John Trevisa's Information Age

John Trevisa's Information Age
Author: Emily Steiner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192896903


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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.


John Trevisa's Information Age
Language: en
Pages: 300
Authors: Emily Steiner
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

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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 maj
John Trevisa and the English Polychronicon
Language: en
Pages: 172
Authors: Jane Beal
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012 - Publisher: Mrts

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A study of John Trevisa's rhetorical arguments for the value, necessity, and authority of translation in his English 'Polychronicon'. John Trevisa was one of th
The Visitation of the County of Cornwall, in the Year 1620
Language: en
Pages: 374
Authors: Sir Henry Saint-George
Categories: Cornwall (England : County)
Type: BOOK - Published: 1874 - Publisher:

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John Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, Book VI
Language: en
Pages: 376
Authors: Ranulf Higden
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004 - Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter

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This volume is the first step in the publication of a new edition of John Trevisa's English translation of Higden's universal history, Polychronicon, to replace
John Trevisa and the English Polychronicon
Language: en
Pages: 828
Authors: Jane Ellen Louise Beal
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2002 - Publisher:

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