Abstract
In the sixteenth century, the Spanish sentimental romance conquered the European book market. As the romances were printed, translated, and adapted over and over again, their reading public stretched across the Iberian Peninsula and into France, Italy, the Low Countries, Poland, Germany, and England. The three greatest bestsellers were Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (1492) and Arnalte y Lucenda (1491) and Juan de Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella (1495), with 72, 29, and 60 editions respectively.1 The popularity of these romances is not surprising: they narrate compelling stories in an eloquent style and engage with timely questions such as the politics of counsel, gender relations, and the tension between love and honour inherent in courtly love. What is less expected, however, is the physical format of many of these texts. A significant quantity are polyglot, parallel-text editions: 23 multilingual editions of Grisel y Mirabella were issued, including 15 Italian-French, 4 Spanish-French, and 4 Spanish-French-Italian-English (Figure 1); Cárcel de amor boasts 18 bilingual French-Spanish editions; and Arnalte y Lucenda was printed in 5 French-Italian and 3 English-Italian texts. In his study of early sixteenth-century Latin-English parallel-text editions, Daniel Wakelin observes that these bilingual volumes’ prefaces advertise their ability to provide both linguistic and moral instruction and that ‘most of the works printed in parallel texts offer moral philosophy […] or history […], which might be read as exemplary’.2
Keywords
- Sixteenth Century
- Language Pedagogy
- Moral Instruction
- Modern Language
- Language Manual
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Notes
While the Spanish titles of the romances are used throughout this chapter, the discussion encompasses the various translations and adaptations of the romances. For details of these editions see Diego de San Pedro’s ‘Cárcel de amor’: A Critical Edition, ed. I. Corfis (London, 1987), 16–47;
D. de San Pedro, Petit traité de Arnalte et Lucenda (1546), ed. V. Duché-Gavet (Paris, 2004), xxxiii–xl;
J. Boro, ‘A Source and Date for the Fragment of Grisel y Mirabella Found in the Binding of Emmanuel College 338.5.43’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 12 (2003), 422–36.
D. Wakelin, ‘Possibilities for Reading: Classical Translations in Parallel Texts ca. 1520–1558’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 463–86 (479).
On the condemnation of romance, see J. Boro, ‘All for Love: Lord Berners and the Enduring, Evolving Romance’, The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, ed. M. Pincombe and C. Shrank (Oxford, 2009), 87–102.
K. Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London, 1965), ch. 8;
R. Simonini, Italian Scholarship in Renaissance England (Chapel Hill, 1952), 12;
J. Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), 1–61.
W. Boutcher, ‘“Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature, 52 (2000), 11–52 (15).
Simonini, 81; Liber Donati: A Fifteenth-Century Manual of French, ed. B. Merrilees and B. Sitarz-Fitzpatrick (London, 1993), 3;
The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittinton, ed. B. White (London, 1932), xviii.
C. B. Bourland, ‘Gabriel Harvey and the Modern Languages’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 4 (1940), 85–106 (85).
H. H. Gray, ‘Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 497–514;
Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 1–26, esp. 21–3.
Skinner, 22. On the moral aspect of medieval Latin education see P. Gehl, ‘Preachers, Teachers, and Translators: The Social Meaning of Language Study in Trecento Tuscany’, Viator, 25 (1994), 289–324 (289);
R. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991).
J. Dolven, Scenes of lnstruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, 2007).
See B. Vickers, ‘Introduction’, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Vickers (Oxford, 1999), 1–55.
M. Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993), 86;
cf. A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 1986).
D. Erasmus, De ratione studii, tr. B. McGregor, Collected Works of Erasmus, 24 (Toronto, 1978), 683.
J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), 32.
D. Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis, tr. J. Sowards, Collected Works of Erasmus, 25 (Toronto, 1985), 24.
G. Stanivukovic, ‘English Renaissance Romances as Conduct Books for Young Men’, Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. N. C. Liebler (London, 2007), 60–78 (67).
See also L. B. Wright, ‘Translations for the Elizabethan Middle Class’, The Library, 13 (1933), 312–26.
R. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992);
K. Charlton, ‘“False Fonde Bookes, Ballades and Rimes”: An Aspect of Informal Education in Early Modern England’, History of Education Quarterly, 27 (1987), 449–71 (449).
H. Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), 55–7.
L. Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1994), 88.
D. de San Pedro, The Castell of Love: A Critical Edition of Lord Bemers’s Romance, tr. J. Bourchier, Lord Berners, ed. J. Boro (Tempe, 2007), 108.
B. Weissberger, ‘Resisting Readers and Writers in the Sentimental Romances and the Problem of Female Literacy’, Studies on the Spanish Sentimental Romance 1440–1550, ed. J. Gwara and E. Gerli (London, 1997), 173–90 (176–7).
A. Redondo, ‘Antonio de Guevara y Diego de San Pedro: Las cartas de amores del Marco Aurelio’, Bulletin hispanique, 78 (1976), 226–39.
Cf. P. Cátedra, Amor y pedagogía en la edad media (Salamanca, 1989), 157–9.
While Barbara Matulka began the trend of labelling Grisel as feminist, more recent scholars such as Marina Brownlee and Lillian von der Walde Moheno have attended to the ambiguous nuances of the romance, observing that it simultaneously advances opposing positions regarding women. See B. Matulka, The Novels of Juan de Flores and their European Diffusion (New York, 1931), 3–45, 88–159;
M. Brownlee, ‘Language and Incest in Grisel y Mirabella’, Romanic Review, 79 (1988), 107–28;
L. von der Walde Moheno, ‘El episodio final de Grisel y Mirabella’, La Corónica, 20 (1991–92), 18–31.
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© 2011 Joyce Boro
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Boro, J. (2011). Multilingualism, Romance, and Language Pedagogy; or, Why Were So Many Sentimental Romances Printed as Polyglot Texts?. In: Schurink, F. (eds) Tudor Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361102_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361102_2
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