John Trevisa’s Information Age Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature 1st edition by Emily Steiner 0192650831 9780192650832

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ISBN-10 ‏:  0192650831 

ISBN-13 :  9780192650832

Author : Emily Steiner 

What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome’s 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 informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa’s oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.

John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature 1st Table of contents

1. Paris in Gloucestershire
An Information Age
The Paris of the West
Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature
2. Big Form: Trevisa’s Vernacular Megagenre
Compendious Genres
Personal Information
My Aristotle
Compendious Theories
3. Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon
Everyone’s Favorite Historian
Translation as History: Trevisa’s “Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk”
Everyone’s a Critic: Trevisa’s Radical Historiography
Langland’s Radical Historiography
4. Alphabetical Logic: John Trevisa’s Index to the Polychronicon and the English Concordance to the Bible
Alphabetizing before Trevisa
Indexical Dysfunction: Trevisa’s English Index
From Modern to Medieval: Caxton’s Index to the Polychronicon
Alphabetizing after Wyclif: The English Concordance to the Bible
5. Encyclopedic Style: On the Properties of Things
Encyclopedic Aesthetics
Accumulating Prose
Lyrical Encyclopedism
Emotional Life
6. Encyclopedic Verse and Vernacular Science: The Book of Sydrac
French Connections
Scientific Style
Encyclopedic Theology
Encyclopedic Poetics
Roundness
7. Holy Encyclopedism: Stephen Batman’s Middle Ages
Hard Words
Properties Lost and Found

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Tags: John Trevisa, Information Age, Knowledge, the Pursuit, Literature, Emily Steiner