Title: L2 Editorial Identity Performance. French-Language Publication in Dutch-Speaking Environments in the Burgundian Low Countries
Abstract: The paratext and materiality of early printed books are, among other things, a medium through which editors and publishers perform a particular identity for consumption by their customers and competitors: as innovative, responsive, scholarly, cosmopolitan, etc. these identity performances assume an additional dimension when work is published in a language other than the main working language of the enterprise. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, for instance, numerous French-language texts were printed in the Burgundian Low Countries by publishers whose first language-or primary working language-was Dutch. I explore the ways in which the public identity of these editions’ editors is constructed through paratext and physical presentation. In particular, I consider to what extent the editorial L1 is perceptible, and in what ways these performances differ from those in the same publishers’ Dutch-language output. I begin by surveying trends in a corpus of editions produced up to 1530, before devoting detailed analysis to two editions of work by the Franco-Burgundian rhetorician Jean Lemaire de Belges. In the process, I develop or adapt a number of concepts with wider methodological relevance to book history and cross-cultural textual transmission.