This lecture will first draw the modern genealogy of the primacy of (textual/literary) translation over communication (oral). This will explain the disciplinary organization of knowledge for European medieval studies, with its emphasis on textual traditions. I will then return to the primary meanings of medieval translatio(n) in order to argue for the need to broaden and reconceptualize translation theory and translation studies, which are based in the European philosophical tradition that started in late eighteenth-century German Romanticism, in order to include oral communication. For a definition of medieval translatio, we will focus on the classic twelfth-century Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligés and Wace’s Romance of Brutus and Romance of Rollo, and then turn to Charles V of France’s principal translator, Nicole Oresme, for his 1372 definition of “communication.”
