Anthony Munday and the Transformission of Some Continental Writings on Women and Love

Abstract

"The prolific translator, author, playwright, and intelligencer Anthony Munday produced 34 printed translations between 1585 and 1623 (excluding reprints), with a 35th entered into the Stationers’ Register but now extant only in autographed manuscript form; he also edited three others. These covered a wide range of subjects, although Munday has long been associated primarily with “englishing” Continental romance. This essay considers three translations that have received little attention; all were participants in the transnational and transcultural phenomenon known as the querelle des femmes, the controversy about women, which was responsible for the appearance of a plethora of printed works, both original and translated, praising and dispraising women, love, and marriage from the late 1400s up to 1800.... This essay...proposes to demonstrate how querelle-related texts undergo various forms and degrees of transformation when transmitted into a new linguistic and cultural context. Our examination of such “transformission” will focus on the cultural and
material, rather than linguistic, tools of re-mediation used to adapt the foreign texts to their new audience, and more specifically on their paratexts."