STUDIES OF TRANSLATIO typically focus on transformations of texts that occurred in the context of medieval practices of copying and authorship, including compiling, parsing, and “translating” languages, as well as on authorial efforts to convey auctoritas. In recent centuries, however, most critical interactions with medieval literary works and their authors have been experienced in and mediated through printed representations of these texts. In creating and using print texts, whether critical editions or massmarket paperbacks, editors and critics have introduced new acts of translatio that have remained fairly invisible to the critical lens. Such print-era practices as typography, modernized spelling, footnotes, glossaries, a focus on authorial intention, and a preference for a single, authoritative text rather than the simultaneous presence of competing witnesses, have profoundly shaped conceptions of medieval authorship and textuality and coloured the way we understand, read, and teach medieval literature.

When we discuss medieval auctoritas, and particularly the authoring of vernacular literature, we cannot do so without recourse to acts of translatio. A. J. Minnis has remarked that “[t] he work of an auctor was a book worth reading; a book worth reading had to be the work of an auctor. No ‘modern’ writer could decently be called an auctor in a period in which men saw themselves as dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, i.e. the ‘ancients.’ “ The central image Minnis uses may be traced back at least as far as Bernard of Chartres, who reputedly stated, “we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.” This metaphor presents a mixed opinion of the dwarves, who simultaneously see more—and farther—but are less capable than their predecessors, a feeling not unfamiliar to many editors today. And what those dwarves were doing when they set quill to parchment constituted acts of translatio such as translating, compiling, and synthesizing. At times the goal of these acts was to relay faithfully the auctoritas of some previous giant. But we also find in these acts of translatio medieval processes of authoring literary works, processes that are often far removed from our own notions of what it means to be an author.