luxurious royal suite was added. In the Tudor era,
political and social trends contributed to the decline of
the Tower as a royal residence; instead, it became the
home to government departments and continued as an
infamous royal jail.
Some important historical events connected to the
Tower include Richard II’s retreat there in 1381 during
the PEASANTS’ REVOLT and his abdication in 1399;
Henry VI’s murder in 1471; and the imprisonment and
execution of SIR THOMAS MORE in 1534–35 and of Anne
Boleyn, HENRY VIII’s second queen, in 1536.
FURTHER READING
Impey, Edward, and Geoffrey Parnell. The Tower of London:
The Offi cial Illustrated History. London: Merrell Publishers
with Historic Royal Palaces, 2001.
Lapper, Ivan, and Geoffrey Parnell. The Tower of London: A
2000-Year History. Botley: Osprey Publishing, 2000.
Carol E. Harding
TRANSLATION TRADITION Translation
was an important literary, cultural, political, and intel-
lectual activity in the Renaissance. It was how the
majority of English readers came into contact with and
appropriated ideas from the much-admired literature
and culture of classical Greece and Rome. It was also a
way of acknowledging their deference and indebted-
ness to this past, while simultaneously claiming that
they and their society were worthy of that inheritance,
and that their language was capable of embodying the
ideas contained therein. Additionally, translation was a
cornerstone of the school curriculum. Students learned
style, eloquence, and morality through translation
exercises. Moreover, in this era where imitation was
the dominant mode of composition—where texts were,
in many ways, valued and judged according to how
they built on their sources and allowed earlier styles
and ideas to resonate in their texts—translation played
a signifi cant role in literary composition.
The Renaissance humanist movement led to the
wide-scale valorization of the language, culture, litera-
ture, philosophy, art, and science of the Greeks and
Romans. Translators embraced the important task of
making such seminal classical works available to the
English public. They were likewise preoccupied with
translating many of the most popular French, Italian,
and Spanish texts. It was by virtue of these translations
that the majority of English people fi rst came into con-
tact with the writings of Cicero, Aristotle, OVID, VIRGIL,
Dante, PETRARCH, and Montaigne. The demand for
texts extended beyond the humanist curriculum and
far beyond literature. Readers desired, for instance, sci-
entifi c treatises, medical texts, and manuals of warfare,
cookery, and hunting. These demands were usually
initially sated by translations, and the translations were
then followed by the production and publication of
native English texts. Printing also played a large role in
the translation tradition, particularly by giving more
readers access to more texts. The blurring of class dis-
tinctions is connected to the translation tradition, too,
as individuals without a classical education could now
read classical texts.
Accuracy and fi delity to the source text was not a
universally accepted theory of translation in all modes
and genres or amongst all translators. Attitudes and
practices ranging from literal (word-for-word) transla-
tion to free translation (a preservation of the text’s
ideas) are discernible. The different translation policies
adopted are matched only by the sheer generic variety
of translations that circulated. Equally varied was the
group of people who devoted themselves to transla-
tion: nobles, professionals, merchants, and students
practiced the art, and a signifi cant proportion of this
group comprised women.
In this period, women’s educational opportunities
and reading material were heavily circumscribed in an
attempt to mould them to the ideals of chastity, silence,
and obedience. It was deemed indecorous for a woman
to speak out or to express her ideas in writing. Such
restrictions prevented literate women from participat-
ing wholeheartedly in the male-dominated intellectual
and literary culture that surrounded them. Translation,
however, provided women with an acceptable way
into the realm of writing. As the female translator was
not deemed to be writing in her own voice or express-
ing her own ideas, translation was regarded as a suit-
able female literary activity. As a result, it was often
through translations that women became writers. Far
from sublimating their voices to those of their source
texts, female translators used the translated text as a440 TRANSLATION TRADITION