ABSTRACT
Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker was the most productive Dutch translator of the seventeenth century. This chapter portrays him as a Mennonite translator whose large oeuvre and intellectual profile were mainly shaped by Cartesianism, neo-Stoicism and Cosmopolitanism. His translating strategies are contextualised in two local debates that occupied Dutch Mennonite communities between the 1650s and the 1670s. Glazemaker’s poetics of translation are reconstructed through a computational analysis of the glosses printed in the margins of his translations of Descartes and Spinoza. As these glosses flagged ambiguity in the sources, the paratext in Glazemaker’s editions reveal how translations communicated the New Philosophy to new readers while trying to resolve – through translation – the rationalist scepticism about the reliability of language.
