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

Abstract

Reviewed by: John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner Matthew Boyd Goldie Emily Steiner. John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 287. $80.00. John Trevisa, father of English prose? Is that a prosaic father, or can informative writing be beautiful? What contributions to a history of style does [End Page 425] a translator make? What is the relationship between facts and literature? When have there been "information ages"? Emily Steiner's John Trevisa's Information Age asks these questions and offers thoughtful answers in seven carefully researched chapters. Each draws attention to Trevisa's contributions to English, English literature, and English "information culture" (1). The book contends that Trevisa's translations of compendious works helped shape English literary prose style and English literature more broadly by making English a suitable and even eloquent vernacular to communicate historical, scientific, and didactic learning. As most readers know perhaps more implicitly than explicitly, Trevisa translated Ranulph Higden's universal history, the Polychronicon; Bartholomaeus Anglicus's encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum; Giles of Rome's mirror for princes, De regimine principum; and other shorter works. As David Fowler suggested in his 1995 biography, Trevisa was possibly from Cornwall and spent most of his life at Oxford before securing a position as chaplain, canon, and vicar for Thomas de Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He is presumed to have died in 1402, so he is an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. His works survive in about thirty manuscripts as well as early prints by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Thomas Berthelet, and Stephen Batman. Steiner concentrates on the Polychronicon and De proprietatibus rerum more than on De regimine principum or other translations, and she also glances sideways into Trevisa's "information age" by considering Piers Plowman, the Concordance to the Wycliffite Bible (c. 1425), and the earlier versified encyclopedia Le livre de Sydrac (c. 1275). Most of the chapters examine Trevisa's divergences from and additions to his sources, the characteristics of his style, and how the large scale of his translations makes the late fourteenth century an age of information in England, following similar projects in France and elsewhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One recurring topic in the book concerns form—the compendium versus the monograph and how book history and the canon would look if we considered the compilation as central to manuscript and print publication. After all, if every compilation/compendium/florilegium/collecte/recueil/gathering/miscellany/"litel tretys"/anthology were tallied, they might add up to more copies than the single-text or single-author book, with arguably more cultural influence. Steiner posits that "what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia," with Trevisa translating and glossing, for example, the Poly-chronicon, to form a "megagenre" or "super-compendium" so that he [End Page 426] "provided an intellectual and literary rationale for English prose" (25, 30). Just in terms of the vernacular, although possibly overrepresented in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, Trevisa remains a major source for the lexicon, with 9,553 contributions in 6,279 entries in the OED. Another key topic is the idea of an Information Age in England c. 1400. Steiner proposes that "our attachments to those texts we call literary, and which we invest with richness and complexity, have roots in medieval information culture," describing Trevisa as "the perfect entry point into a literary history of information" (12). She stresses that "Every age is, in its own way, an information age, and the late fourteenth century was no exception. … It was not merely the age before the printing press or the age before the internet, but also the age in which the collection and classification of knowledge was bound up with the production of vernacular literature" (227). In Steiner's reading, Trevisa, who likely knew John Wyclif at Oxford, does not simply translate in a straight manner but has works that "criticize the professional religious and redefine the relationship between clergy and laity" while...