Corps de l’article

Introduction

If translation drafts are now recognized as an important resource for the study of translation history and processes, pre-1800 archives have been almost entirely neglected in genetic translation studies (GTS). This is perhaps unsurprising given that critique génétique defines itself as a methodology for the study of written invention in modern authorship—with a concentration on the author’s avant-texte, a term used to refer to either the prepublication materials that witness the genesis of a work and/or the phase that precedes the emergence of the text—in opposition to methods appropriate for the scribal traditions of medieval and early modern Europe, when manuscripts were prepared in the scriptorium or by scribes, copyists, and secretaries, with proportionally little autograph material surviving. Common in theoretical definitions of genetic criticism, this sentiment is expressed unambiguously by Pierre-Marc de Biasi in his seminal article of 1996 “What is a literary draft?” published in Yale French Studies:

Defined as instrumental to the composition and elaboration of a text, the rough draft constitutes a step that is almost always indispensable for the writer, leading one to reflect that drafts have probably always existed, in one form or another, even if few examples prior to the mid-eighteenth century have survived (with the exception of a handful of cases all the more striking because of their rarity). By contrast, because of significant cultural and intellectual changes that modified thinking and behavior in Europe from the latter half of the eighteenth century on, literary drafts have been preserved with some care by the writers themselves throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

de Biasi, 1996, p. 28

While they are undoubtedly difficult to locate, autograph (or holograph) translation drafts of pre-18th-century literary texts are less rare than is often assumed—they are certainly more numerous than de Biasi’s “handful of cases”—and to foreclose discussion of the challenges of studying such material hinders the opportunity for productive debate between translation studies and cognate disciplines, notably early modern literary history and Biblical studies, two fields where such drafts are attracting increasing attention, and where specialists are gaining insights into translating from discovering evidence that had been gathering dust in archives.

This article draws on this scholarship, firstly, to demonstrate exactly where such pre-18th-century documents might be discovered, secondly, to compare the way that disciplines outside translation studies approach these acts of translation, and, thirdly, to consider how GTS might engage in a dialogue with other disciplines about examining and understanding these materials. These three questions are addressed with examples drawn from the history of English literature, using autograph literary translation manuscripts from the English Renaissance. I discuss four sources of translation drafts or materials not already identified as such in libraries, archives, or public collections: (1) the papers of an author who maintained a translation practice, (2) the archives of a figure of historical or public interest, (3) the archives of a noble family, and (4) materials pertaining to a single text or group of texts held in such high esteem that all evidence relating to its genesis is preserved for cultural heritage. There will inevitably be some overlap between these categories and I do not pretend that they form a complete picture of where such materials might be encountered—I am ignorant of many sites and more will no doubt come to light—however these four have yielded precious resources already, and they offer the occasion to examine the methodologies used to understand such materials outside of translation studies. Space here precludes a full account of the translation strategies used by the writers discussed, though there is evidence enough to convince that such a project is both worthy and capable of extending to other languages and literary traditions. Finally, this study focuses primarily on literary translation manuscripts, which means that while it discusses some non-literary translation, for instance Elizabeth I and Henry Savile translating Tacitus, it excludes a host of pre-18th-century translation manuscripts.

1. The Papers of an Author-Translator: The Case of Sir Thomas Wyatt

The archives of an author who was also a practising translator are perhaps the most obvious place to begin when searching for autograph literary translation manuscripts dating from before the 18th century. Longstanding biases towards authorship of original works mean that the drafts of authors are more likely to have survived than those of translators who had no other creative writing practice. English Renaissance authors were very often multilingual, and they frequently translated works by their contemporaries, by moderns on the Continent, and by classical authors. Within the archives of such writers, one may come across translation manuscripts. Such is the case for the great poet and translator Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542). Within his album, the “Egerton” manuscript, known commonly as the Thomas Wyatt Book and conserved at the British Library (MS 2711), Wyatt’s autograph translations of Petrarch sit alongside his own imitations of the great Tuscan humanist and his other original verse; these allow one to observe the emergence of some of the very first sonnets ever written in the English language—the genesis of a genre, no less.

The will to observe the author’s hand at the moment of writing, and rewriting, and to understand their unfolding inspirations, motivations, methods, style, and élan—as impossible as that may be—defines genetic criticism. In Egerton one finds fair copies of Wyatt’s poetry, inscribed in the hand of a secretary, subsequently revised in that of the author. With its beautifully transcribed poems in the early pages, Egerton appears to have been intended as an album of Wyatt’s work, one that over time evolved into Wyatt’s personal notebook for poetic composition (Daalter, 1998, pp. 217-218). In addition to revisions and autograph drafts of translations of Petrarch’s sonnets, one finds his religious verse, notably his autograph Psalms and paraphrases (f. 86-98). These are followed by Sir John Harington of Kelston’s own rendition of the Penitential Psalms (MS 2711, f. 104-107). All of this material survives within a palimpsest of 17th-century life—later hands used the book to note down excerpts from scripture, homilies, mathematical equations, Latin aphorisms and their translation, French aphorisms, recipes, translations of the Psalms in meter; much of this with interlinear and marginal scribbling (Baron, 1976; Daalder, 1988; Harrier, 1975, pp. 1-15; Powell, 2004, 2009; Stamatakis, 2012). If Egerton is a valuable miscellany of such material, it is most precious because it contains the core of Wyatt’s poetry in one form or another, numbering some 150 poems. The versions of his poems in the earlier pages are copied from what are likely to have been his “foul papers” (Stamatakis, 2012, p. 219), a term that philologists and literary historians use to designate drafts and intermediary manuscripts. These are typically revised by Wyatt himself; a process that from a genetic point of view effectively authorizes those allographic fair copies, reviving their endogenesis, and representing at least two moments in the avant-texte of a particular work. Wyatt’s annotations and corrections retrospectively authorize the scribal copy as his own work in progress, and they produce a new autograph revision, simultaneously representing two states of composition. These versions may then be compared with a later version, the argument depending upon the nature of the latter document: Is it an autograph revision in Wyatt’s hand, or an allograph fair copy, composed in the hand of a secretary?

Indeed, some of Wyatt’s Egerton’s poems may be compared with versions in a separate manuscript, such as his ottava rima poems in the “Devonshire” manuscript held in the British Library (Add MS 17492). Devonshire contains, for instance, a version of Wyatt’s poem “Desire alas” (f. 73) said to be composed between the first fair copy and the heavily revised version in Wyatt’s hand at f. 50 of the Egerton book. Such facts stymie any “simple, linear or teleological path of stemmatic descent between E [Egerton] and D [Devonshire]” (Stamatakis, 2012, p. 216), underscoring how a critical reconstruction of the avant-texte from a text’s multiple draft versions is needed to form an image of its genesis.

Egerton has a certain notoriety for early modern historians, however. By far its most commented upon detail (and variant) appears in Wyatt’s “If waker care, if sudden pale colour” (66v), a poem that appears to refer to the illicit affair between the poet and Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII from 1533 until her beheading in 1536. Wyatt struck out the line of fair copy, “Her that set our country in a rore [roar],” inscribing above, “Brunette that set my wealth in such a rore [= roar],” rendering the object of his devotion less a recognizable public figure and one tied more closely to his personal fortunes (Figure 1).

Figure 1

The Book of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1530s), British Library, Egerton MS 2711, fol. 66v.[1]

Reproduced by permission of The British Library

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Less commented upon is the fact that six lines of this sonnet directly imitate “Sonnet 188” of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. “If waker care, if sudden pale colour” is but one of many examples within the Egerton manuscript of Wyatt imitating Petrarch’s inward lyricism, staging within England’s Renaissance court its erotic pleasures, unrequited longings, and emotional intensities. Despite persistent attempts to read Wyatt’s poems biographically, Petrarchan tropes are localized with “circumspect opacity or ambiguity” (Shrank, 2022, p. 418), reverberating less with the poet’s persona than a prevailing atmosphere of political tension and amorous intrigue at court.

In the Egerton manuscript one sees how Wyatt’s poetics of imitation was intimately related to his practice of translation. The page facing Wyatt’s autograph revision of “If waker care,” for instance, contains both a partial translation and close imitation of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 37 “Sì è debile il filo,” “So feble is the threde that doth the burden stay,” in which the poet renders the freely changing lines of Petrarch’s canzoni into poulter’s measure, an Elizabethan innovation with lines that alternate between iambic hexameters and heptameters—Wyatt combined the alexandrine and fourteener into a rhymed couplet. Within this manuscript one has the rare opportunity of witnessing original English literary poetic forms emerge from a practice of translation. In many instances Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch assume “a vitality not to be found in the original,” yet according to Rees these successes come in spite of “the prevailing spirit […] of dogged determination to overcome technical difficulty”; Wyatt’s real successes occur when he renders Petrarch’s Italian into meters “traditionally English” (1955, p. 22).

Furthermore, the poetic dialogue within Egerton between “So feble is the threde” and Wyatt’s proceeding epigram “Tagus fare well” (f. 69r) has been said to be emblematic of how “the textuality of early Tudor script culture often seems self-referentially inflected, as if manuscript texts nod, knowingly, to the textual practice in which they are implicated,” a veritable “rhetoric of rewriting” (Stamatakis, 2012, p. 60). Indeed when Stamatakis portrays Wyatt “retroping an already used lexis,” with the poet’s highly self-conscious manner of composition thematizing its own processes of rewriting (ibid., p. 64), he invokes a metapoetics of translation that connects with the claims that certain translation studies scholars have advanced to theorize and promote the translator as a creative rewriter (Bassnett and Bush, 2006; Perteghella and Loffredo, 2006; Buffagni, Garzelli and Zanotti, 2011). The claim for the authorship of the translator emerges organically in such early modern English literary history—its grounding in a close reading of manuscript revision underscores the extensibility of these methods with those of GTS.

Although Wyatt is best known for his imitations of Italian poetic forms, he was also an important translator of Classical Latin (see Shrank 2016), composing the earliest Tudor vernacular verse paraphrases of the psalms and other Biblical texts (he shares this title with Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey). In 16th-century England, the Church of England encouraged each to cultivate a personal relationship with God and an intimate relationship with sacred texts, which spurred a proliferation of translations of the psalms. If David’s narrative of penitence and redemption provoked incarcerated poets Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Smith, not to mention Wyatt himself, to produce English renditions of certain psalms, translation also afforded poets such as Philip Sidney and John Harrington the occasion for poetic experimentation. Egerton is a precious resource once more, for it contains Wyatt’s renditions of Pietro Aretino’s prose prologues into octaves; the psalms themselves Wyatt composed in terza rima. Wyatt dramatizes David’s predicament and discourse with the Lord in a Puritan-Evangelical psychological drama that has been argued to be no less than “the most dramatic and least dogmatic, most original and least sectarian religious poem of its age” (Twombly, 1970, p. 346). Turning to these texts, Stamatakis develops a theory of Wyatt’s literal and metaphorical practice of interlineation. One example suffices to show how draft materials stimulate a new understanding of a translator’s practice at this nexus of secular and religious poetics. Figure 2 shows Wyatt’s fifth penitential psalm (Psalm 102), composed and revised in his own hand.

Figure 2

[by cawse I have forgot to take my foode brede
my foodebrede off lyff / the word off trowthe I saye]

Lines 14-15 of Wyatt’s fifth penitential psalm with deletions and holograph interlineations (Egerton, MS Egerton 2711 f. 95r).

Reproduced by permission of The British Library

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Stamatakis focuses on Wyatt’s introduction of the word “brede [=bread]” at lines 14-15 of this Egerton draft (see Figure 2), contrasting it with Wyatt’s Latin sources—Joye, Campensis, Coverdale, and Aretino (see also Daalder, 1998, p. 222)—to underscore its Christological import. He draws out theological and rhetorical dynamics that merit citation in extenso.

Not only do Wyatt’s lines quoted above spell out the Logocentric import of the Eucharistic bread: here, the paratactic syntax of the virgule implies that the two halves of the second line are equivalent, that this “brede” is the redemptive Logos, the Word made flesh. They also, in an effortless show of Wyatt’s linguistic facility, mimetically demonstrate the redemptive, transformative agency of the Word—the “word off trowthe” that can trope the “brede off lyff” into the soteriological “word off trowthe” itself. In a unique addition, Wyatt’s clause “the word off trowthe” (in neither Aretino nor the Vulgate) picks up and expands a conceit from Fisher’s 1508 treatyse. […] Wyatt’s Egerton version, surpassing his sources, visually unfolds what is infolded in an already used, unredeemed lexis. Via Wyatt’s treble paraphrase above, the material, gustative “foode” is struck through and troped into the soteriological (arguably Eucharistic) “brede” (l. 14), which is in turn turned into the redemptive “brede off lyff” (l. 15), itself paraphrastically glossed as “the word off trowthe”, the Word of God. This progressive rescription, whereby each new phrase not only rewrites its predecessors but also paraphrastically develops and expansively unfolds them, mimetically represents the transformative power of the redeeming Logos. In a dizzying cycle, the paraphrastic agency of the Word corrects a fallen script by approximating its terms to the Word of truth itself.

Stamatakis, 2012, pp. 83-84

This virtuoso exegesis negotiates points of theology with finesse, yet the scholar’s focus on the translator’s progressive rescription—the intellectual independence and creative innovation exercised in Wyatt’s rewriting of sources—recalls the lauded agency claimed for translators within contemporary translation studies. In no way restricted to or by religious subjects, this methodology is cognate with that of GTS: it surpasses a merely philological genealogy or stammatics of shifting signification, for it demonstrates a literary and theoretical sensitivity to the translator’s capacity to make their words release, amplify, or even enact the latent meanings of their sources.

Wyatt’s interlineation, Stamatakis continues, is supplemented with a technique of “redemptive echo,” a strategy of translating and revising that “redeploys one and the same word but in a redeemed sense: weighing it, expanding it, declaring it, and troping it towards the Logos” (ibid., p. 85). A paradigmatic example, the poet subjects no less than the logocentric signifier “word” to this process, revising previous versions or errors derived from his sources: “word” is first associated with “sensory, sensual discourse […] Next, no less nefariously, it becomes the ‘nowghty [=naughty] word’ of David’s enemies […]”; by the fourth psalm, “this fallen, deceitful, and inadequate vocable is progressively rescripted to more salubrious ends […] denot[ing] the word of God, ‘thi word stable’”; in the fifth it is “the Eucharistic word, ‘the word off trowthe’ (Ps. V.15)”; and in the sixth, “the self-sufficient ‘holly word off eterne excellence’”; until finally, in the prologue to the seventh psalm it becomes “the Word made flesh” (ibid., pp. 85-86). A similar process is observed with other terms, such as shadow or love, on each occasion the scholar underscoring the translator’s revision of his tropes to reflect and enact a process of redemption proper to the psalms. This commentary highlights the capacity for an early modern manuscript to witness the translator drafting and rewriting to synchronize the form and content of their words, the literary historian attuning translation scholars of any period to a poetics devised by the translator in the pursuit of their own rhetorical ends.

2. The Archives of a Figure of Historical Interest: Queen Elizabeth I

The second category of sources for holograph manuscripts of pre-18th-century literary translation drafts is the archives of a person of historical interest, especially when that person is known to have practised translation. In the English Renaissance, translation typically formed part of an education in foreign languages and cultures; it was taught also as a means to access the civic, political, and military traditions of foreign and/or ancient peoples. Queen Elizabeth I belongs to this category. A prodigious polyglot, she was tutored as a child in languages ancient (Greek, Latin) and modern (English, Italian, Spanish, Welsh), and she expanded her repertoire in adult life to include Cornish, Dutch, German, Irish, and Scots. As Queen, she had a reputation of being a highly proficient multilingual diplomat who maintained an active interest in translation. Translation for this monarch was a hobby as well as a passion; and among Elizabeth’s papers figure her own versions of numerous Roman authors such as Boethius, Horace, and Plutarch. This work, conserved in State Papers MS 12/289, was once judged severely for its unconformity. The reservations expressed by Elizabeth’s editor, Caroline Pemberton (1889), who brought Elizabeth’s English versions of Boethius, Plutarch, and Horace to public attention, were sharpened by later male scholars, such as T.W. Baldwin, who demeaned Elizabeth as a “pedantic poseur” who was never more than a “learned grammarian” (1944, p. 284; see Hosington, 2018).

However, the value of Elizabeth’s translation manuscripts becomes apparent the moment one abandons the need for her translating to accord with a preconceived aesthetic or notion of “correct” translating. Her translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a remarkable document, is a case in point. Elizabeth produced this work after her sixtieth birthday, in the autumn of 1593, during her stay at Windsor Castle. She dictated the sections in prose to her secretary Thomas Windebank, Clerk of Signet in 1568 and Clerk of the Privy Seal in 1598 (Elizabeth I, 1899, xi). Curiously, however, the manuscript contains a central section, in verse, inscribed in Elizabeth’s own hand (Clapham, 1951, pp. 88-89; Elizabeth, National Archives, n.d.).

Figure 3

Elizabeth’s translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophie [The Consolation of Philosophy], October and November 1593 (State Papers 12/289 f.48)[2]

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Figure 3 shows the monarch’s manuscript with her own autograph corrections that include multiple deletions, superscript additions. Even more literal than anything one would find in a Loeb edition, Elizabeth’s word for word draft might have impressed Friedrich Schleiermacher (1992 [1813]), the 19th-century German philologist who advocated for literal translation, to draw the reader towards the foreign text and proffer an experience of the foreign. Today, however, the literal nature of the Queen’s translating is often said to reflect worldly realities—the haste of composition, no time to revise—her “‘sight-read[ing]’ the Latin, much as a pianist might ‘sight-read’ a musical score” (Ha, 2009, p. 6). Elizabeth’s drafts evince a profound engagement with foreign sources rather than her effort to produce a finished translation destined for wide circulation.

The single holograph manuscript of Elizabeth’s Boethius translation is certainly insufficient for a study of the genesis of a literary oeuvre, however it remains highly valuable for genetic research of Elizabeth’s translating generally. Her handwriting on this document was one of the sources used by John-Mark Philo to identify her hand revising a fair copy translation of Tacitus’s Annales, held at Lambeth Palace Library, London (MS 683), as he announced in the Times Literary Supplement on 29 November 2019 (Philo, 2019). This claim is substantiated in Philo’s subsequent study of the manuscript’s paper stock, its provenance, handwriting, and style of the translator (Philo, 2020). The Boethius manuscript therefore helps facilitate identification of Elizabeth’s revision of fair copies of her work elsewhere, and as demonstrated already in the case of Wyatt, this allows one to register at least two distinct phases of a translation’s authorship; in the case of Tacitus’s Annales, the Queen’s autograph revisions of the fair copy version of her work authorize the extant draft and the latter version.

In addition to the materiality of MS 683, the style of its writing allows Philo to identify it as the work of Elizabeth. He compares its literal style with that of Elizabeth’s translating elsewhere, noting that if in the 1590s Tacitus’s brevity was proverbial, the Queen “makes the preservation of Tacitus’s concise style her priority,” adapting it to her own “terse” style (2019, p. 59). But if she had no view to publication, why did she bother to produce fair copies of her translations? To return to them for future study would appear the most likely answer, as foreshadowed by Philo’s connection (to my knowledge as yet undeveloped):

In the second half of the sixteenth century, Tacitus was being read as presenting monarchy as the best form of government […] [the Annales] shows the disintegration of the old republic and the emergence of a monarchical form of government that is able to bring stability to a Rome exhausted by war. Taken on its own, then, the first book of the Annales could be read as the triumph of monarchical rule in stabilizing and pacifying a troubled state.

ibid., p. 32

For historians of the Elizabethan period, Elizabeth’s translation manuscripts hold keys for understanding the Queen’s state of mind in relation to the social and political dynamics of her government and the period. Her choice of text to translate and her own translation style come to reflect and dialogue with the form of her reasoning as a monarch and her sense of self as a ruler. Future genetic study of her literary translations will focus not on the writing of a polished or published text, rather, as begun already, on the evolution of her growing appreciation of the ancient world, its relevance to modern government, and the genesis of her “terse” style.

3. The Archives of a Noble Family: The Case of Henry Savile

In addition to the archives of authors or figures of historical interest, those of noble families constitute a third potential source of pre-18th-century literary translation drafts and holographs. Elizabeth I features as the author of a source text in one such example. In 2017 Arthur F. Marotti and Steven W. May published their discovery of a copy of the Regina’s poem “Oh, fortune” in the Gell family papers, now located in the unassuming Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, along with its Latin translation. This ten-line poem was believed to have been composed by Elizabeth while she was confined at Woodstock Palace near Oxford as a “prisoner” and denied writing materials. Never published, the only copies of the poem known previously were those made by three foreign visitors to Woodstock between 1598 and 1600, who gave conflicting accounts of the work, one claiming that it was, like her other prison poem, a couplet, etched into the windowpane with her diamond, another saying that it was inscribed on a window shutter in charcoal. John Gell, of Hopton Hall, Derbyshire (1593-1671) was a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the early 17th century. Marotti and May contend that he must have copied the poem after visiting Woodstock around 1610. Gell’s version appears in his commonplace book along with what is most likely his own Latin translation of Elizabeth’s poem, and although Marotti and May are little impressed by Gell’s rendition, they situate this work among other translations within his notebook, an anthology of poems or citations, many translated into Latin or of Latin origin. Elizabeth’s poem and its Latin translation are understood in this context of “the student-scribe’s academic, political, and moral interests,” Elizabeth serving the student as “a moral example of fortitude and personal integrity” (2017, p. 18). The scholars’ method resembles the micro-historical approach taken by translation studies researchers (see Munday, 2014), who rarely look to pre-18th-century translators or seek out their drafts. Marotti and May nonetheless underscore the potential that collections of family papers hold, for their “discovery of the text in a county record office suggests that even more copies are waiting to be found outside of such major manuscript repositories as the British Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and the National Archives at Kew” (2017, p. 19).

Indeed, the archives of other noble families have proven to hold materials of ancestors who worked as translators or who served as interlocutors for or correspondents with translators. Such is the case of the Methley branch of the Savile family, whose manor in Yorkshire, Methley House, for centuries housed a printer’s copy of a translation of Tacitus’s Annals by one of Queen Elizabeth I’s favoured men at court, Henry Savile; the manuscript is now housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. A scholar of astronomy, mathematics, and astronomy, Savile held the roles of second dean, postmaster, bursar, and proctor of Merton College, Oxford, where he was elected fellow in 1565 (Goulding, 2004, 2010). He was not only a polymath of immense erudition, known for his diplomatic prowess, Savile was also a translator of scientific and historical texts. His versions of Tacitus had great commercial success, while also being works of serious scholarship; Savile accompanied his seminal Histories and Agricola of 1591 with detailed critical commentary, and his own The Ende of Nero and the Beginning of Galba prefaced this work. He was feted in his day by the likes of Ben Jonson, who believed that Savile’s unrivalled learning rendered him an ideal ruler, “a Tacitus and a Sallust for modern times, endowed with the moral authority to write history” (Gajda, 2021, p. 34).

Figure 4

Annotated printer’s copy of Savile’s translation of Tacitus’s Annals. Formerly at Methley House, Yorkshire, today in the Bodleian Library. Bodl. ms Eng. hist. d. 240, fol. 206r.

Reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Philo, 2021, p. 8)

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In his recent study of the printer’s copy of Savile’s translation of Tacitus’s Annals, Philo (2021) demonstrates that the instructions directed to the printer, the notes, and the last-minute changes to the text offer new insights into the late phase of the genesis of this translation (Figure 4). They reveal Savile’s working methods, his approach, and strategies as a translator, as well as the nature of relationships between translators and printers in the 16th century. Among the voluminous annotations and notes in Savile’s hand, Philo identifies the significant contribution of Savile’s brother, Thomas. Philo compares the printer’s copy he identified with the recent discovery by Mordechai Feingold (2016) of a manuscript witness of Savile’s translation of the Annales and its The End of Nero and the Beginning of Galba supplement.

This manuscript is held in the archives of another noble family, the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House, the former royal palace that since the early 17th century has been the Cecil family home. Philo identifies the same scribal hand and the same Spilman’s royal watermark between the two versions (Savile being one of Elizabeth’s favoured translators), and by examining the Hatfield printer’s copy in light of the Bodleian manuscript, Philo suggests that although the former is a fair copy it predates the latter; the printer’s version annotated by Savile is otherwise identical to the other fair copy version of the supplement.

Comparing these versions, Philo offers examples of Savile revising his earlier version of the supplement for a “stylistic unity” (2021, p. 12) he will harmonize with his translation. Philo then juxtaposes the later Bodleian version to a printed version, and in a long section entitled “Savile’s Method of Translation” (ibid., pp. 14-24), Philo’s philological work assumes a GTS character as he details Savile’s method of rendering Tacitus’s “notoriously challenging prose” (ibid., p. 15) through a strategy of revision that strove to capture Tacitus’s curt and succinct style, so much so that the English Tacitus is ”yet more cynical, more Tacitean, as it were, than he is in the original Latin” (ibid., p. 18).

Philo sees the broader implications of Savile’s translation-cum-commentary and the significance of recognizing the role of Savile’s younger brother Thomas when he describes their exegetical work as “positioning themselves against current trends in classical and antiquarian scholarship on the Continent, as represented by Justus Lipsius, François Hotman, and Guillaume Budé,” and especially when he shows the “elaborate commentary” that accompanied their translation to constitute no less than “a practical demonstration of how such scholarship should be undertaken” (ibid., p. 30). While such insights pertain to the translation of works of history, they are drawn from the study of manuscripts once cloistered in the archives of a noble family. Such research underscores the potential for GTS research into literary translation when scholars cast their gaze beyond prominent institutional archives.

4. The Archives of a Text with High Heritage Value: The King James Bible Translators

Savile’s translations of Tacitus were perhaps not his greatest achievement: as a member of the Second Oxford Company of translators for the King James Version of the Bible (KJB) he contributed to rendering into English the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelation. The great popularity of the Geneva Bible in England, perceived as a puritan translation and unacceptable to the King for this and its anti-Royalist tone; the poor reputation of the official Bible of the Church of England, the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, with its errors in interpretation and inaccuracies of scholarship; the desire to quell religious divisions between Puritans and Anglicans through the creation of a single authoritative text of the Church—these and other factors led the King to support the idea for a new translation in the wake of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference that he tasked with trying “to establish a degree of religious uniformity in his kingdoms” (Norton, 2004, p. 5).

While a sacred text, the KJB came to be thought of as a masterpiece of English literature (Norton, 1993). But if it is now appreciated as an exemplar of a high, majestic rhetorical mode of Renaissance English, its translators demurred from literary ambitions or pretentions; in respecting the Word they “strove for scholarly precision, not eloquence” (Feingold, 2018a, p. 28), and “would have been shocked, if not disgusted,” one commentator holds, “to hear ‘modern praise for the translators as great English literary stylists’” (ibid.). The extant manuscripts from this project (discussed below) include notes made by translator John Bois (Allen 1969; Norton, 2011, pp. 55-110; Hardy, 2017), Bois’s diary (Norton, 2011, pp. 72-80), the marked-up 1602 Bishops’ Bible in the Bodleian Library (Norton, 2004, pp. 23-24), and Lambeth Palace Library’s manuscript MS 98 (Norton, 2011, pp. 96-98). Furthermore, in yet another instance of evidence from the period coming to light in recent years, on 16 October 2015 Jeffrey Alan Miller announced in the Times Literary Supplement his discovery of a new translation draft of the KJB. Miller’s (2018) elaboration on this finding challenges our perception of the genesis of one of the most intensively studied texts of all time. Although not yet appreciated within translation studies, Miller’s work reveals the potential for a triangulation of distinct research methodologies for studying translation archives—in this case biblical studies, genetic criticism, and translation studies.

Long held to be a wonder of collaboration, the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I was divided across six “companies” or groups of translators from Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster. They completed most of the task between 1604 and 1608, following a series of rules stipulating that, in theory: an existing translation known as the Bishops’ Bible be used as a base text and “as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit” (cited in Norton, 2011, p. 86); all previous Bibles, including the Geneva Bible, could be borrowed from “when they agree better with the text” (ibid.); any individual translation had to be approved by the translator’s company; a company’s agreed translation then be sent to the other companies for their approbation, or if necessary discussion at a General Meeting of company chiefs; and finally, Bishops were instructed to encourage clergymen in their dioceses skilled in Greek and Hebrew or knowledgeable of errors in the earlier English text to participate in the translation process (Feingold, 2018a, p.10).

One of the seven translators of the so-called Second Cambridge Company was Samuel Ward (1572-1643), known today as the author of a series of inscriptions that Miller (2018) argues are the earliest known draft of any part of the KJB. Miller’s discovery challenges our habitual conception of what constitutes a literary translation draft. Ward’s inscriptions represent an earlier stage of composition than any other known manuscript from work on the KJB. Furthermore, if many ancient translation manuscripts survive, translation drafts—the stuff of GTS—are rarer , and Ward’s manuscript, dating from 1604 to 1608, is one of the oldest literary translation drafts in English—it is older than the partial draft of the New Testament epistles in the Lambeth Palace Library in London, or the nearly complete drafts of the Old Testament and the Gospels at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which is a revision inscribed over a 1602 Bishops’ Bible. Miller affirms the rarity of Ward’s inscriptions and the unparalleled access it gives to the working methods of both Ward and the Second Cambridge Company, as well as the sources they used and privileged, all of which challenges received understanding about many aspects of the KJB’s composition, notably the capacity for individuals to work in isolation and draft their own translations prior to meetings of their company, which runs counter to the historical emphasis on groupwork in the composition.

The Second Cambridge Company was entrusted with the translation of the Apocrypha, texts of the Old Testament excluded from the Hebrew Bible but included in ancient versions of the Septuagint or the Old Latin Bible, the Vetus Latina, which preceded Jerome’s revised Vulgate.[3] Controversy surrounded them because certain books of the Apocrypha, surviving only in Greek and Latin versions, were thought to be translations from Hebrew or Aramaic (a fact since confirmed for some books), others were first written in Greek, and so, unlike the Old and New Testament, there was believed to be no extant “original” language version.[4] Miller (2018, pp. 188-192) argues that Ward’s inscriptions constitute a complete draft of 1 Esdras and a partial draft of Wisdom 3-4, and crucially, that while all the other manuscript drafts—not just notes, like John Bois’s discussed below—of the KJB translation date from a late stage of composition—composed in a hand not identified with any specific translator, and possibly the work of one or more copyists or scribes, after the majority of the work had been done (eg., see discussion of the 1602 Bishops’ Bible below)—Ward’s draft witnesses the early choices and strategies of a single translator. In this respect, Miller’s concerns align precisely with those of the genetic scholar, and his privileging autograph manuscripts recalls, for example, de Biasi’s affirmation that “the manuscript of most interest to the researcher in textual genetics” is not the fair copy, which “offers a very fixed image of the work,” unlike “the rough drafts, the handwritten documents of the writing process,” through which “one concretely glimpses writing in the act of being born” (2004, p. 39).

Figure 5

MS Ward B (Notebook of Samuel Ward) 7r, Sidney Sussex College.

Reproduced with the permission of Sidney Sussex College Library, Cambridge

-> Voir la liste des figures

Previously catalogued as “verse-by-verse biblical commentary,” Ward’s inscriptions are in fact not comments or mere notes but systematic queries and reformulations of the text of the Bishops’ Bible (Miller, 2018, p. 203). True to the directive that the translation be a revision, Ward typically copies a phrase from the Bishops’ Bible, identifies its Greek source from the Septuagint, and proposes a new translation; he regularly privileges the Geneva Bible, sometimes departing from it or revising anew. Ward’s variations range from single word changes to his rewriting whole paragraphs, and Miller traces many such variants through to the final text of the KJB, which confirms their approval by the Company. The notes cannot be a retrospective commentary, Miller argues, because they show Ward making mistakes and changing his mind; they “bespeak Ward working out his proposed revisions to the Bishops’ Bible’s translation for the first time as he goes along” (ibid., p. 211; my emphasis).

The nature of these inscriptions raises the question of the status of the translation draft, especially one within a collaborative translation project. For Miller, the inscriptions are unquestionably “Ward’s own initial draft of those portions of the Apocrypha for the King James Bible” (ibid., p. 204; cf. pp. 218-219, n.113, pp. 223 and 255). For a genetic critic, the dossier is far from ideal: the lacunae are immense, and the evidence offers only, in Miller’s words, a single “snapshot” (ibid., p. 192). Yet the scholar demonstrates how much can be deduced by gazing through this window, and he argues that the traditional notion of a draft needs to be rethought when it comes to the KJB, for “an ill-fitting notion of what a draft of the work might resemble may be one of the primary reasons why so few have ever been discovered” (ibid., p. 205). Because of the injunction to produce a revision of the Bishops’ Bible, at even late stages of the translation, near complete drafts were composed by amending and annotating physical copies of the Bishops’ Bible.

Crucially, this means that if, in looking for drafts of the King James translation, one looks only for manuscripts where the translation of even a single book has been worked out or written out in full, then such a draft might never materialize, for the King James Bible seems never to have been drafted in that sense at all.

ibid., p. 205

Miller is wrestling with the fact that Ward’s inscriptions appear to constitute a draft but do not resemble anything a philologist would normally identify as one. Unlike the 1602 Bishops Bible that survives in the Bodleian Library (Norton, 2004, pp. 23-24), Ward’s draft is not an annotation made directly on an existing text. Formally speaking, it is closer to Lambeth Palace Library’s manuscript MS 98, which contains proposed annotations and corrections to the Bishops’ Bible version of the New Testament’s Epistles (Norton, 2011, p. 96-98).

Miller’s observation implies that the nature of the KJB’s composition requires a redefinition of the ontology of the translation draft. This is an exciting proposition, which has the potential to allow many more drafts from the period to come to light. To strengthen his proposition, Miller could draw on the theorization of the literary draft in genetic criticism. In Logiques du brouillon, Daniel Ferrer defines prepublication manuscripts not as variants of a text—as they continue to be for most biblical scholars—but as “des protocoles pour la fabrication d’un texte” (2011, p. 182). For Ferrer, “[c]’est la diversité et la complexité des instructions composant ces protocoles qui font du brouillon un espace ouvert, échappant l’implacable exigence de répétition à laquelle est soumis l’espace textuel” (ibid.). From the perspective of genetic criticism, therefore, it is clear that Ward’s manuscript is exactly such a protocol, a set of instructions for the making of a text. As a draft it is not restricted by the need to be a reproducible variant or material representation of the text. It can therefore be understood also as a script for the performance of an oral text, to be debated in company. By marking up the Bishops’ Bible version of 1 Esdras with Ward’s variations, one could produce a virtual hypothetical text that approximates what might have only ever existed on this occasion, when verses of 1 Esdras were delivered orally, likely in fragments, debated one by one during that meeting of the Second Cambridge Company. Indeed, Miller (2017) makes a similar point when discussing Ward’s draft in relation to the Geneva Bible, noting that Ward frames his notes in the imperative, as though they were (or could be) instructions for a scribe to follow in marking up a Bishops’ Bible.

Miller argues that these inscriptions are the “evidence of the thinking” (2018, p. 213) that produced the translation, and his concern for this dimension to the writing is perfectly compatible with the genetic methodology. One of Miller’s examples involves Ward weighing up the Bishops’ Bible’s “such an Easter” against the Greek πάσχα and the Geneva Bible’s “suche a Passeouer”. Ward’s note “sic BB. 2. Paralip. 35. 18” is decisive: it indicates the translator’s intent to harmonize his text with Bishops’ Bible, 2 Chron. 35:18. Yet if Miller remarks that such a note is a record of Ward’s thought process, his interest is primarily philological, focusing on the role different sources played in the production of Ward’s translation and Ward’s own contribution. A GTS scholar might focus also on the systematic nature of Ward’s recording and justifying his word choices and find in Ward’s care for documenting the terminological coherence of his text evidence of his competence as a translator, something that could be compared with levels of terminological coherence across the books of the Bible and the companies that produced them.

Another Biblical scholar also offers reason to believe that more draft materials from the period are likely to emerge. In addition to three extant drafts of parts of the KJB discussed already, further evidence of the translators’ work survives in the form of two copies of notes taken by John Bois concerning a revision of the New Testament Epistles and Book of Revelation, part of a revision of the whole Bible by a select group of translators, in London prior to its publication in 1611. These copies of Bois’s notes are held in the British Library and the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 2011, Nicholas Hardy (2017) discovered that annotations in a copy of the Greek version of the Old Testament, or Septuagint, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (shelfmark D 1. 14 Th.Seld), were the work not of John Selden as once believed (eg. Toomer, 2009, II, p. 877) but of Bois himself. Hardy shows the text to have been used and annotated by Bois while he was translating the KJB—incidentally, Bois used a different handwriting when composing in English and in Latin (Norton, 2011, p. 97). Reflecting on the recent emergence of such materials, Hardy affirms that the evidence is more “heterogenous” and “much less scarce than was previously thought” and “not especially difficult to recover” (2017, p. 610), for it was listed under the name of the author and available in published catalogues. Its significance had not been noticed by the person who catalogued it, and “[d]oubtless more material could be found simply by looking up the names of other known translators in library catalogues” (ibid.). This is perhaps overly simplistic given that it was Toomer’s work that led Hardy to Selden’s copy of the Septuagint, which Hardy then deduced contained work by Bois—the methodology Hardy recommends was not the one that led him to his discovery in that instance—and earlier scholars, such as Allen, Norton, and others, have combed the evidence attributed to the official translators.

Rather, Hardy is on surer footing when he develops his idea by advising researchers to abandon their prejudices about “the ‘Englishness’ of the whole [KJB] enterprise” (2017, p. 610), for he highlights that most of the new source material is written in Latin, or Latin and Greek as in the Bois-Casaubon correspondence. He therefore echoes Norton, who observed that a quarter of Bois’s notes “involve discussion of the Greek without any mention of a possible English translation,” while even more “mix discussion of the Greek with English possibilities” such that even at a late stage of the translating, the translators worked from a “[r]efined understanding of the Greek,” and hence, “[t]he argument that they worked primarily or even solely to polish the English of the Bible as English is absolutely untenable set against these notes” (2011, p. 101). Hardy further advises that the Bois-Casaubon correspondence “exclusively in Latin and Greek about problems of vernacular translation should instruct us to take a much broader view, looking beyond the traditional lists of ‘official’ translators and across linguistic and even national boundaries”; researchers should adopt a “panoramic” gaze, and seek out “different kinds of sources,” not just drafts or corrected copies of earlier Bibles (2017, p. 610). Indeed, when approaching any translation project, we should take heed of the fact that the dossier’s lacunae may relate to our own inherent biases, and then imagine how a “panoramic” view could lead us to new sources and insights.

Bois’s notes, lost for centuries, were properly identified by Ward Allen in his 1969 Translating for King James. Bois was, like Samuel Ward, a member of the Second Cambridge Company, and he made his notes during the 1610 General Meeting of the various translation companies. Written in Latin, except when the Greek text or English translation are discussed, they are less useful for the historian who wants to know the facts concerning what each person did and how they went about it than they are for the genetically-minded scholar interested in following the transformation of sources and thinking. Bois reveals his own genetic mindset when, for instance, as Norton details, he comments on almost 500 items of discussion but shows no special interest in the reading finally adopted by the Meeting: “How they travelled, not where they got to, is his interest, as he tells us about translating but not about translation” (2011, p. 98).

This situation reminds us that genetic critics have long contrasted their methodology with the philologist’s teleological approach, the latter concerned with following the path of variants that lead to the final text (see Lernout, 2002; Van Hulle, 2022, pp. 8-9). Bois’s more genetic, less philological, interest is particularly evident when he spends far more energy discussing the translations that were not included in the final text than on how items made their way to the final text: of Bois’s 498 notes, 367 contain English, 332 have unused readings (often more than one per note), and a mere 56 contain decisions found within the KJB, although Bois never indicates this (Norton, 2011, p. 98).

Bois’s notes understandably frustrate Biblical scholars, and Norton compares them with those made by Giles Lawrence, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, who assisted with the revision of the New Testament for the second authorized version of the Bishops’ Bible of 1572. Bois’s notes are not the scholarly compendia that Lawrence’s are, for if they were, “[t]hey would perhaps reveal the logic behind every contentious reading and the literary awareness behind every perceived felicity. They might also reveal the state of the text received by the general meeting and indicate where (if anywhere) there were later changes made to the text” (2011, pp. 98-99). Bois’s notes afford only glimpses of this scene: “It is like watching Shakespeare’s brain at work while writing Hamlet without getting Hamlet itself” (ibid., p. 99). Here Norton reveals the teleological, product-focused orientation of the philologist, an essential point of difference with the process-focused genetic critic, for whom the most interesting research finding would be that Shakespearean spectacle of the mind, or failing that, its imprint on paper.

Norton’s engrossing account of Bois’s translating is not, however, without genetic insights. For instance, commenting on the committee’s failure to adopt one of Bois’s more economical and idiomatic English formulations, Norton observes: “And again, Bois, by giving what was eventually rejected rather than what was accepted and why, allows us to see the kind of possibilities the translators tested” (2011, p. 103). Perhaps here the complex modeling of avant-texte within genetic criticism (Ferrer 2011) might stimulate new research questions or results, as shown above when a genetic perspective was introduced into Miller’s work on Samuel Wards’ notes. Conversely, GTS researchers should read beyond their discipline to appreciate that many of the questions with which they struggle, or questions that could inform their approach to literary texts, have a long history of scholarly discussion in adjacent fields.[5] These perspectives can even challenge the epistemology of GTS itself. Consider, for instance, the previously mentioned Bodleian Library 1602 Bishops’ Bible, marked up with revisions by the KJB translators.

Annotations witness the translators’ work, their revising this version of the New Testament (those of the Old Testament date from a later stage of the project). Note that this copy of the Bishops’ Bible appears to be bound together from two different annotated copies—the KJB translators were given unbound copies to aid them in their work—which explains why it appears to have been annotated at two different times by two or more different KJB translation companies. These annotations register deliberate acts and intentions of the translators; some are retained in the first printed text of the KJB while other are not, which is one of the reasons why scholars can identify these annotations as a draft and not a retrospective record of the changes that were made to the Bishops’ Bible in composing the KJB.

Yet there is debate about the status of these annotations in Biblical scholarship. Crucially, annotations to the Gospels by the Second Oxford Company display three hands at work: one at Matthew and John 17, another at Mark and Luke 1-18, a third at Luke 19-24 and John 18-21. Methods were not uniform; for instance, the scribe who annotated Mark and most of Luke devised a complex system that registered new alternatives or deletions in the Bishops’ Bible text and whether or not they were accepted by the company. Allen and Jacobs (1995, p. 5) hold that the first series of annotations represents a record of the translators’ composition, which occurred in two stages, while at a third stage, the annotations reflect a revision of this work that might have been carried out in accordance with the tenth rule[6] of the translation protocol, producing something akin to a fair copy. Norton, on the other hand, sees the translators’ annotations as constituting a “working copy, perhaps created as the company made their initial decisions, that was then reviewed by the company itself” (2011, p. 95; my emphasis). He refers to this as an “intermediate draft” (ibid., p. 96), a term with a more teleological orientation. If this terminological instability shows precisely where the analytical tools of genetic criticism can benefit biblical scholars, it also highlights how, traditionally, genetic criticism, at least in de Biasi’s formulation (2004, p. 39), privileges authorial manuscripts over fair copy to the extent that sources such as Bodleian Library Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1 might never have attracted the attention of a genetic critic: not only is this translation revision inscribed on a printed text, these annotations remain, arguably, at least one remove from the translators composing, as opposed to simply recording, this draft of the KJB.[7]

The 1602 Bishops’ Bible is challenging because, unlike Ward’s draft, it is the work of a number of unidentified scribes. Even though they register decisions made at a later stage in the translation process, these are the decisions of a collective of individual translators who devise and revise their own translation. The particularity of this 17th-century practice contrasts with genetic criticism’s traditional focus on singular authorial inscription at the expense of collective modes that embody shared authorship, or in this case, shared translatorship. In recent years, however, genetic criticism has done much to acknowledge forms of collaborative creation and thus mitigate the Romantic heritage within its methodology, its bias towards individual authorship and autograph evidence (see Donin and Ferrer, 2015). There are many contemporary parallels of such textual production, like theatrical translations that emerge through the collective workshopping of a draft translation, with one person, who is not necessarily a translator, recording the changes to the company’s working text. Such a recording may be made with no one person held responsible, or it could be made by a technological device, such as a voice recorder or a video camera, and this draft can remain fluid throughout the entire production process, never becoming fixed on the printed page, emerging as text proper only in the moment of its performance.

Conclusion: Towards a Transhistorical and Transdisciplinary Genetic Translation Studies

This article has made the case for both a transdisciplinary and a transhistorical GTS. In fact, its argument, that genetic criticism can extend to pre-18th-century texts, need not be limited to translations, for its rationale can apply to any work for which autograph evidence survives from the phases of its genesis. Moreover, without pretentions to be exhaustive, this article has identified four principal sites where draft materials of literary translations prior to the 18th century may be discovered: the archives of an author-translator, of a figure of historical interest, of a noble family, and of text with high heritage value. The proliferation of archival materials connected to the KJB project is testimony to the fact that a pre-18th-century text can be a rich source for translation manuscripts, drafts, notes, and other genetic sources. This example has the particularity of being both a canonical text and a translation, and it exemplifies how drafts of a work deemed to be of high heritage value are more likely to perdure through the ages than those of any other text. Still, chance has its role to play, for the status of the KJB is arguably not the reason why Ward’s draft or Bois’s annotated copy of the Septuagint survive. Indeed, the archive remains an unpredictable space, and many of the examples discussed above are serendipitous discoveries. This underscores the fact that although this paper attempts to direct research to areas where pre-18th-century literary translation drafts are likely to be found, one must always enter the archive open to the possibility that the most valuable material one will encounter is not what one expects to find.

Furthermore, the categories discussed raise questions relating to the ideological implications of GTS research for the period. Bias emerges from a focus on persons of historical interest, like Elizabeth I, aristocratic families, such as the Saviles, or indeed canonized author-translators, such as Wyatt. For a more holistic view of pre-18th-century translation, it would be preferable to have access to a more diverse range of translator types and textual sources. But if genetic research is limited by the materials available to it, the few examples discussed here confirm that the high prestige field of translators and text types from the 16th and 17th centuries does indeed give GTS researchers cause to reflect upon the epistemology of their method, its processes and theoretical assumptions, all the while enriching GTS by drawing it into dialogue with the other fields of research.

This article has highlighted instances of translators revising fair copy versions of their work (Wyatt and Elizabeth I), printer’s copy (Savile), or print editions of past translators (the KJB translators). These examples underscore how the nature of manuscript production in the period and the kinds of evidence it produces require genetic critics to be aware that their inherent bias towards drafts composed in the writer’s hand can lead them to pass over fair copy manuscripts and other printed forms, and therefore miss such cases of authorial and/or translatorial rewriting. If scholars of this period were to adhere to de Biasi’s view that “the manuscript of most interest to the researcher in textual genetics” cannot be the fair copy because of its “very fixed image of the work,” then they might overlook exactly those “rough drafts, the handwritten documents of the writing process, [in which] one concretely glimpses writing in the act of being born” (2004, p. 39). As shown, the mere fact of being fair copy does not imply a manuscript’s fixity, which medievalists have long recognized in their debates around manuscript “mouvance” (Zumthor, 1972, pp. 64-106). When authors or translators revise fair copy versions of their work, their signature retrospectively authorizes that past version and revives the fluidity of the draft, renewing the work’s textual genesis. It is encouraging to see the regular discovery of new holographs and other autograph evidence from the drafting of texts in this period, and to hear predictions by scholars, such as Hardy (2017, p. 610), that many more translation drafts, notes, and other such evidence will inevitably come to light. GTS will do well to register Hardy’s observation that scholars should not assume that this evidence will exist as English-language sources, for the genesis of a literary translation inevitably involves not only the negotiation of source and target language materials but expression in all the tongues of those engaged in the genesis. Above all, Miller’s exciting proposition that literary drafts from the period will not resemble those we have come to expect may prove decisive in allowing genetic research to flourish where it once seemed impossible. GTS researchers should heed these calls as they expand the remit of genetic criticism by venturing into archives where pre-18th-century materials await discovery, or indeed rediscovery, with a lucid and fresh, genetic perspective.