Emily Steiner, "John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400" (Oxford UP, 2021)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Mar 11, 2023 · 51m

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…