John Trevisa's Information Age

Abstract

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?