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.

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 the most prodigious translators living in England in the fourteenth century. His numerous translations of works from Latin into English helped to ensure the creation and perpetuation of late-medieval vernacular history, literature, and culture in Britain. His translation of the 'Polychronicon', a universal history of the world originally compiled byRanulf Higden, is both his magnum opus and his opportunity to present rhetorical arguments for the value, necessity, and authority of translation. Through his paratextual 'Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk on Translation' and prefatory letter to Lord Thomas Berkeley as well as his intertextual explanatory notes to the 'Polychronicon', John Trevisa explores the tasks of the translator.

"Reprinted after revision and correction from the 'Weekly Mercury, '" Mar. 1881-May 1884.