John Trevisa Research Articles

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

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

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

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...

A Companion to Giles of Rome, ed. Charles F. Briggs and Peter S. Eardley

Giles of Rome (c.1243/7–1316) is now probably most famous for the defence of papal supremacy which was offered in his De ecclesiastica potestate (1302). However, to readers in the later Middle Ages, Giles was perhaps best known for his political treatise, De regimine principum (c.1280). The work survives in almost three hundred Latin manuscripts and was also translated into many vernaculars, including the Middle English version by John Trevisa. John Watts has described the political theory produced in late medieval France and England as being ‘mostly Egidian in its assumptions’ and Giles’s work was also a source for poets such as John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve. Yet, despite the fame of his political works, Giles was, as the editors to this volume note in their introduction, ‘first and foremost a theologian’. An Austin friar and a student of Thomas Aquinas at the University of Paris, Giles became prior general of his order in 1291, with his teachings—both those written and those ‘still to be written’—being adopted as the Austins’ official doctrine; he eventually rose to be archbishop of Bourges In addition to his political and theological works, Giles also wrote widely on philosophy and metaphysics with a number of his works in these fields being studied in the universities. It is surprising, given his medieval influence and modern fame, that this useful collection is the first general survey of Giles’s work. Its eight chapters offer a wide-ranging investigation of Giles’s thought, and the book also includes a chronology of his writings, a list of catalogues of their manuscripts and a bibliography of secondary literature.

Preaching and History: The Audience of Ranulf Higden’s Ars componendi sermones and Polychronicon

ABSTRACTIn his Ars praedicandi sermones, in traditional yet rich metaphoric language, Ranulf Higden compares Christ to a fountain, a shepherd, a rock, a lily, a rose, a violet, an elephant, a unicorn, and a youthful bridegroom wooing his beloved spouse. Ranulf encourages preachers to use such metaphors while using them himself, rendering his text a performed example of what he encourages. This text is clearly linked to two others: Ranulf’s Latin universal history, the Polychronicon, and John Trevisa’s English translation of it. In the Polychronicon, Ranulf relates the life of Christ, utilizing some of his own rhetorical suggestions from his preaching manual. He also depicts a cross-section of good and bad preachers, including Gregory, Wulfstan, Eustas, St Edmund, and one William Long-Beard and his kinsman, who exemplify (in different ways) the wisdom conveyed in Ranulf’s instruction in the Ars praedicandi. This essay suggests that the literary relationship between the preaching manual and the Polychronicon supplies additional support for the idea that the audience of the latter was not noblemen exclusively, but also clergymen who preached and had responsibility for the care of souls (cura animae).

Compendious Genres: Higden, Trevisa, and the Medieval Encyclopedia

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.

Books and Bodies: Ethics, Exemplarity, and the ‘Boistous’ in Medieval English Writings

‘Boistous’, along with ‘rude’, is a common descriptor for Middle English writings, and has often been understood to point to writers’ anxieties over the inferiority of English as a literary medium. However, ‘boistous’ can also refer to the exemplary, the natural, and the bodily, and so simultaneously points to writers’ understandings of the didactic and rhetorical potency of English. By looking to John Trevisa’s translations of De regimine principum and De proprietatibus rerum, as well as the writings of Thomas Usk and Nicholas Love, this essay contends that ‘boistous’ demarcates a form of vernacular writing that claims a mode of reading for the lay and unlearned that is predicated on the senses of taste and touch, and that is understood to be fundamentally good-for thinking with, for ethical life in the world, and for salvation.

Hermaphrodite

Hermaphroditus, in Greek myth, was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. The water-nymph Salmacis, seeing him bathing in a pool, fell in love with him and prayed that they might never be separated. The gods interpreted her request literally and joined the pair into one body. In both his name and his being, therefore, Hermaphroditus combines male and female.“Hermaphrodite” seems to have entered late Middle English, via Latin from the Greek, in John Trevisa's 1398 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De proprietatibus rerum (On the properties of things). Here it described an animal comprising both sexes, male and female, “but always unperfect”. From the 18th century, in botanical or zoological use, the term referred to those species of plants or animals in which the co-existence of male and female organs in individuals was not an aberration but a natural state, for example flowering plants and some varieties of molluscs and worms. When applied to animals, and especially human beings, however, the word usually implied monstrous malformation. This was the case even when it was used in a more figurative sense to describe effeminate men or virile women; Sir Robert T Wilson in his journal in 1803 deplored, “The revolting hermaphrodisy of the ‘blue stocking’.” 19th-century medical men were fascinated by individuals whose bodies displayed characteristics of both sexes. The desire to confirm such ambiguous bodies as either male or female was spurred by the social significance of sex. Doctors searched for the “real” sex of apparently bisexual bodies and gradually the existence of true hermaphrodites (newly, narrowly defined as only those possessing both testicular and ovarian tissue) was denied.In the 20th century, ideas about true sex were eclipsed by gender identity and the perceived need for anatomy to match this. New terminology arose and hermaphrodites became “intersex”. Early surgical intervention was, and still is, the standard response to a sexually ambiguous infant but this approach has been criticised. Intersex spokespersons now demand that, unless necessary for health, genital surgery should be done only at an age when individuals are able to give their consent. But the unease generally provoked by sexual ambiguity exposes our continuing discomfort with transgression of binary categories, whether the boundaries are broken by anatomy, sexuality, or non-conformity with gendered stereotypes of identity. Hermaphroditus, in Greek myth, was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. The water-nymph Salmacis, seeing him bathing in a pool, fell in love with him and prayed that they might never be separated. The gods interpreted her request literally and joined the pair into one body. In both his name and his being, therefore, Hermaphroditus combines male and female. “Hermaphrodite” seems to have entered late Middle English, via Latin from the Greek, in John Trevisa's 1398 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De proprietatibus rerum (On the properties of things). Here it described an animal comprising both sexes, male and female, “but always unperfect”. From the 18th century, in botanical or zoological use, the term referred to those species of plants or animals in which the co-existence of male and female organs in individuals was not an aberration but a natural state, for example flowering plants and some varieties of molluscs and worms. When applied to animals, and especially human beings, however, the word usually implied monstrous malformation. This was the case even when it was used in a more figurative sense to describe effeminate men or virile women; Sir Robert T Wilson in his journal in 1803 deplored, “The revolting hermaphrodisy of the ‘blue stocking’.” 19th-century medical men were fascinated by individuals whose bodies displayed characteristics of both sexes. The desire to confirm such ambiguous bodies as either male or female was spurred by the social significance of sex. Doctors searched for the “real” sex of apparently bisexual bodies and gradually the existence of true hermaphrodites (newly, narrowly defined as only those possessing both testicular and ovarian tissue) was denied. In the 20th century, ideas about true sex were eclipsed by gender identity and the perceived need for anatomy to match this. New terminology arose and hermaphrodites became “intersex”. Early surgical intervention was, and still is, the standard response to a sexually ambiguous infant but this approach has been criticised. Intersex spokespersons now demand that, unless necessary for health, genital surgery should be done only at an age when individuals are able to give their consent. But the unease generally provoked by sexual ambiguity exposes our continuing discomfort with transgression of binary categories, whether the boundaries are broken by anatomy, sexuality, or non-conformity with gendered stereotypes of identity.

Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory Robert Emmett Finnegan S. H. Rigby. Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi, 329. €119.00; $169.00. Wisdom and Chivalry is a deeply researched and closely argued piece of historical criticism. Stephen Rigby chooses as his analytical tool for The Knight's Tale Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum, a mirror for princes composed circa 1280 for the future Philip IV of France. Giles, a student of Aquinas, synthesizes the political/religious ideas of his—and Chaucer's—day with respect to the personal and public qualities a ruler ought to possess, and demonstrate. The De Regimine, which shows the [End Page 365] influence of Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, survives in some 350 manuscripts, mostly Latin, some vernacular. John Trevisa translated it into English; Thomas of Gloucester, Richard II's uncle, possessed a Latin copy. It is, then, an appropriate touchstone for a study of this sort. Indeed, a reader/listener who had internalized Giles's ideas might well find that “in idealizing Duke Theseus . . . The Knight's Tale seeks to offer a confirmation of the ‘dominant’ ideology of late medieval England” (285) and that “Duke Theseus embodies the virtue which political theorists demanded a ruler should possess as an individual, as the head of a household, and as a sovereign ruler” (276). Rigby structures his analysis in terms of this tripartite division: Part I (“Ethics: The Good Rule of the Self”) deals with Theseus's personal ethics; Part II (“Economics and Politics: The Good Rule of Others”) shows these personal ethics in public action; Part III (“The First Mover and the Good Rule of the Cosmos”) views Theseus's rule of self and others in the wider context of Jupiter's/the Christian God's dominion over the universe. Rigby, then, evaluates Theseus's conduct from the microcosmic-personal to the macrocosmic-universal. There is no ambiguity here. By every measure, and in all circumstances, Theseus comports himself as Giles, and political theorists roughly contemporary with Chaucer— Dante, Boccaccio, John Gower—think an ideal ruler should. We learn, for example, that the duke had every right to send Palamon and Arcite to prison forte et dure and set the “pilours” on the fallen Thebans; he had shown his banner on the march against Creon, and this gesture counted to Chaucer's contemporaries not only as a formal declaration of war but also as an indication that little, or no, quarter need be expected. Later we discover that Saturn, whose intervention concludes the strife in heaven, can be understood as representing the wisdom of old age. We are also told that Theseus's First Mover lecture is informed not only by Boethius but by current ideas of the Christian God's control of the universe and everything in it. There are numerous such interpretations, all positive; Rigby consistently sees the duke's actions as ideal and exemplary. But this need not necessarily be so, even for a reader steeped in the De Regimine. A Gilesian reader might recognize Theseus's right to conduct himself as he does on the Theban battlefield, but yet question the charity of his so doing. Given the dynamics of the poem, such a reader might well find it odd that Jupiter, who attempts to resolve the contention in [End Page 366] heaven—“Juppiter was bisy it to stente” (2442)—signally fails. If our Gilesian could trace the semantic range of “bisy” and “stente,” he would find, perhaps, the terms suggesting that Jupiter worked for a solution over a significant period of time and became worried and distressed when he did not succeed. Saturn's malevolent self-characterization embodies the worst violence depicted on the walls of the temples of Mars, Venus, and Diana. Our Gilesian reader might find an in bono interpretation here a very large order indeed, and discover little in the text to warrant an assertion that “the agency of Saturn, in resolving the conflict between Mars and Venus, can actually be seen as an instrument of Jupiter's power” (269). Again, our Gilesian might...

Uncoupled:OR How I Lost My Author(s)

The essay traces the personal history of trying to find an author, in the sense of a number of attempts to identify a father figure with whom an editorial and critical career might be linked. Describing such devices as the mapping out of a comprehensive series of abstract models for charting the relationships between a translated and a translating text (in the case of John Trevisa) and the construction of an authorial idiolect where no autograph survives (in the case of Thomas Hoccleve), the personal narrative now regards these attempts to reach back into the authorial psyche as hubristic, even improper. In the place of such a single authorial identity, the essay concludes by showing how authoriality rather than authorship took over in the development of a scholarly career, resulting in, for example, the founding of the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholarship.

A Companion to Middle English Prose

The essays in this volume provide an up-to-date and authoritative guide to the major prose Middle English authors and genres. Each chapter is written by a leading authority on the subject and offers a succinct account of all relevant literary, history and cultural factors that need to considered, together with bibliographical references. Authors examined include the writers of the Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wohunge Group; Richard Rolle; Walter Hilton; Nicholas Love; Julian of Norwich; Margery Kempe; 'Sir John Mandeville'; John Trevisa, Reginald Pecock; and John Fortescue. Genres discussed include romances, saints' lives, letters, sermon literature, historical prose, anonymous devotional writings, Wycliffite prose, and various forms of technical writing. The final chapter examines the treatment of Middle English prose in the first age of print. Contributors include: Bella Millett, Ralph Hanna Iii, Ad Putter, Kantik Ghosh, Barry A. Windeatt, A.C. Spearing, Ian Higgins, A.S.G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, Helen L. Spencer, Alfred Hiatt, Fiona Somerset, Helen Cooper, George Keiser, Oliver S. Pickering, James Simpson, Richard Beadle, and, Alexandra Gillespie.

Middle English Translations of Medieval Encyclopedias

A medieval encyclopedia was an educational text describing the natural and human worlds that was used primarily within an institutional setting such as a monastery, cathedral school, or university. A few encyclopedias were also sources for exempla used in medieval sermons both in Latin and in the vernacular languages. Only two such encyclopedias were translated into English: Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum was translated by John Trevisa in 1398/9, and a French version of Honorius Augustodunensis’s Imago mundi made by Gossouin of Metz in 1245–50 was translated by William Caxton as Mirrour of the World (printed 1480/1481 and 1490). These are both popular translations that render their originals rather literally than freely. Trevisa’s technique preserves the Latin terminology of the original, which suggests that his translation is meant to speed up searching for the English reader while it preserves the key terms of Bartholomaeus’s Latin. Caxton’s technique is to anglicize the original thoroughly, down to place-names and local color, while he also expands his original somewhat via his stylistic preference for restatement in doublets and triplets.

Min Herte is Growen into Ston: Ethics and Activity in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis

The role of ethics in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis has been the subject of much scholarly attention. This essay seeks to elucidate Gower’s reception not only of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (which had been translated into Latin by Robert Grosseteste and adapted by John Trevisa) but of the moralizations on Ovidian texts, and to analyze how these traditions influence the goals of the Confessio . Specifically, it discusses how Genius employs the tale of Medusa to mirror the paralysis, impaired will, and confused desire of Amans, and uses it to argue for an ethical agenda that is practical, rather than theoretical in nature. The tale itself is sourced in the moralizing commentaries on the Metamorphoses and the exempla of thirteenth-century sermons, but it turns these sources to an Aristotelian practical ethic to emphasize the importance of productive, directed action and the role of individual agency in that action.

Shifting Focus to Mozart's Operas

Grassnick, Ulrike. Ratgeber des Konigs: Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England. Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 2004. Pp. xii; 471. Ulrike Grassnick's book bears the subtitle Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England, which accurately describes the contents of the volume. author studies seven Mirrors of Princes in Middle English: John Trevisa's Governance of Kings and Princes (c. 1388-92), Thomas Hoccleve's TheEegiment of Princes (c. 1410-11), John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh's Secrees qfoldPhilisqffres (1449-50), Sir Gilbert Hay's Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (c.1456), George Ashby's Active Policy of a Prince (1470), John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Book VlI - 1386-93), and Geoffrey Chaucer's Tale ofMelibee (c. 13 72-74). All of these texts were produced between the 1370s and the 1470s (none are extant from the 1200s), and in their form the first five are pragmatic texts, while the last two are narrative-fictional. Interestingly, according to Grassnick, Chaucer's Tak ofMelibee, one of the narrative-fictional texts, is the earliest Furstenspiegel in English. Thus, Chaucer not only wrote the earliest manual on the use of a scientific instrument in English, The Treatise on the Astrolabe, but also the first Mirror of Princes in the vernacular. As G. points out, Tale qfMelibee is one of only two prose elements in the Canterbury Tales (along with Parson's Tale), and it is the one that the poet assigns to his own fictional alter ego, Chaucer-thePUgrim. G. gives special attention to narrative-fictional texts, so that her book is informative and thought provoking not only for students of political science but of literature and history as well. In her fifty-page introduction, G. defines the primary goal of the Furstenspiegel to be the creation of behavioral patterns proper to leadership (32), a function quite different from the mirroring of existing behavior that the word Furstenspiegel seems to imply. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu in English, she writes: Symbolic power is a power to construct reality (29) ; in fact, G. identifies her methodological position as borrowed from Bourdieu's Handlungstheorie (Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns [Frankfurt a. M.: 1998]) and acknowledges her use of his central concepts of Feld, Kapital, Sozialer Raum, and Habitus [pattern of behavior - 18]. In her Literaturverzeichnis [Works Cited], sixteen entries are by Bourdieu. Within the political and literary fields of the Middle Ages, therefore, G. recognizes that the image of an ideal leader may be as much a construction of the texts as a critique of any prevailing system or specific leader. Her second chapter provides a brief history of the medieval Furstenspiegel During the Middle Ages theorists generally drew their models of kingship from Old and New Testament traditions rather than from those of classical antiquity, although the Secretum Secretorum [Secret of Secrets], the Letter to Alexander the Great by the Pseudo- Aristotle, was very influential and often translated. It was St. Augustine who interpreted the Bible as the first mirror, and that interpretation prevailed as other texts became secondary mirrors of archetypal and exemplary models of behavior. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Furstenspiegel followed this Augustinian textual tradition in the construction of ideal leader images. Grassnick's third chapter contains a separate section on each of the seven Furstenspiegel that her book treats. order of her discussion is not strictly chronological: the narrative-fictional texts (Gower's and Chaucer's) are grouped last because they offer the expanded possibilities of meaning that fiction permits. …

Catechesis and Castigation: Sin in the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle

Who schulde now knowe emperours, wonder of philosofres, other folwe the apostles, but hir noble dedes and hir wonder werkes were i-write in stories and so i-kept in mynde? … For storie is wytnesse of tyme, mynde of lyf messager of eldnesse — John Trevisa's translation of Polychronicon.

Fiona Somerset. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 241. $64.95. ISBN 0-521-62154-2.

Part I: 1. Introduction 2. 'Lewed Clergie': vernacular authorisation in Piers Plowman 3. The 'Publyschyng' of 'Informacion': John Trevisa, Sir Thomas Berkeley, and their project of 'Englysch Translacion' Part II: 4. Answering the twelve conclusions: Dymmok's halfhearted gestures toward publication 5. The Upland Series and the invention of invective, 1350-1410 6. Vernacular Argumentation in The Testimony of William Thorpe.

The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar

John Trevisa (ca.1342-1402), perhaps the greatest of Middle English prose translators of Latin texts into English, was almost an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. Trevisa was born in Cornwall, studies at Oxford, and was instituted vicar of Berkeley, a position he held until his death. Over a period of thirty-five years eminent medievalist David Fowler has pieced together an account of Trevisa's life and times by diligently seeking out documents bearing on his activities and translations. This has resulted in a cultural history of fourtheenth-century England that ranges from the administrative, geographical, and linguistic status of Cornwall to the curriculum of medieval university education, and from religious and secular conflicts to the administration of a substantial provincial household and the role of its aristocratic keepers in the Hundred Years War. Fowler provides an analysis of Trevis's known translations the Gospel of Nicodemus, Dialogus inter Militem et Clericum, FitzRalph's Defensio Curatorum, the Polychronicon, De Regimine Principum and De Proprietatibus Rerum. He also advances the hypothesis that Trevisa was one of the scholars responsible for the first complete translation of the scriptures into English: the Wycliffite Bible. An appendix contains a collection of biographical and historical references designed to illustrate Fowler's contention that Trevisa may have been responsible for the revisions of Piers the Plowman now known as the B and C texts.

A medieval scientific encyclopedia "renewed by goodly printing"; Wynkyn de Worde's English De proprietatibus rerum.

Wynkyn de Worde published c. 1495 the first printed edition of John Trevisa's English translation of an influential work of science composed by Bartholomew the Englishman in Latin in the thirteenth century, De Proprietatibus Rerum (DPR). The design of the Worde's book, the use of Latin in the rubrics, and the visual vocabulary of the illustrations bring readers of English into the circle of learning. First, the plan of organization of Bartholomew's encyclopedic work is analyzed and both that structure and the expository style of the work are related to memorial reading and use as a textbook. Next, the widespread use of DPR in Latin and vernacular languages is reviewed, the suggestion that certain of its books seem to have been used more than others is made, and the reliance of English readers, such as Roger Thorney, who commissioned de Worde's edition, on de Worde for learned books printed in their provincial tongue is pointed out. Finally, through comparison with certain manuscript and other printed editions, the methods de Worde used to make the book readable are explained, the layout is shown to support the idea of system, and the function of the pictures as visual texts carrying scientific ideas is demonstrated.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar By DAVID C FOWLER Pp xiv plus; 282 Seattle University of Washington Press, 1995 $ 40 A S G EDWARDS A S G EDWARDS University of Victoria Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLVIII, Issue 192, November 1997, Pages 515–516, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLVIII.192.515 Published: 01 November 1997

Book Review: The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar

Book Review: The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar

THE MIDDLE ENGLISH "PSEUDO-TURPIN CHRONICLE"

Because this article introduces an unpublished and little-known Middle English text, it engages necessarily in a diverse set of enquiries. As a consequence, the article is divided into sections which consider (I) the manuscript, (II) a history of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle as it originated on the Continent, (III) the relationship of the Middle English text, as a translation, to other translations and versions - especially those found in Britain and Ireland - and (IV) the literary and thematic distinctions of the Middle English text. In anticipation of the third and fourth sections, it is worth keeping in mind that many of the events related in the Pseudo-Turpin are linked with those of the chansons deg,este of Charlemagne (the so-called `Matter of France). Received scholarly opinion has tended to suggest that when this kind of material found its way into Middle English the circumstances were forced, the results regrettable: The English Charlemagne romances ... give the impression that they were written ... by writers who were driven to this somewhat uncongenial material by [an] insatiable demand for romances.' The English Charlemagne romances are in the main undistinguished, to say the least.2 The matter of France [is] the source of nine of the dreariest and most contemptible pieces.' Some of the Middle English Charlemagne texts are indeed of questionable merit, but others, when looked at more closely, are without doubt the work of intelligent authors and translators very much engaged with their material;4 and it can be shown that the Middle English Pseudo-Turpin belongs with the better examples. More importantly, perhaps, it can also be shown that the piece reveals - albeit subtly - evidence for the proposition that much of the English matter of France emanated from a well-established and flourishing Insular textual tradition. There may be evidence, moreover, for a distinctly English tradition regarding certain moralistic parts of the chronicle. The Middle English Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle is preserved uniquely in San Marino, Henry E. Huntington Library, MS HM zS,561. The manuscript, dating from the late fifteenth century, comprises a large collection of Middle English texts, the most voluminous of which is John Trevisa's translation of Higden's Polychronicon; that text includes alphabetical subject indexes in Latin and English and Trevisa's own `Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk upon Translation' with the pendant 'Epistle' to his patron Thomas, fourth Lord Berkeley (fols 24'-3 I 9'). Also found in the manuscript are Trevisa's translations of the Dialogus inter militem et clericum (fols 1'-Ov) and Fitzralph's Defensio curatorum (fols 5--20); there is also another translation, perhaps by Trevisa, of The Beginning of the World and the End of Worlds, attributed to Methodius (fols z i'-z33. There are also some 115 Latin verses on the kings of England from Alfred to Henry VI (fol. 3zo', followed by some Latin tracts on each of the kings of England from Richard II to Edward IV (fols 320V-3 ; 3 z 5 is ruled, otherwise blank). The Pseudo-Turpin is the last item, occupying fols 326`-337. At least five scribes were at work on the whole manuscript; all use late anglicana or secretary scripts which date from the second half of the fifteenth century. Parchment is used throughout and the pages are large, measuring about 38omm x 227 mm. Margins are ample, with the area of text taking up about z6gmm x 176mm across two columns. In the portion of the manuscript preceding the PseudoTurpin there are forty lines per column. In the same portion, decoration starts out lavishly, with a number of pages rendered with gilt and coloured full foliate borders and illuminated initials, and other pages have similar but less extensive adornment; several pages, however, show decoration in various stages of incompletion, and all decoration is abandoned by fol. I 3 8'. The Pseudo-Turpin begins on a new gathering of eight bifolia, and carries over into another such gathering, the last four folios of which are lost; as a result, the text breaks off soon after beginning its twenty-sixth chapter, two words into a new phrase (`and anone . …