this reason that some recent early modern transnational projects have formally adopted a network model, to privilege relationality and connectedness over simple geographical location, whose effectiveness as a category can be limited. One exemplary project of this type is the Leverhulme-funded News Networks in Early Modern Europe project, directed by Joad Raymond, which focuses on ‘find[ing] a way of writing that is not confined to political boundaries, but follows flows’, since ‘[d]efining scope by political (or even theological) geography is no longer plausible, because that geography is artificial and profoundly porous, and because early-modern subjects did not think of communicative geography in those terms’.[35] To think of these dynamics and flows as relational, rather than geographically tethered to the points on a map, allows both a macroscopic exploration of the situation at scale, and a simultaneous attentiveness to local conditions.[36] The large-scale analysis of network data, therefore, can give a tremendously powerful insight into trends and phenomena across an extensive geographical terrain; but we should likewise note that, however granular the detail and sophisticated the methodology, big data analytics do not allow for the kind of qualitative, subjective and relational spatial perspectives, especially the ‘intimately tiny’ ones which we have seen in the examples above.

It is self-evident, then, that we need to find a way of not just working at scale (both at the macro level and as micro-histories), but also moving through scales, for a more flexible and supple mode of enquiry into early modern translation textual cultures, which are at once radically situated and subjective, and representative of wider trends and events. We need a formal, place-based model which acknowledges the heterogeneity of space(s) and individuals’ subjective experiences of it, allied to a macro model directed towards the modelling of movement, dynamics, and interactions. Can new GIS tools and technologies therefore be harnessed by early modern textual scholars in such a way as to help facilitate a properly multi-scalar mode of enquiry, while maintaining the ‘power of the particular’?[37]

The potential that spatial mapping holds for early modern translation in particular has recently been highlighted by several scholars. In the conclusion to his 2015 article, Marko Juvan signals that:

One of the most urgent future tasks of literary scholars using GIS is comparative and transnational research of the following issues: cultural transfer and literary translation; the diffusion and interaction of literary forms, genres, styles, and themes; their interdiscursive circulation over different linguistic territories; and the international social networking of writers.[38]

While the GIS specialist Juvan highlights translation studies research as one urgent area for enquiry, translation scholars too have been reflecting on the necessity for visualization of textual circulation and connections. In looking forward from their 2017 model for the study of translations in early modern Britain, Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda Hosington ‘could envisage an even more decentralized approach, in which the data recovered through our model could be used to create digitized maps of early modern translation and print networks’, and Belle outlines a case-study of how this might be achieved in a forthcoming article.[39] But with this exception, mapping still remains something that should or could be done; translation scholars themselves have to date been somewhat reluctant to move into this domain.[40] It is certainly true that GIS tools and technologies require a high initial investment, of time and substantial intellectual effort on the part of the researcher to master new and unfamiliar technical approaches, and of potentially considerable financial resource to make appropriate datasets and analyse them; it is perhaps for this reason that GIS is still very underused within early modern literary studies, even while digital cartographic apps are one of our most commonly used everyday technologies. But a multiscalar mindset deriving from the affordances of digital technologies does not necessarily require an actual digital mapping resource to be built up-front; a primary, and achievable, goal of this paper is simply a more explicit and informed engagement with diverse spatial theories and the methods of cultural geography, and thereby an awareness of the potential of a place-based, multiscalar early modern translation studies. Such an approach could only enrich the field, by opening ourselves up to territories (both historical and intellectual) outside of our own specialized areas of expertise — as do the papers in this volume, of course. Indeed, one of the exemplary spatially-extensive projects already mentioned in this essay —News Networks in Early Modern Europe — does this very successfully without much recourse to GIS mapping, and serves to stand as a model of what might be done within the field of early modern translation studies.[41]

That said, the very particular affordances of digital cartography and GIS tools lend themselves to some immediately interesting possibilities in relation to early modern textual transits. As locative, data-agnostic technologies, geographic information systems can be very powerful, enabling much more than the simple plotting of georeferenced data points on a map. As Bodenhammer et al note, ‘[t]he power of GIS for the humanities lies in its ability to integrate information from a common location, regardless of format, and to visualize the results in combinations of transparent layers on a map of the geography shared by the data’.[42]

It is the presence of layers as the fundamental structural element which makes GIS such a promising tool for literary-textual enquiry: base maps of geographical territories can be created at different scales, allowing the viewer a sense of vertical movement through a multiscalar space on a single place, while layers can be time-enabled and animated in such a way as to show dynamic developments and trajectories over time. GIS data combined with computer-assisted modelling tools now permit walk-through reconstructions of historic spaces and buildings; while images and audio texts deriving from the historic cityscape can even be superimposed on the real-world environment using smartphone apps, allowing the user an embodied and kinetic experience of the historic research object.[43] As we saw earlier, a premodern printed map provides a single, static, view imposed by the author-function on the viewer in its picture plane. A web map, by contrast, can continue to develop its content by adding further data points; it is rendered on the fly in the browser, and can be expanded and altered by the viewer, permitting new perspectives to be added from enriched data points and via reorientation of perspective. With interactive mapping, the modifiable web map privileges mobility over fixity; textual and individual trajectories can be mapped, and show themselves to be both mobile and situated, produced by and always contingent on the viewer, just as we have learned to do for our analogue textual objects and their spaces.

Conclusion: towards a multiscalar early modern translation

If we are serious about developing a more positioned view of translation interactions, a formal multiscalar approach, possibly via the use of GIS tools and technologies, means we can construct both more intimate, positioned, contextualized, subjective views of the dynamics of translation activities, and more powerful and dynamic visualizations of macro trends. What, then, would this new spatialized geography of early modern translation look like? What forms could its enquiries take? In the first instance, it would effect a decoupling of language-exchange activity from nationally-conceived spaces, alongside a reaffirmation of translation’s radically situated status as locally-produced and place-specific; it would attend to questions of place-making through discourse, for example, in the many instances of cosmopolitan, Italianate culture created textually in the Northern centres discussed in this special issue.  We could embark on a programme of ever-richer mapping of the data points at our disposal in terms of textual actors, their travels, and their networks; we are all aware of the contact zones and especially favoured sites through which books and people pass and transact, but much more granularity is needed, and very much more could be done even in terms of basic layering and the visualization of geolocated information. A spatially attuned translation studies could undertake radically situated object histories, charting the transits and interactions of a single copy of a book through times and spaces (as does Cristina Dondi’s 15cBOOKTRADE project);[44] locate the printshops and booksellers of our period and layer onto them the texts which they produced and their individual trajectories, or the houses of their clients, proximity to other language-learning and/or polyglot spaces such as schools, schools, churches, courts, and so on.

But, as many have noted, for GIS to properly serve humanistic enquiry, a mechanistic and selective use of GIS is not enough. As I have outlined here, it is only by conceptualizing our research in spatial, scaled terms and finding the points of intersection with related fields and new technologies will we truly reap the benefits of this new paradigm.[45] Whether we materialize these notions of space in electronic spatial technologies, or locate them intellectually in the knowledge objects of the past, such as maps and books, or in our representations and reconstructions of past translational practices, the necessity of a multiscalar, geographically mobile conception of the spaces and places of translation is essential.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the editors and the anonymous peer-reviewers for their insightful comments on this article, and would also like to thank the following people, who made invaluable contributions to earlier drafts: Marie-Alice Belle, Warren Boutcher, Rhiannon Daniels, Jon Morris, Joanna Taylor, and Anna Strowe. I am especially grateful to Marie-Alice Belle for generously sharing a forthcoming article with me, which addresses similar methodological concerns around transnational translation connections and questions of scale from a network analysis perspective: Marie-Alice Belle and Marie-France Guenette, “Translation and print networks in seventeenth-century Britain: from catalogue entries to digital visualizations”, forthcoming in the next volume of New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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