What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English
prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De
proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades.
This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book
argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive
reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling
vast quantities of information.
Author(s): Emily Steiner
Series: Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 304
City: Oxford
Cover
John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c.1400
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Illustrations
1: Paris in Gloucestershire
An Information Age
The Paris of the West
Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature
2: Big Form: Trevisa’s Vernacular Megagenre
Compendious Genres
Personal Information
My Aristotle
Compendious Theories
3: Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon
Everyone’s Favorite Historian
Translation as History: Trevisa’s “Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk”
Everyone’s a Critic: Trevisa’s Radical Historiography
Langland’s Radical Historiography
4: Alphabetical Logic: John Trevisa’s Index to the Polychronicon and the English Concordance to the Bible
Alphabetizing before Trevisa
Indexical Dysfunction: Trevisa’s English Index
From Modern to Medieval: Caxton’s Index to the Polychronicon
Alphabetizing after Wyclif: The English Concordance to the Bible
5: Encyclopedic Style: On the Properties of Things
Encyclopedic Aesthetics
Ornamentality
Hightness
Accumulating Prose
Doubling Down
Running Rhymes
Lyrical Encyclopedism
Coming to One’s Senses
Neisshe
Emotional Life
6: Encyclopedic Verse and Vernacular Science: The Book of Sydrac
French Connections
Scientific Style
Encyclopedic Theology
Encyclopedic Poetics
Roundness
7: Holy Encyclopedism: Stephen Batman’s Middle Ages
Hard Words
Properties Lost and Found
Appendix
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Aberdeen
Baltimore
Berlin
Brussels
Cambridge
Chantilly
Glasgow
Ghent
London
British Library
Lyon
Madrid
Manchester
Minneapolis
Montpellier
New York
Northampton
Oxford
Bodleian Library
Paris
Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 3522
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Princeton
Rheims
San Marino
The Hague
Tokyo
Valenciennes
Vienna
Early Printed Sources (up to 1700)
Edited Primary Sources
EETS = Early English Text Society
Secondary Sources
Index
