TRANSLATION IS AN act of fundamental cultural movement, reflecting issues relating to culture, history, literacy and gender. With that in mind, this book offers an overview of French > English translation activity in England during a period when the formation of a new tradition, through means of translation, was at its height, examining this through the lens of prologues of translated works. These prologues formed a textual space in which ideas of translation, cultural transmission and other aspects of literary theory could be given at least passing consideration, and sometimes appreciably more, by medieval writers. For sociolinguistic reasons, writers in Britain between 1100 and 1450 were exceptionally aware of translation issues, and relative to the continental French, often regarded as makers of the European mainstream, they were remarkably precocious in certain aspects of their literary and textual culture for that reason.

In the early Middle Ages, speakers in much of western and central Europe used a Latin-derived language, and the textual culture of the literate was undergoing a slow process of movement from transferral to translation. The distance between Latin and Romance was perceived and experienced in ways that have since been conceptualised by linguists as a state of diglossia, with the vernacular seen as an L form of Latin rather than as a separate language. Transferral turns into translation when the H and L varieties of a language become so divergent that the different registers acquire their own names, their own spelling systems and invade one another's functions. This is what gradually happened in Latin Europe. The appearance of Latin > Romance translations in the twelfth century which named themselves as such was a crucial indication that a conceptual distinction was being made between separate languages.

The key to understanding these conceptual changes is very often to be found in translators’ prologues. Any acknowledgements within a text that translation has taken place – both by the introduction of separate names for languages and by the use of verbs for ‘translate’ – are almost invariably found in the opening lines of the relevant works.