When, back in the 1980s, Roger Ellis first sounded out academic colleagues in British universities and beyond about their possible interest and participation in a conference on medieval translation theory and practice, he perhaps did not envisage that the resulting gathering-intellectually curious, animated, convivial-at Gregynog Hall in Wales (1987) would be the first of a series of international conferences with a strong continental European base, which now provides a regular forum in which one can initiate, and engage with, research questions about this near all-encompassing aspect of medieval culture. Since that first meeting, the Cardiff Conferences on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages have charted and drawn anew the parameters of scholarly debate on the topic, while their Proceedings, hosted since 1996 by Brepols’ Medieval Translator series, cumulatively present a body of work valuable to anyone interested in translation in its medieval, broadly European, manifestations. The contributors of this volume’s essays, assembled in tribute to Roger Ellis on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, have profited from the intellectual opportunities the Medieval Translator conferences foster, and in particular from Roger’s friendship and academic acumen. The essays draw in many cases on Roger’s work to inform a collective project that reflects on his specific interests in translation, including late-medieval piety and Birgittine texts, scholarly editions and studies of genre, considering literary and linguistic relations within and across languages, registers, national boundaries, time and space, refining, even re-defining, our understanding of translation. We offer these essays with warm thanks to and appreciation of Roger Ellis for his work in this field, not least for establishing, with this conference series, a means to demonstrate that translation, and translation studies, is above all a question of different voices speaking productively in dialogue.
