‘Hospitality to this German stranger’

Abstract

Abstract The article examines religious translations associated with communities of German-speaking refugees in mid-seventeenth-century Britain, namely: a mystical treatise circulating among the non-conformist Family of Love, and the writings of Jacob Böhme, which enjoyed a surprisingly wide reception in English print. The discussion focuses on the textual-material features of these texts, as they represent tangible traces of the activities of seventeenth-century networks connecting German-speaking exiles, English translators, and their many intermediaries. The printed books record the circulation of those texts across dissident communities, but also their passage from clandestine manuscripts to widely-distributed printed texts, and the transformations that accompany their dissemination on the English book market. By examining together the discursive, textual, and material features of these translations, this essay foregrounds the importance of combining descriptive translation studies and book studies as complementary approaches when documenting early modern histories of cultural transfer, displacement and exile.