Reviewed by:

• Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages ed. by Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood
• John Kennedy

Although ‘Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages’ is the title of an international project that has produced at least two conferences to date, and one in which the editors of the volume now being considered play leading roles, there is no overt attempt in this book to establish any association with project activity. The book contains thirteen single-author chapters and an introductory essay by the editors. Despite the common connotations of the word ‘insular’ in medieval studies, the focus here in on the high and late Middle Ages, not the centuries before 1000, and Iceland receives prominence beside Britain and Ireland. Though England receives some attention, particularly in chapters on Welsh translations of English Tudor period prophecy literature, and on Anglo-Latin abuse poetry during the Hundred Years’ War, as well as in Rory McTurk’s essay examining alliterative patterns in Piers Plowman and skaldic poetry, the emphasis of the volume is on the literatures of Wales, Ireland, and Iceland. Scotland does not feature here.

Nine of the thirteen chapters after the introduction are largely devoted to considering the practice of translators (or as some authors prefer to say, ‘redactors’) in rendering into the vernacular Latin texts from antiquity or the Middle Ages (and to a considerably lesser extent texts from other medieval vernaculars). The source texts are varied—from the Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid (both rendered into Irish) to De excidio Troiae historia attributed to Dares Phrygius (c. fifth century ce) and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (both rendered into Icelandic). The emphasis of the chapters is on what the translators or redactors have achieved, considered in the light of the milieu in which they worked and their likely audiences: source study has a long history, but the focus here is not on tracking down sources for its own sake as an intellectual exercise, or on demonstrating how a translator failed to appreciate the subtleties of the source text. The studies here lead in most cases to an enhanced appreciation of what was achieved in the reworking of the source.

Other essays consider gentry libraries in late medieval Wales and discuss the possibility that the portrayal of the paradisiacal Glæsisvellir, ‘Shining Fields’, in Icelandic sources may have been directly influenced by something similar in Irish [End Page 189] mythology. It will be apparent that the broad theme of ‘crossing borders’ has been interpreted so as to allow contributors considerable latitude. In discussing the Anglo-Latin abuse poetry Joanna Bellis admits that the poems ‘did not so much cross a border [...] as erect one’ (p. 109), and in seeing parallels between what he describes as contrapuntal alliteration in William Langland’s great poem and the work of the earlier Norse poets McTurk understandably makes no suggestion that the skalds exerted a literary influence in fourteenth century England.

The chapters in this volume are very lucidly written (though Sif Ríkhardsdóttir’s more theoretical discussion of emotive literary identities, emotive script, and emotive coding in the earlier part of her essay is understandably a bit more challenging). In general, they do not focus on the major historical subjects or the best-known literary masterpieces of medieval insular cultures (but Sif Ríkhardsdóttir has some brief but interesting comments on Njáls saga and Egils saga Skallagrímssonar). Leading scholars are represented in the volume, and most of the chapters have extensive and useful individual biographies, typically extending over at least three pages. There is an index of manuscripts and a general index, but, somewhat disappointingly, no biographical information about the contributors or systematic indication of institutional affiliation.

The study of medieval translation practices is a field increasingly attracting attention, and those concerned with that subject should find this volume a rich resource. Other students of medieval literature, particularly those whose interest is...

审核人：

• 跨越岛国中世纪的边界ed。通过艾斯林·伯恩（Aisling Byrne）和维多利亚洪水（Victoria Flood）
• 约翰·肯尼迪

尽管“跨越岛国中世纪”是一个国际项目的名称，迄今为止，该项目至少已召开了两次会议，其中一次被认为是该卷的编辑发挥了主导作用，但在这一方面没有公开的尝试。预定与项目活动建立任何关联。这本书包含13个单作者章节，以及由编辑撰写的介绍性文章。尽管在中世纪研究中“孤立的”一词有共同的含义，但这里的重点是中世纪的中世纪和晚期，而不是1000年前的几个世纪，冰岛在英国和爱尔兰旁边倍受关注。尽管英格兰受到了一些关注，特别是在有关英国都铎时期预言文学的威尔士语翻译以及《百年战争》中盎格鲁-拉丁滥用诗歌的章节中，皮尔斯·普罗曼（Piers Plowman）和斯卡迪奇诗歌，该卷的重点是威尔士，爱尔兰和冰岛的文学作品。苏格兰在这里没有特色。

引言后的十三章中有九章主要考虑翻译者（或像某些作者更喜欢说的“编剧”）将古代或中世纪的拉丁文字翻译成文字的实践（程度相对较小）其他中世纪话语的文字）。源文本是多种多样的，从埃涅阿斯纪和斯塔提乌斯的Thebaid（包括渲染成爱尔兰），以德excidio Troiae史记归因于敢弗里时斯（Ç。第五世纪CE）和蒙茅斯的杰弗里史记regum Britanniae（都渲染成冰岛语）。这些章节的重点是翻译人员或编校人员所取得的成就，要根据他们工作的环境和可能的读者来考虑：来源研究源远流长，但是这里的重点不是寻找其翻译来源。自己的缘故，作为一种智力活动，或者说明译者如何无法欣赏源文本的微妙之处。在大多数情况下，这里的研究使人们更加了解在修改来源方面所取得的成就。

其他文章则考虑了中世纪威尔士晚期的士绅图书馆，并讨论了在冰岛资料中，天堂般的Glæsisvellir的写照“ Shining Fields”可能直接受到爱尔兰[End Page 189]神话的类似影响的可能性。显然，“跨界”这一宽泛的主题已经得到了解释，以便使捐助者有很大的自由度。在讨论盎格鲁-拉丁滥用诗歌时，乔安娜·贝利斯承认这首诗“与其说是跨界不如竖立”（第109页），而且是因为他看到威廉所说的对立论断之间存在相似之处。daccess-ods.un.org daccess-ods.un.org可以理解，兰兰德的伟大诗作和早期北欧诗人麦克图克的著作没有暗示斯卡德夫妇在十四世纪的英国产生了文学影响。

本卷中的各章非常清楚（尽管SifRíkhardsdóttir在文章的较早部分中对情感文学身份，情感剧本和情感编码进行了更为理论化的讨论，这更具挑战性，这是可以理解的）。一般情况下，他们不专注于重大历史题材或中世纪岛屿文化的最著名的文学名著（但西芙Ríkhardsdóttir有一些简短而有趣的评论Njáls传奇和Egils传奇Skallagrímssonar）。本书中有著名学者的代表，并且大多数章节都有详尽且有用的个人传记，通常覆盖至少三页。有一份手稿索引和一个综合索引，但令人失望的是，没有有关贡献者的传记信息或系统性的机构隶属关系。

对中世纪翻译实践的研究是一个越来越引起人们注意的领域，与该主题相关的人们应该从中找到丰富的资源。其他中世纪文学的学生，尤其是那些对...感兴趣的学生