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

Abstract

Emily Steiner’s brilliantly wide-ranging new monograph John Trevisa’s Information Age explores the collection of political, theological, and literary contexts that governed medieval practices of encyclopedic writing. Consequently, the study also argues for a reconsideration of the “literary,” such as in the fascinating discussion of Trevisa’s Polychronicon index as a form of literary criticism (132).The first chapter introduces the notion of reading compendia as both text and process (2), suggesting that the encyclopedic project is best understood not as an attempt at exhaustive definition or compilation but rather as a method of organizing information. The second chapter demonstrates that Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon was “an opportunity to turn a Latin universal history into a megagenre of vernacular information” (33) and to shape this history according to his personal interests (38). These interests include Trevisa’s consistent interest in calculating time (34) and the transference of grammatical theology into Middle English (41); the latter has also long been acknowledged as a project of Langland’s, especially in B.15. It is therefore logical that the study progresses to a treatment of Trevisa and Langland’s “bolder encounters with the universal history” (73) in relation to Wyclif’s usage of the Polychronicon to critique the institutional church. Steiner discusses Trevisa’s arguments for classical and patristic traditions of translation that legitimize and necessitate vernacular engagement with theological knowledge and history (76–78), and Trevisa’s use of Wycliffite arguments to justify his historiographical choices (85). The study then repositions the polemic of Piers Plowman in light of Trevisa’s work: Langland utilizes the idea of universal history to highlight moral discrepancies between the hagiographical past and the fourteenth-century present (97).The monograph then turns to a literary analysis of Trevisa’s encyclopedic mode and the detail it allows. The fourth chapter focuses on the apparent dysfunction of Trevisa’s index, which superficially seems to hold the positions of an alphabetical index and a table of contents and as a result functions as neither (117). Instead, Steiner demonstrates, it acts as a pseudo-critical text of its own in which Trevisa represents information through the selection of key themes and phrases, a historiographical mode that is also highly literary, which “draws our attention not to famous men and places but to body parts and orifices, sexual anomalies and hybrids” (132). The following chapter extends this interest in Trevisa’s response to his source material by exploring his Middle English elaborations and digressions that deepen the interweaving of science and theology (150, 164). The sixth chapter turns to a parallel example in The Book of Sydrac, whose Middle English translator adapted their French source in similar ways to Trevisa. This chapter focuses more explicitly on emotional glosses, such as contemplation resulting from questions of unknowable scale (196) and longing for home (202). The final chapter explores encyclopedism in the sixteenth century, focusing on Stephen Batman’s version of De proprietatibus rerum, Batman vppon Bartholome (1582) and Trevisa’s legacy of expansion with biographical detail (214) and poetic analogy (219).John Trevisa’s Information Age is—perhaps inevitably!—a contribution to medieval studies that is encyclopedic in scope. The study considers how encyclopedic writing contributed to Christian perceptions of religious-racial Otherness (101–3, 123), the bestiary tradition (171–72), debates about fetal development and ensoulment (202), and notions of disability (198). Steiner discusses Trevisa’s Wycliffism but the discussion is not limited by it; the study analyzes Trevisa’s individual methods of knowledge transmission within this context, such as Trevisa’s “overstressing” of the exemplary mode in order to give pragmatic guidance to lay audiences (87). In turn, it is apparent that Trevisa’s personal glosses are themselves part of his exemplary project, teaching medieval readers how they may understand and organize the world through their own memories and emotions. Though the monograph does not explicitly advertise its contribution in this way, it will be clear to those working on exempla and miracle tales that Steiner here uncovers a possible origin, or at least a prominent mode of transmission, for the late-medieval exemplary mode that is at once personal and universal. Readers familiar with Steiner’s previous work will be eager to discover that this monograph, too, discusses time in astute detail: Trevisa’s organization of time, it is shown, is also intertwined with his personalized exemplary mode. The study is also a wonderful demonstration of the intersection of poetics and theology, especially in the discussions of analogy as historiography or memory (56) and the mirroring of literary devices, such as metaphor, with the concepts, objects, or science that they describe (151). In this way, John Trevisa’s Information Age is a truly versatile piece of scholarship that, while providing a significant contribution to the field, can also function as a useful guide for students seeking to develop an understanding of theological literature and its poetic methods.In such a wide-ranging study, it is perhaps unavoidable that readers may yearn for deeper and more extended explorations of any or all of the contexts, individual stories, or information that form part of these encyclopedic texts. As the purpose and subject (and indeed great strength) of the monograph is to demonstrate the range and influence of encyclopedism as a mode, rather than analyzing these texts with a particular thematic focus, at times it may feel as though the discussion slightly outpaces the reader’s curiosity. For instance, the discussion regarding Higden and Trevisa’s oppositional responses to Josephus and Arthurian legend is fascinating; a more extended commentary on these responses would be welcome, especially because there is a relative scarcity of scholarship on the interaction of theological (or theologized) sources with Arthurian culture in general. Likewise, a more explicit positioning of the role of encyclopedism in devotional memory more widely may have further emphasized the study’s contribution and made these arguments more accessible to readers less familiar with the field (135–36). However, these moments will also be foundational for future studies: the monograph provides a map for new encounters with Trevisa, allowing readers to identify and follow up areas of interest, vivifying the potentially overwhelming volume of his work to make it attainable for future readers.