Laetitia Sansonetti

Laetitia Sansonetti is Senior Lecturer in English (Translation Studies) at Université Paris Nanterre and a junior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. Her research bears on the reception of classical and continental texts in early modern England, language learning, poetry and rhetoric and questions of authorship and authority. Her current research project on translation and polyglossia in early modern England (https://tape1617.hypotheses.org/) is funded by a five-year grant from Institut Universitaire de France.

The aim of this project is to analyse the evolution of literary polyglossia, i.e. the co-presence of several languages within one printed text, whether those languages are set in parallel or intertwined, in works printed in England over the 16th and 17th centuries. A study of translation practices will shed light on this history of polyglossia in order to show how, through the European circulation of texts and people, the humanist exercise of translation recommended to learn languages shaped the English literary production of the period.

Recent publications include:

• Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England (ed. with Rémi Vuillemin, Brepols, 2022), the first volume in a new series for which she is co-editor with Ladan Niayesh (https://www.brepols.net/series/PEEMB)
• “Immortal passados: early modern England’s Italianate fencing jargon on page and stage”, in Karen Bennett and Angelo Cattaneo (eds), Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period (Routledge, 2022)
• “Le lexique de l’escrime en Angleterre à la fin du XVIe siècle : traduire ou ne pas traduire les mots italiens”, in Jean-Louis Fournel and Ivano Paccagnella (eds), Traduire à la Renaissance (Droz, 2022)
•  “Traduction et (re)naissance de la poésie anglaise à l’époque élisabéthaine”, in Cahiers Shakespeare en devenir N°16, Views on and from the Renaissance, ed. by Pascale Drouet and Nathalie Rivère de Carles (2022)
• “‘An pettie tanes, Ie parle milleur’: Speaking Foreign Languages in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1600; 1623)”, Études Anglaises 73.4 (2020), 472-492