Translation functioned in the “long” sixteenth century as both a practice and a metaphor. The period saw an explosion of translation between European vernacular languages, a significant development which did much, in concert with other forces, to vitiate the powerful authority of classical culture, even as translations from Greek and Latin continued to abound. But translation also comes to describe in an increasingly suggestive manner the various modes of cultural transmission which constituted a central dimension of early modernity.

Translation – tradurre in Italian, vertere and translatio in Latin – is defined by John Florio as “to traduce, to transpose, to bring or leade over, to bring, to convay, to remove from one place to another. Also to translate from out of one tongue into another.” Susan Sontag, in a recent essay on translation, evokes these and several other senses of the term as “to circulate, to transport, to disseminate, to explain, to make (more) accessible.” Translation serves as a means of recovering access to the material culture of the past and its effects that the term “Renaissance” has denoted since Jules Michelet, Jacob Burckhardt, John Addington Symonds, and other scholars of the period took it up in the nineteenth century: retrieving the past, however, through a process mediated by the critical language of the present.