"Translating a Woman's Voice of the Past. Issues in the Translation of Mothers' Moral Testaments of the Early Seventeenth Century"

Among the forms of gendered discourse recently ridiscovered by literary historians an interesting example is provided by the so-called “maternal legacies”, a genre which emerged as such in England during the seventeenth century, and which maintained a certain degree of popularity for the following two centuries. These conduct books, written by allegedly dying mothers for the future instruction of their children, and presented in the form of moral testaments, represent one of the very few forms of writing authored by women which were allowed to reach publication in an age during which women were not supposed to express their voices publicly. Stemming from its authoress’s direct engagement in producing an Italian translation of an exemplar of the genre, this essay addresses specifically the question of how the obviously anachronistic language (and values) expressed in this kind of discourse should be translated today, so as to be comprehended by a severely different readership, but without losing its distinctive conventional features, thanks to which the censorship of the original texts was probably avoided.