John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 (Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture)

"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."--Publisher's description Cover 1 John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c.1400 4 Copyright 5 Acknowledgments 8 Contents 10 List of Illustrations 12 1: Paris in Gloucestershire 14 An Information Age 14 The Paris of the West 25 Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature 38 2: Big Form: Trevisa’s Vernacular Megagenre 42 Compendious Genres 44 Personal Information 51 My Aristotle 59 Compendious Theories 66 3: Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon 79 Everyone’s Favorite Historian 81 Translation as History: Trevisa’s “Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk” 87 Everyone’s a Critic: Trevisa’s Radical Historiography 91 Langland’s Radical Historiography 103 4: Alphabetical Logic: John Trevisa’s Index to the Polychronicon and the English Concordance to the Bible 119 Alphabetizing before Trevisa 122 Indexical Dysfunction: Trevisa’s English Index 130 From Modern to Medieval: Caxton’s Index to the Polychronicon 145 Alphabetizing after Wyclif: The English Concordance to the Bible 147 5: Encyclopedic Style: On the Properties of Things 156 Encyclopedic Aesthetics 161 Ornamentality 164 Hightness 166 Accumulating Prose 169 Doubling Down 171 Running Rhymes 174 Lyrical Encyclopedism 176 Coming to One’s Senses 178 Neisshe 181 Emotional Life 182 6: Encyclopedic Verse and Vernacular Science: The Book of Sydrac 190 French Connections 198 Scientific Style 204 Encyclopedic Theology 207 Encyclopedic Poetics 212 Roundness 216 7: Holy Encyclopedism: Stephen Batman’s Middle Ages 223 Hard Words 228 Properties Lost and Found 233 Appendix 242 Bibliography 270 Manuscripts 270 Aberdeen 270 Baltimore 270 Berlin 270 Brussels 270 Cambridge 270 Chantilly 270 Glasgow 270 Ghent 270 London 271 British Library 271 Lyon 271 Madrid 271 Manchester 271 Minneapolis 271 Montpellier 271 New York 272 Northampton 272 Oxford 272 Bodleian Library 272 Paris 272 Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 3522 272 Bibliothèque nationale de France 272 Princeton 272 Rheims 272 San Marino 272 The Hague 273 Tokyo 273 Valenciennes 273 Vienna 273 Early Printed Sources (up to 1700) 273 Edited Primary Sources 273 EETS = Early English Text Society 273 Secondary Sources 278 Index 296 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. 0This 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 What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, Chaucer’s contemporary, John Trevisa, might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational Latin texts into English prose, supported by the patronage of the baron Thomas de Berkeley (1352–1417). These included Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, an enormous universal history with continuations to the present; Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum; and Giles of Rome’s beloved 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 texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of medieval information culture. Modern readers typically encounter medieval English literature through Trevisa’s contemporaries, Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, a triumvirate representing a range of literary styles and languages formative to English letters. How might the nature of this encounter change if Trevisa was in the mix? Can big informational genres give us a purchase on medieval English poetry and prose? And how might Trevisa’s oeuvre enable us to envision a new literary history rooted in the compilation and translation of compendious information alongside texts traditionally labeled as literary? This work explores reference books in the medieval period including informational texts, encyclopedias, histories, and manuals, with particular attention to John Trevisa's translations and how these influenced the form and development of vernacular English literature