John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400

Description

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. 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