Form[e]s of transnationhood: the case of John Wolfe's trilingual Courtier. Issue 1 (February 2015) - Coldiron, A. E. B.
Abstract This article treats the importance of printing and translation, and of printing as a kind of translation, in John Wolfe's 1588 trilingual edition of the Courtier. At a signal moment in England's international relations, this book brings not a new word to English readers: the included Hoby, Chappuys, and Castiglione versions were widely available in England (previous editions in English and Latin, and the bilingual French editions on which Wolfe probably based the concept of this work, are noted here). But Wolfe's mise‐en‐page establishes and encourages a newly internationalized English courtiership, and his choices of previous paratexts are also strategic and significant in the new moment. The edition does much more than multiply by three Hoby's appropriative impulses. Wolfe's page strategies, together with his selected paratexts, inculcate an engagement with alterity that offers a new answer to England's old predicament of wanting – and not wanting – what the continent had to offer.