The Study of Medieval Translations

This entry discusses translations into Latin from Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew. It consists of two parts: a short overview of the history of translations into Latin, and a discussion of the current research objectives. The historical overview presents the agents of translation, their tools and methods, major translation movements and their centres. The second part provides an overview of the published source materials, followed by a discussion of major trends of research: philological, cultural, and historical approaches. Current methodologies combine the philological methods of the earlier generations (such as comparing translation and original, attributing anonymous translations) with more context-oriented research (considering patrons, institutional frameworks, tools and resources of the translators, their networks, etc.). Interdisciplinarity is the dominant trend in scholarship: there is a fruitful cooperation between contemporary translation studies and the study of medieval Latin translations, between historians of the medieval and of other premodern translation movements, as well as a dialogue between scholars of the different source and target languages.