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John Trevisa's Information Age - Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 (Hardcover)
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John Trevisa's Information Age - Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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