ABSTRACT
Renaissance (and the difficulty of defining the temporal limits of each period must be acknowledged): firstly, that most of the writing in Europe during this time consisted of translations, customarily considered secondary works; secondly, that the period lacked any coherent theory of translation. Critics now fully concede the autonomous status of translated texts in the period, and have challenged the second truism, either by distilling theory from translators’ prefaces or extrapolating it from translators’ practices. Much scholarship, however, has adopted a rather hackneyed evaluative approach, which has been concerned with local and specific examples. Rener, though, offers a universal model, and Copeland contests the empiricist assumptions of other critics.
