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This paper seeks to situate Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny’s Natural History in the context of the development of early modern English science. While Holland’s Pliny has traditionally been studied in terms of the early modern reception of the Classics, the establishment of an English rhetoric of translation and the development of English prose, this paper focuses on the discursive and paratextual strategies at work in Holland’s rendering of the botanical and medical books of Pliny’s Natural History. Drawing on and broadening Genette’s definition of paratexts as liminary spaces of authorial—or translatorial—control and self-fashioning, the paper explores the complexities of Holland’s self-defined translation project as the “divulging” of Pliny’s medical and botanical knowledge to a broadened readership. Whereas the prefaces to both volumes of the Natural History rely on the rhetoric of utilitas, or usefulness, to span the spectrum of potential readers, from schoolchildren and “inferior readers” to Humanist scholars and physicians, a closer analysis of the marginal annotations in books XIX to XXVII of the Natural History shows Holland integrating the Continental tradition of learned commentary denouncing the factual, interpretive, and methodological errors in Pliny’s treatise. It is argued that the resulting tension between text and paratext, and between Holland’s prefaces and other kinds of liminary material, ultimately reflects changing attitudes towards ancient science, and the very nature of scientific knowledge in early modern England.

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This article addresses the ways in which Thomas Hawkins, a translator engaged in the cultural and literary activities of early Stuart court culture, but also in the transnational, Anglo-French Catholic networks of the time, appropriates cer tain Odes of Horace to assert his cultural, literary, and ideological values at the courts of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Focusing in particular on the para texts of the printed volume in its various editions (1625-1638), which include a translator's preface as well as a number of commendatory poems from contemporary writers and courtiers, this article revisits Theo Hermans's (2014a [1985]) and André Lefevere's (2006Lefevere's ( [1992) seminal methods for analyzing the 'manipulation of literary fame' in early modern England. While confirming Hermans's and Lefevere's attention to issues of patronage and cultural norms, as well as the pivotal importance of paratexts as markers of such factors, I argue that the strategies of ideological and political encoding at work in the productions of English seventeenth-century court culture are best understood when approached from an "enlarged" (Tymoczko, 2005(Tymoczko, , 2007 methodological stance. This means complementing well-established analyses of literary ma nip ulation in terms of patronage and cultural norms with specific attention to the material conditions in which translations were produced and circulated; their significance to the complex and ideologically conflicted milieu of the early Stuart court; and the social, political, and religious networks in which trans lators operated, well beyond the immediate circles of courtly patronage and influence. Keywords: translation, manipulation, cultural approach, historical network analysis, early modern England Résumé L'article examine les différentes modalités de l'appropriation de certaines Odes d'Horace par le traducteur Thomas Hawkins, actif dans les milieux de