Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Steiner, Emily
Titre(s) : John Trevisa's information age [Texte imprimé] : knowledge and the pursuit of literature, c. 1400 / Emily Steiner
Édition : First edition
Publication : Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, copyright 2021
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (XII, 287 p.) : ill. ; 24 cm
Collection : Oxford studies in medieval literature and culture
Lien à la collection : Oxford studies in medieval literature and culture
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-281) and index. - Bibliogr. p. 257-281, index
"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."--Publisher's description
Sujet(s) : Trevisa, John (1342?-1412?)
Littérature anglaise -- 1100-1500 (moyen anglais)
Littérature latine médiévale et moderne
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780192896902 (Br.). - ISBN 0192896903
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb46885503z
Notice n° :
FRBNF46885503
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
Table des matières : 1.. Paris in Gloucestershire -- ; An Information Age -- ; The Paris of the West --
; Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature -- ; 2.. Big Form: Trevisa's Vernacular
Megagenre -- ; Compendious Genres -- ; Personal Information -- ; My Aristotle -- ;
Compendious Theories -- ; 3.. Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon
-- ; Everyone's Favorite Historian -- ; Translation as History: Trevisa's "Dialogue
between a Lord and a Clerk" -- ; Everyone's a Critic: Trevisa's Radical Historiography
-- ; Langland's Radical Historiography -- ; 4.. Alphabetical Logic: John Trevisa's
Index to the Polychronicon and the English Concordance to the Bible -- ; Alphabetizing
before Trevisa -- ; Indexical Dysfunction: Trevisa's English Index -- ; From Modern
to Medieval: Caxton's Index to the Polychronicon -- ; Alphabetizing after Wyclif:
The English Concordance to the Bible -- ; 5.. Encyclopedic Style: On the Properties
of Things -- ; Encyclopedic Aesthetics -- ; Accumulating Prose -- ; Lyrical Encyclopedism
-- ; Emotional Life -- ; 6.. Encyclopedic Verse and Vernacular Science: The Book of
Sydrac -- ; French Connections -- ; Scientific Style -- ; Encyclopedic Theology --
; Encyclopedic Poetics -- ; Roundness -- ; 7.. Holy Encyclopedism: Stephen Batman's
Middle Ages -- ; Hard Words -- ; Properties Lost and Found.
