Movement and Translations of Italian Histories on the Dutch Revolt Across Europe

chapter 7 ‘Translated and Often Printed in Most Languages of Europe’: Movement and Translations of Italian Histories on the Dutch Revolt across Europe

Nina Lamal

In the preface to the English translation of Guido Bentivoglio’s History on the wars in Flanders (1654) the London printer-publisher Humphrey Moseley stated the following:

If I say this Book hath been often call’d for, you may believe me. For, none who are not un-read or un-travail’d, but know what value is paid to BENTIVOGLIO, not only in Italy, whose Language is weare’s, and in Flanders, which gave it subject, but in France and Spain, who by worthy Translations have made it their own.1

Moseley referred to the popularity of Bentivoglio’s work in Italy, the Nether lands, France and Spain in order to advertise the newly published English translation.2 But his remark that this book had often been asked for indicates that this London publisher was aware of the publication of other editions and translations in European cities. Through the practice of translation, works such as Bentivoglio’s history crossed political and religious borders and were adapted to new cultural climates, an idea captured by Moseley’s statement that through translation the French and Spanish ‘have made it their own’. Peter Burke has called such a process – following leading anthropologists – ‘cultural translation’.3 His work has revealed the potential of detailed study of translations to “under- stand what readers in different countries found particularly interesting or alien in other cultures in the early modern period”.4 Scholars have become increasingly

1 Guido Bentivoglio, The history of the warrs of Flanders written in Italian by that learned and famous Cardinall Bentivoglio; Englished by the Right Honorable Henry, earl of Monmouth (London, Humphrey Moseley, 1654), A. 2 Paul J. Voss, ‘Books for sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), pp. 733–756 and Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006). 3 P. Burke, ‘Cultures of translation in early modern Europe’, in P. Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7. 4 Burke, ‘Translating Histories’, in Cultural Translation, p. 125.

‘Translated and Often Printed in Most Languages of Europe’ 125 aware of the importance of translation for the circulation of ideas, information and books in early modern Europe.5 Few studies on early modern translations have, however, studied the patterns of mobility of early modern books across Europe and the ‘intricate nexus’ between the different actors involved in the process of translation.6 By studying the initial publication and reprinting of texts – both in their original language and in different translations – this paper will study the transnational movement of texts and the role of the European book trade. In particular, this is a case study of the publication and translation of two Italian and Catholic history writers of the revolt in the Low Countries: Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio’s Relationi (1629), Della Guerra di Fiandra (1632–1639) and the Jesuit Famiano Strada’s De Bello Belgico (1632–1647).7 The revolt in the Low Countries was followed with great interest in early modern Europe.8 Politically and religiously the war in the Netherlands divided Europe and many histories on the conflict were written from a partisan stance. The histories of Strada and Bentivoglio were no exception to this trend: as members of the Roman Catholic Church, they were sympathetic to the Spanish-Habsburg monarchy and to the Catholic cause. Very few of these histories crossed political and religious divides easily. But Strada’s and Bentivoglio’s works found an international audience in seventeenth-century Europe: numerous re-editions appeared in Europe’s main publishing centres before the works were translated into French, Spanish, English and Dutch.9 Only these two Italian

5 For a selection of the recent studies on early modern translations see: Fred Schurink (ed.), Tudor Translation (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2011); S.K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (eds.), Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640 (Leiden, Brill, 2013); Renaissance Studies, 29 (2015) special issue edited by Brenda M. Hosington on Translation and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe; T. Demetriou, R. Tomlinson (eds.), The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France 1500–1660 (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2015) and K. Newman, J. Tylus (eds.), Early Modern Cultures of Translation (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 6 W. Boutcher, ‘From cultural translation to a culture of translation? Early Modern Readers, Sellers and Patrons’, in T. Demetriou, R. Tomlinson (eds.), The Culture of Translation, pp. 23. See also José Maria Fernandez and Edward Lee-Wilson (eds.), Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015). 7 Burke, ‘Cultures of translation in early modern Europe’, p. 16; two exceptions are Maximilian von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant translation of the Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2011); Barker and Hosington, Renaissance Cultural Crossroads. 8 Hugh Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt 1560–1700 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013); Nina Lamal, Le orecchie si piene di Fiandra. Italian news and histories on the Revolt in the Low Countries (1566–1648) (PhD dissertation, University of Leuven and St Andrews, 2014). 9 The Jesuit Jan Poszakowski used Strada’s history for his own account of the wars in the Low Countries (published as Historyi Kalwińskiey in 1749 in Warsaw). See subsequent footnotes for the various editions and the translations.