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.

About the Author:
Emily Steiner, Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Emily Steiner is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale University. She is author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature and Reading Piers Plowman. She has also co-edited The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, with Candace Barrington; Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts, with Lynn Ransom; and The Cambridge History of History Writing: England and Britain, 500-1500 with Jennifer Jahner and Elizabeth Tyler. She is Director of the International Piers Plowman Society.