Instead of an Introduction: Medieval Europe Translated

Abstract

In the years 2011-2017, the ERC Project »Origins of the Vernacular Mode. Regional Identities and Textual Networks in Late Medieval Europe (OVERMODE)« was carried out at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The project addressed Central and Eastern Central Europe and focused on the formation and transformation of vernacular mentalities, especially on the transfer of a theological body of knowledge into various vernaculars in the late Middle Ages. One aspect of the project was a collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Byzantine Studies, in which a transcultural approach was developed. Results were presented in a series of sessions on the ideology of translation at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2013. Individual papers concerned politics, »professional« translators and the cultural dynamics of translations. 1 Lively and productive discussion following the individual papers led to an agreement among the participants to pursue the comparative approach further, which was then carried out in the years 2013-2017 within the framework of the COST Action IS 1301 »New Communities of Interpretation. Contexts, Strategies, and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe« and in collaboration with the research network of the Cardiff conferences on the theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages (The Medieval Translator). 2 In the Journal »Medieval Worlds« we found an appropriate platform to pursue further the debate on medieval translation cultures. In the present issue, a first group of articles focusing on various aspects of medieval translation are collected, and further clusters will extend the scope in future issues of the journal. The following introductory essay will address some of the research problems on medieval cultures of translation. Rather than summing up the individual articles presented in the following, it returns to the research on medieval Latin Europe pursued in the ERC Project which stood at the beginning of our engagement with the issue of translation.