scholarly journals Behind the Early Modern English Translation of The Laws of Oléron: Determining the Underlying French Text

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (6) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Kinga Lis
Keyword(s):  
French Text ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
French Texts

The objective of this paper is to analyse the sixteenth-century French texts which might lie behind an Early Modern English translation of a sea-code known as the Laws of Oléron, in an attempt to determine which of them served as the actual basis for the rendition. The original code has been dated back to the thirteenth century, with the earliest extant copies coming from the fourteenth century, at which point it was already known and used in England. It was not, however, before the sixteenth century that a translation was commissioned and appeared in a book called The Rutter of the Sea. The publication in question went through multiple editions and the views concerning the French text that served as the basis for the rendition diverge greatly. This paper analyses the various proposed theories and juxtaposes the actual French texts with each other and the Early Modern English translation.

scholarly journals On the Earliest English Translation of the Laws of Oléron and Its Editions

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-118
Author(s):  
Kinga Lis
Keyword(s):  
French Text ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Mutual Relationship ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
North Western

Abstract The Laws of Oléron are a compilation of regulations binding in north-western Europe. They concern relationships on board a ship and in ports, as well as between members of one crew and those of another when it comes to safe journey. Even though the “code” was known in England at the beginning of the 14th century, it was only in the 16th century that it was translated from French into (Early Modern) English. The literature on the topic mentions two independent 16th-century renditions of the originally French text (Lois d’Oléron) but disagrees as to the authorship of the earliest translation, its date and place of creation, the mutual relationship between the two, their content and respective source texts. Strikingly, three names appear in this context: Thomas Petyt, Robert Copland, and W. Copland. The picture emerging from various accounts concerning the translations is very confusing. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the history of the misconceptions surrounding the Early Modern English versions of the Laws of Oléron, and to illustrate how, by approaching them from a broader perspective, two hundred years of confusion can be resolved. The wider context adopted in this study is that of a book as a whole, and not of an individual text within the book, set against the backdrop of the printing milieu. The investigation begins with a brief inquiry into the lives and careers of the three people named with respect to the two renditions, in an attempt to determine whether these provide any grounds for disagreement. The analysis also juxtaposes the relevant renditions as far as their contents, layout, and the actual texts are concerned in order to establish what the relationship between them is and whether it could account for the confusion surrounding the translations.

Glimmers of the World Soul in Kabbalah

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-150
Author(s):  
Jeremy P. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

Brown interrogates the status of the world soul in medieval and early modern Kabbalah. He advances a critical distinction between stronger and weaker fields for determining this inquiry, namely, between (a) the kabbalists’ explicit uses of the Platonic term “world soul,” which are rare and begin primarily during the sixteenth century, and (b) Kabbalah’s hypostatic psychology. The latter dates back to the infancy of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century. While sharing affinities with Neoplatonic cosmo-psychology, it does adopt its technical terminology. Special attention focuses on attempts during the Renaissance to render the teachings of Isaac Luria into the philosophical idiom of the world soul, and in particular, a nexus of Lurianic speculation that related the distillation of the primordial ether from the abyssal depth, or ʾEn Sof. Conclusion explores the dynamics of Kabbalah’s uneasy relationship with this facet of the Platonic philosophical heritage.

Complexity in national legislation of the Early Modern English period

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anu Lehto
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Genre Studies ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Systematic Method ◽  
National Legislation ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Early English

This paper concentrates on Early Modern English statutes printed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study considers the development of complexity and the rise of modern writing conventions by following the diachronic pragmatic view. The analysis also draws on genre studies and underlines the sociohistorical impact on linguistic changes. Complexity is assessed by a systematic method that observes the textual structure and syntax. The material consists of legislative documents in Early English Books Online; six of the documents were transcribed and compiled into a small-scale corpus. The results indicate that complexity was a common feature in the Early Modern English period: coordination and subordination are frequently used, and the sixteenth-century documents have an increasing tendency to favour subordination. During the sixteenth century, legislative sentences and text type structure become more regular and correspond to present-day practices.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

scholarly journals De Beneficentia: A Homily on Social Action attributed to Basil of Caesarea

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (5) ◽  
pp. 457-481
Author(s):  
Susan R. Holman ◽  
Caroline Macé ◽  
Brian J. Matz
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Social Action ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Greek Text ◽  
Manuscript Dating ◽  
Manuscript Text

Abstract This paper introduces an anonymous work attributed to Basil of Caesarea entitled, De beneficentia, or “On beneficence.” The text is known from one manuscript dating to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Phillipps 1467 (gr. 63), a collection of genuine and pseudonymous Basilian homilies. Although pseudonymous and extant (as far as we can determine) only in this sole manuscript, in some quoted fragments from the ninth and twelfth centuries, and in a sixteenth-century Latin translation, De beneficentia, shares a number of characteristics common to social homilies preached in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. This paper discusses the Berlin manuscript text in the context of the known fragments, other spurious, dubious, or pseudonymous homilies attributed to Basil, and its attributed relationship to social preaching in Christian late antiquity, and offers a new edition of the Greek text with its first English translation.

May under verbs of hoping: Evolution of the modal system in the complements of hoping verbs in Early Modern English

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Yanovich
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Compositional Semantics ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Recent Innovation ◽  
Two Stages ◽  
Late Modern

The chapter traces two stages of the rise of the may-under-hope construction of Late Modern English, present in examples like (i) Dearest, I hope we may be on such terms twenty years hence. Despite the archaic feel to it, this construction is in fact a very recent innovation that arose not earlier than the sixteenth century. I conjecture that its elevated flavor does not stem from its old age, but rather was inherited from another construction, with the inflectional subjunctive under hope. Along the way, I also present evidence that the textual absence of may under verbs of hoping before the rise of this construction was not due to narrow compositional semantics.

The “Calculatores” in Early Sixteenth-century Physics

1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Continuity Theory ◽  
Discontinuity Theory

The aim of this paper is to report some little-known aspects of sixteenth-century physics as these relate to the development of mechanics in the seventeenth century. The research herein reported grew out of a study on the mechanics of Domingo de Soto, a sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic,1 which has been concerned, in part, with examining critically Pierre Duhem's thesis that the English “Calculatores” of the fourteenth century were a primary source for Galileo's science.2 The conclusion to which this has come, thus far, is that Duhem had important insights into the late medieval preparation for the modern science of mechanics, but that he left out many of the steps. And the steps are important, whether one holds for a continuity theory or a discontinuity theoryvis-à-visthe connection between late medieval and early modern science.

Biblical Languages and National-Religious Boundaries in Muscovy

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-22
Author(s):  
Isaiah Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Biblical Languages

Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”

Between Homonymy and Polysemy: The Origins and Career of the English Form Dialect in the Sixteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 134 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Van Rooy ◽  
John Considine
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
English Word ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe emergence of the form dialect in early modern English is often mentioned in histories of the language, but important as it is, the evidence for it has never been analyzed as a whole, and its treatment in the revised OED entry for dialect leaves room for modifications. This article presents and re-evaluates the evidence for dialect in sixteenth-century English sources. It demonstrates that there were two homonyms with this form, one a shortening of English dialectics and one a borrowing from post-classical Latin dialectus, from its Greek etymon διάλεκτος, and, less often, from French dialecte. After treating dialect ‘dialectics’ briefly, it explores the known attestations of dialect ‘kind of language’, showing the range of senses in which this word could be used, and the ways in which it can be shown to have spread from one user of English to another, beginning with one clearly defined expatriate learned circle in the 1560s, entering more general learned use in the 1570s and 1580s, and becoming a fully naturalized literary English word in the 1590s. The paper therefore offers a detailed case-study of the naturalization of a learned word in early modern English and also contributes to the history of the conceptualization of language variation in sixteenth-century England.

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