Bibliophiles are familiar with Nicolas Gueudeville primarily for his translation of Éloge de la folie. But besides Erasmus, he translated Thomas More, Henri Corneille Agrippa, and the less renowned Gulielmus Insulanus Menapius, meaning that the sixteenth century occupied a lot of his attention. Here we examine the prefaces to these translations, by first highlighting, among the most conventional
... [Show full abstract] publishing practices, a purposefully paradoxical authorial stance, following this with extracting a poetics of suitability: between imitative writing and an unfaithful faithfulness to the spirit of the Renaissance. In the end we show that this poetics coincides with a fairly original, and rather modern, conception of humanism as universalism. This conception is itself undoubtedly linked to the act of appropriation belonging to the translator.
