ABSTRACT
Networks are skeletons, no more than bones awaiting muscles to make them function. No matter how well position in the times and places of translators and translations, little history can ensue until it knows how the translations were actually produced and received. This means reading and analyzing the translations. It also means rather more than producing archaeological lists of textual variants. Several models considered here and in the next chapter: 'norms', 'systems' and a special kind of system called a 'regime'. But first it needs some idea of the kind of activity that such abstract objects are supposed to constrain. In author's Toledo work the features of most interest were signs of pedagogical elaboration, Christianization of pagan texts, and indications of the relationship between collaborating translators. In the case of fifteenth-century Castile, where historians argue about whether Italian humanism was really understood, special attention must inevitably be paid to the translations of philosophical terms, particularly the use of neologisms.
