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John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 . Emily Steiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii+287.

2022; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/721422

1545-6951

Michael Calabrese,

Medieval Literature and History

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewJohn Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400. Emily Steiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii+287.Michael CalabreseMichael CalabreseCalifornia State University, Los Angeles Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRight from the title and the clever set of chapter headings, Emily Steiner’s book on John Trevisa plays upon on the theme of “the information age,” immediately connecting the medieval to the modern and inviting us (and our information obsessed culture—false, true, and otherwise) to witness how Trevisa’s work as a translator of compendious Latin texts (Higden’s Polychronicon and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum but also Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum) participated in an important and understudied history: the development of English prose and poetic style in service of a surging vernacular encyclopedic literature, which Steiner shows, should be regarded as central to the development of English medieval literature as a whole. Passim, she engages as well with Trevisa’s other translations and original writings, including his “Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk.” And in all his work, in addition to developing a particular literary style informed by various rhetorical tropes and artful poetic ornaments, Trevisa engages with global and national histories, and with nature and the cosmos, as he explores the wondrous splendor of the created world in all is beauty, mystery, and complexity.By tracing Trevisa’s labors with generous quotations—as Trevisa’s texts are difficult to find (translated or not) in modern anthologies or handy classroom texts—Steiner reveals a vital, imaginative flowering of literary English that ranks with our best canonical literature, while helping us tell a fuller history of (among other subjects) English national identity, reformation doctrine, and global sociopolitical relations. The genealogy of Trevisa’s texts extends all the way up to the sixteenth-century adaptation by Stephen Batman, as information from the “new world” rumbles in to expand or disrupt medieval knowledge. Here, at book’s end, as an often-fanciful history brushes up against a real colonial one, we start to recognize the modern world we have inherited from the fraught histories of exploration and conquest.The book takes its place among a series of important monographs that uncover lost or occluded histories of English literature. We look now at grammar texts, scribal glosses, court proceedings and trial accounts, biographical musings, works of lay piety, spiritual biographies, guild records, and biblical commentaries in our assessment of the period. Such works are now being expansively edited, and classroom anthologies are, to some extent, now including bits of vernacular literature previously neglected in favor of the major poetic hits—a process that would have to be expanded to account for these new contentions about the status of Trevisa. Steiner’s book, an impeccable feat of research and analysis, contributes to this expanded definition of vernacular literature by studying how “information,” either from the ancient past or from recent events, was artfully, creatively, rhetorically, and often ideologically rendered in the ambitious translation projects that compelled Trevisa to reimagine the uses of English.So the question that begins this book—“What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium?”—renders an immediate answer: John Trevisa “might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century” (1). The book also engages with Trevisa’s work in composing English indices, tables of contents (i.e., “finding aids”) in the vernacular instead of Latin—a project fraught with complexities that strained the effectiveness of English. Readers of medieval English literature will enjoy learning from this book and will be captivated by the global, religious, national, and natural histories recounted in its pages.Chapter 1, mainly on the production of books in France as a prelude to the English efforts, offers a teacherly overview of the whole idea of an encyclopedia or a compendium in the Middle Ages and how information was gathered and presented. For the books under current study are related to a larger “explosion of reference books both in Latin and in the vernaculars” (5) spanning different genres in medicine, botany, and other sorts of natural and physical sciences that mark the way that scholarly information was gathered and packaged for nonspecialist audiences. Some such texts were beautifully and grandly made and certainly took a lot of money to produce and to own, as Steiner notes the vast resources in these cases “needed to make information beautiful” (2).If chapter 1 showed how John Trevisa and his patron Thomas de Berkeley were inspired by the French court’s compendious productions, chapter 2, “Big Form,” explores more deeply what Trevisa was trying to accomplish with his translations. Prominent here is his use of “glosses,” for instead of simply translating, he elaborates and expands upon the Latin to make it understandable, and, as Steiner says, “untangling compendious Latin into readable English is no mean feat” (30). The glosses work “to pique and sate the curiosity of English readers” and to “expand Higdon’s Latin universal history into a supercompendium of all useful information” (30). In relation to the larger story of the history of English literature, Trevisa thus “provided an intellectual and literary rationale for English prose,” with the assumption that “the vernacular is the source of all useful knowledge about the world” (30). Many of Trevisa’s glosses can be rambling and tangential (though exuberant), and they are by no means systematic, but they rely on confidence in the power of the vernacular. Highlights here involve Trevisa’s use of personal anecdotes about education, grammar, culture, and language as generative forces of autobiographic consciousness. Plus there is a lot of fun stuff here about such diverse subjects as Daedalus’s labyrinth, oysters and crocodiles (it’s like watching episodes of the Discovery Channel or National Geographic), a vernacular lyric constructed from the Latin catalog of various bird names, and a poignant lyric on the cross—a strikingly meditative composition on learning and faith (63–64). Steiner lets us hear, see, and feel the energy of the English that Trevisa creates as he challenges his powers—and the language itself—to express the events, places, things, and histories that he needs to compile in translation.Chapter 3, “Radical Historiography,” first examines Trevisa’s original composition “A Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk” (appended to a few Polychronicon mss.), arguing that in such works, he, like his “earlier contemporary William Langland did not simply plunder histories for materials with which to illustrate radical ideas; rather, it was in grappling with the universal history as a compendious form—and as a particularly English one—that Trevisa and Langland were able to criticize the professional religious and redefine the relationship between clergy and laity” (68). Langland himself “saw in the universal history an opportunity both to reform historiography and to historicize reform” (89). One feels in this chapter the actual movements of religious history, as writers in the vernacular lay the foundations for dramatic social changes that occur 150 years later. A highlight here is a close analysis of historiography expounded in Piers B15 regarding universal Christian history—as Steiner produces one of the most insightful and important discussions in Langland criticism about the deep historical situatedness of Langland’s Christian historiography. Langland maps here, says Steiner, “ecclesiastical history onto present-day England, making converting the infidel abroad the gold standard for English clerics” (98). Historiography in Piers Plowman, like the “Dialogue” and the Polychronicon translation, records “the transmission of reformist discourse from clergy to laity and from Latin to vernacular” (94).If the first chapters illustrated how Trevisa’s translations of Latin compendia “helped create a vernacular megagenre of information while bringing monastic universal history in line with English and lay modes of reading the past” (106), chapter 4, “Alphabetical Logic,” studies how Trevisa provided an index to the Polychronicon and to the English concordance of the Bible, tasks that will certainly draw the sympathy of “anyone who has struggled to compile an index” (106). That’s for sure. Guiding the (well-illustrated) chapter is the notion that “the growth of English as both a literary language and a language of information culture temporarily wreaked havoc with models of alphabetical indexing inherited from Latin scholarship,” revealing that it was in fact not easy “to develop vernacular search engines capable of navigating a vernacular text” because “these take generations to hone” (106–7). Trevisa’s indices nonetheless work as interpretive, ideological tools, drawing attention, for example, to sensationalistic aspects of history. Steiner calls this work in fact an “alternative index,” one that “draws our attention not to famous men and places but to body parts and orifices, sexual anomalies and hybrids, ditches and roadblocks, bastards and antipopes, and women who say uncomfortable things at inauspicious times” (132).Chapter 5 turns to Trevisa’s translation of De proprietatibus rerum, showing how it cultivated an “‘encyclopedic style’ for vernacular prose” (144), offering not only encyclopedic information but the cultivation of a literary style influential in the shaping of literary English. Trevisa’s entry for “Lent” is dramatically paired here with the opening of the Canterbury Tales. Such work “brings inventiveness to the fore,” to the extent that “it’s tempting to locate the origins of modern English prose in the medieval encyclopedia” (144), as Trevisa constructs “vernacular textuality by inventing a vocabulary for vernacular aesthetics” (153).We see Trevisa here striving “to use all the resources of English to achieve in prose what the encyclopedia achieves as a genre by encompassing so many aspects of the created world,” and in doing so “he expresses through English prose the aesthetics of ornamentality—beauty through variety” (156). Thus Trevisa’s “lyrical encyclopedism” creates “literary sensations that excite wonder and feelings in the reader” (163), so that one senses the splendor of the created world inherent in the Latin text, now celebrated in the varieties of sensual English prose. Chapter 5 takes a moving look at Trevisa’s “captious ethics” that “invites sympathy for a range of persons and for various forms of human misery,” including the plight of the blind (174), proving that Trevisa’s innovations “are crucial to our understanding of the capacity of literature to create beauty, intimacy, and pathos” (176).Chapter 6 turns to the little studied, versified encyclopedia of the Book of Sydrac, a work translated into several European vernacular languages though originally composed for the French court. Steiner describes the work “as an encyclopedia loosely framed as a philosophical dialogue, with some of the trappings of an Alexander romance” (181), with the ultimate function of being “a book of general knowledge for literate lay people” (190), as its literary style helped to create “a vernacular encyclopedic poetics” (191). It asks some amazing questions: How heavy is the soul? Do animals have souls? What do mute people speak in their heart? (198). And also “[Why] did God make the world round [?]” (204), a question that relates not only to theology but medieval travel literature—and later encounters. Much of what we read in these medieval texts, in fact, seems perpetually modern, as humans continue to contemplate relations to the other peoples of the world, to nature, to the animal kingdom, to physics, and to all the processes of the universe: “the wondrous diversity of the world,” as Steiner summarizes (209).To this exact point, the final chapter, playfully entitled “Holy Encyclopedism” (Bert Ward!), looks specifically at the 1582 publication of Trevisa’s translation of De proprietatibus rerum by Stephen Batman, part of the feisty life of Trevisa’s text in print history and manuscript, which Steiner calls “an impressive genealogy” (210). Trevisa’s text provided for Batman “nothing less than a foundation on which to append new information about the New World,” which allows Batman to “turn a medieval information genre into a Renaissance megagenre” (211). Batman vppon Bartholome (an influence on Shakespeare as well) “builds upon rather than displaces its medieval foundation” (212), with the result that the medieval text “provided the scaffolding on which to hang a modern encyclopedia and a pattern for the created world on which to map a navigable one” (213).Once we get information pouring in from the New World, we recognize the birth of the modern era “in the period before the founding of the East India Company and the Virginia Company, in which England was in danger of being left behind in the race for the globe” (220). Steiner ends her book with both a triumphant sense of how the encyclopedia thrives but also noting how the quest to organize knowledge can now in some instances be connected to “the same violence that drives colonial expansion” (223). She points out that the “construction of an encyclopedic present, the now of recently acquired information, depends upon a violent encounter,” as exemplified by the “horror felt by the natives upon first seeing the Spanish” and mistaking men on horses for the mythical onocentaur (224). Myth, living history, and violence clash in this new quest to inspect prior and compile new encyclopedic knowledge. What a fascinating if ominous place to end the book, which will take its place in the medieval critical canon as a landmark achievement in our exploration of the evolution of English as a literary language and the vernacular as a generative force in the compilation and interpretation of “information” through the ages. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 2November 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721422 Views: 242Total views on this site HistoryPublished online July 07, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.