Compendious Genres: Higden, Trevisa, and the Medieval Encyclopedia

Abstract

Medieval compendia, the Wikipedia of the Middle Ages, are a rich and productive source for medieval thinking about genre. For some medieval writers, writing in Latin or in the vernacular, compendiousness was not only an indicator of genre but also a pretext for genre thinking. It is at once a characteristic of a medieval genre and the means through which medieval writers experimented with genre. In this essay I focus on two compendious writers, the well-known Latin historian Ranulph Higden (died c. 1364) and his prolific English translator John Trevisa (d. 1402), both of whom saw the potential of compendia to shape genre. Higden used compendiousness to define a universal chronicle and to distinguish history from other large genres. For Trevisa, who translated Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s popular natural encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum, as well as the Polychronicon, compendiousness was a means of communicating with lay readers and of fashioning a supple and sensual vernacular. For both authors, but especially for Trevisa, the natural tendency of compendia to go to extremes — to accrete information, to exaggerate form, and to generate more and more language — was key to the ways in which they negotiated between genres, both long-form genres, such as chronicles and encyclopedias, and short-form genres, such as the lyric. Taken together, Higden and Trevisa are illuminating for modern scholars seeking genre in medieval literature, as well as for those keen to push the limits of modern genre theory.