In this ambitious study, Massimiliano Morini combines detailed analysis of Tudor translation theory and practice with the cultural argument that changing theories and practices of English translation coincide with shifts in England's position in the European political and cultural scene. Agreeing with Francis Otto Matthiessen (1931) that translations brought the Renaissance to England, and focusing on translations of secular texts into English from European languages, Morini examines the figures and practices by which English writers imagined and facilitated cultural encounter through translation, in the process exposing their beliefs about language and textuality. As Morini shows, translation puts pressure on how language conveys meaning: is meaning, for instance, contained in words like “good medicines in wooden boxes” (47), as one common translation trope he quotes suggests? How important is the sound or etymology of the original words, or the rhetorical shape of the original phrasing, or the social register or decorum of the original diction? Translators have answered these questions differently in different time periods and circumstances. Given the centrality of translations and of the movement of texts and people across national and regional borders to the culture of the English Renaissance, Morini's book contributes to the ongoing reassessment of early modern international and interregional exchanges.

Tudor Translation examines a period of transition in translation practices between what Morini defines as medieval translation, which encouraged significant changes to examples and rearrangement of text, and modern translation, in which translators strive for minimal differences of style and content from the original. During the Tudor period, medieval and modern practices coexisted, as humanist goals of translator invisibility and textual fluency began intermittently to be adopted. The first half of the book, on Tudor translation theory, includes a section on figurative language about translation. The book's second half, on the practice of translation, is divided into chapters on poetry and on prose.

Morini notes an increasingly assertive approach to the original in metaphors describing translation used in the later sixteenth century, an approach that he argues reflects increasing English confidence and national pride. The content of translations also reveals national investments: Morini suggests that Holland's translation of Livy tended to encourage the English to imagine themselves as conquerors by “Englishing” the text and that Hoby's enthusiasm for translation places it as a patriotic duty in a context of “strife” with other nations. Since, as Morini notes, translation is an ethically charged practice, one that deals with linguistic and cultural difference, I think even more such analysis would be productive. For instance, how does the notion that borrowing from another language could bankrupt English reflect or inflect Tudor ideas about cultural contact, community, and difference? What are the implications of the gendering of translation? Morini's catalog of tropes (which also includes slaves and conquerors, clothing, and digestion) suggests that some of these figures were used quite flexibly, so that, depending on how the writer imagined the relationship between the two languages at a particular time, translation could be described as enriching or bankrupting, impregnating or being impregnated.

In support of his persuasive overall argument that translation choices reveal the translators’ beliefs about the nature of language and about the cultural position of English in relation to the languages of the originals, Morini examines a range of secular translations. For instance, he contrasts two translations of the Celestina, one by John Rastell (1525) that freely adapts the original and one by James Mabbe (1531) that translates according to more modern norms but edits the text to avoid words and phrases that the translator saw as blasphemous. Morini also discusses John Florio's translation of Michel de Montaigne, which is marked by the unapologetic addition of rhetorical copia, and Holland's Livy, which includes amplifications that Holland considered appropriate for a great orator, as well as English colloquialisms.

In the poetry chapter, Morini treats John Harington's famous translation of Orlando furioso in terms of negotiating the genre of epic (esp. Virgil's legacy) and as an autobiographical statement (including the cameo Harington gives his spaniel in Canto XLI) in which Harington alters the original to create a fluent and culturally Elizabethan version. Morini is in his element when tracing translation choices in detail, displaying his sympathy for the translator's task and sensitivity to the details of both languages. A comparison between translations of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1581) by Richard Carew (1594) and Edward Fairfax (1600) reinforces Morini's point that the practice of translation was in transition in sixteenth-century England and also highlights the types of judgments involved in making any translation. Although the two translators are writing only six years apart, Carew tends to privilege word-for-word homology wherever possible, whereas Fairfax adds details like colors, classical allusions, and figurative language, along with moral, religious, and misogynistic commentary, in order to make the English version correspond to particular Elizabethan notions of eloquence.

A new appraisal of the international and interregional exchanges that characterized the early modern period is under way, as scholars emphasize new ways and reevaluate old ways of thinking about the internationalism of the Renaissance. Tudor Translation's contribution is to show how the theory and practice of translation articulated changing notions of English language and culture, within a European frame, during this transitional time.