Crossing Boundaries in Early Modern England

Book excerpt: Between 1500 and 1700, eight very different English translations of Kempis's Imitatio were published in about 70 editions, crossing boundaries of language, confessional affiliation, and literary genre. This study explores the ways in which biblicism and inwardness, so typical of the Latin original work, are subject to creative transformations by the English translators. Thus, the translations reflect and even influence more general tendencies in the wider corpus of early modern English literature, for example in the works of George Herbert, John Bunyan, and early English Bible translations. Florian Kubsch worked as a researcher at the Department of English at the Eberhard Karls Universitaet Tuebingen, Germany.