Jung, Raphaëlle
Dissertation topic:
"Paratextuality and translation in the instructive literature
of the early modern period: Jehan Drouyn's Nef des folz."
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Chair of French and Italian Literatures
Neuphilologisches Institut/Romanistik
Philosophiegebäude
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof. Dr Brigitte Burrichter
Second supervisors:
Dr Anne-Laure Metzger-Rambach (Univ. Bordeaux-Montaigne)
Class in the Graduate School: "Middle Ages and Early Modern Age"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from WS 2020/21.
Abstract:
The aim of the proposed thesis is to determine the role of paratext in the European reception and transmission of the Ship of Fools around 1500. To this end, the forms and functions of the paratext in three of its translations are analysed. Paratexts surround the actual text; they introduce it and comment on it, sometimes also
interrupting the flow of the text with comments, references or illustrations. The paratexts turn the published work into a text with several authors, whose plurality expands the plurality inherent in every translation. The diversity of voices surrounding the text (editors, patrons, anonymous scholars) and the plurality of spaces "occupied" show that the paratexts are the site of a multiple reception of the text.
Instructive literature carries great weight in the early modern period, but there are clear gaps in the research. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the great importance of moral literature in this period, which was a way of structuring and communicating knowledge between scholars and non-scholars. The choice of translations gives the corpus a coherence that is grounded in the contemporary reception of these texts themselves: the textual translation forms an appreciation of the source text, which is deemed worthy of dissemination in another language. While a Latin translation shows the intention to disseminate the text as widely as possible, the translation into the vernacular stems from the desire to expand the target audience of the text to include the illiterati (those who could not read Latin).
The corpus of this work comprises five prints published between 1497 and 1499 and written in Latin and French. These are two Latin and three French translations of Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, a moral satire in Alemannic dating from 1494. The significance and peculiarity of these works lies in their immediate reception on a European level, which makes them key texts of the instructive literature of their time and made the Ship of Fools the "first bestseller" of the early modern period.
