English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557

'This book deftly refigures our notions of print, poetry, and gender in Early Modern England. Anne Coldiron is one of the most original and thoughtful scholars of Anglo-French literary relations in this period, and her study synthesizes deep archival research with inventive literary history to restore a large body of neglected books to their rightful place in the study of early print culture and the English literary imagination.' Seth Lerer, Stanford University, USA 'This surprising book finds a missing link between the cultures of medieval and Renaissance England: a foundationally Francophone translating and printing of poetry from the French that is far from courtly, aristocratic, or Petrarchan. Women, in particular, form the object and subject of much of this little-known literature. A.E.B. Coldiron achieves brilliant acts of recovery in introducing us to newly Englished, but still French-accented, tales of women that would haunt cultural imagining between Caxton and Shakespeare. This generous, pioneering book deserves to be widely influential; highly recommended.' David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania, USA '... this is a solid contribution to our appreciation of some under-contemplated texts.' Renaissance Quarterly 'Medievalists will be most interested to see what happens to familiar texts as they entered the print shop, especially how medieval views of translation were modified by the print market.' Speculum '... an able, well-informed and illuminating discussion of a fascinating and unjustly neglected topic. An important contribution to scholarship in its own right, it should also act as a stimulus to further research.' Review of English Studies '... this is a sensitive consideration of the cultural capital of French gender dialectics in early modern England. It convincingly and imaginatively shows how 'Englished' works go beyond the scholastic and courtly origins of the querelle and lead an active and demotic afterlife in English print cultur