Fixers

Zrinka Stahuljak is professor of comparative literature and French at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of seven books, including, most recently, The Adventures of Gillion de Trazegnies: Chivalry and Romance in the Medieval East.

"Fixers is an erudite, ambitious book that synthesizes concepts from medieval studies and modern translation theory, offering salutary reading for students and scholars of both. It offers an exciting lens for reading the work of fixer-travelers and translators across the medieval world – from Chaucer, who worked by day as a customs official and diplomat, to Arabic-language travel writers such as Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Batutta."

• List of FiguresOn Translations and TerminologyIntroduction Fixers: Toward an Alternative History of Translation and LiteraturePart I. Historical Realities: Strategy, Loyalty, and GiftOne The Politics of Translation: Foreign Language Acquisition, Conversion, and Colonization (Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Crusade Treatises)Two The Economy of Translation: Missionaries to the Mongol Empire, Pilgrims to the Holy Land, and the Gift of Languages (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries)Part II. Disciplinary Realities: Authorship, Genre, and Literary HistoryThree The Ethics of Translation: Loyalty, Commensuration, and Literary Forms in the Fourteenth Century (Machaut, Froissart, Mézières)Four Fixer Literature: (Pseudo)Translation and Manuscript Illumination (the Fifteenth-Century Court of Burgundy)Five The Hermeneutics of Translation: Authorship and Genre (the Fifteenth-Century Court of Burgundy)Conclusion Fixers: Early World Literature in the Age of the GlobalAcknowledgmentsAppendixesNotesBibliographyIndex