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Abstract
Medieval compendia, the Wikipedia of the Middle Ages, are a rich and productive source for medieval thinking about genre. For some medieval writers, writing in Latin or in the vernacular, compendiousness was not only an indicator of genre but also a pretext for genre thinking. It is at once a characteristic of a medieval genre and the means through which medieval writers experimented with genre. In this essay I focus on two compendious writers, the well-known Latin historian Ranulph Higden (died c. 1364) and his prolific English translator John Trevisa (d. 1402), both of whom saw the potential of compendia to shape genre. Higden used compendiousness to define a universal chronicle and to distinguish history from other large genres. For Trevisa, who translated Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s popular natural encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum, as well as the Polychronicon, compendiousness was a means of communicating with lay readers and of fashioning a supple and sensual vernacular. For both authors, but especially for Trevisa, the natural tendency of compendia to go to extremes — to accrete information, to exaggerate form, and to generate more and more language — was key to the ways in which they negotiated between genres, both long-form genres, such as chronicles and encyclopedias, and short-form genres, such as the lyric. Taken together, Higden and Trevisa are illuminating for modern scholars seeking genre in medieval literature, as well as for those keen to push the limits of modern genre theory.
Notes
1. See, for example, the English manuscript in the Huntington collection dated to 1368: <http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/hehweb/EL7H8.html>.
2. Vincent of Beauvais’s gargantuan, confidently and minutely-ordered Speculum Historiale, seems to have cast a shadow over Higden’s enterprise.
3. All Polychronicon references, both from Higden’s Latin original and Trevisa’s English translation, are to Babington and Lumby’s edition.
4. Trevisa substitutes an agricultural metaphor, “þat is in oþer books i-write welwyde and parcel mele i-plaunted, here it is i-putte togidre in rule and in order” (I.i).
5. Trevisa and Berkeley likely modeled their program not on the cultural activities of the English court but rather on those of the French king Charles V, a famous bibliophile, who, in the 1370s, recruited Paris scholars to translate Latin academic texts. Trevisa’s translations for Berkeley invoke the range of texts translated for the French court (see Steiner, “Lords, Servants” and “Berkeley Castle”).
6. Trevisa intrudes, glossing the principle “the greater serves the lesser” with practical experience, perhaps derived from Aristotle: the way in which we go about doing something is always inferior to thing that we hope to accomplish. So, for example, cultivating land is prescribed for growing good corn, and good corn is better than anything else; medicine is prescribed for health, and health is better than medicine; food and drink are necessary for life, and life is better than food and drink. Where Higden uses natural history to make a point about historical genres, Trevisa pushes the discussion towards ethical philosophy.
7. Compendiousness thus works in ways complementary but not identical to vernacularity.
8. Quotations from Trevisa’s translations of the Properties are from Seymour, ed., On the Properties of Things, Vols 1 and 2, cited by book and chapter numbers. Latin quotations are taken from Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Peter Ungarus, 1482).
9. As Timothy Stimson has suggested to me, Trevisa’s translation of this passage may have been inspired by Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, book 5, prose 5.
10. On Master Gregorius, De mirabilibus Romae, see James, “Magister Gregorius.”
11. For example, Berlin SB-PK 6 Diez MSS B Sant 1 and 4 (fourteenth century) and Wien, Osterreichische National Bibliothek (ONB), Codex Vindobonesis Palatinus 102 (item #11) (fifteenth century). See Hexter, “Shades of Ovid” 303.
12. Trevisa seems to have had access to a better Latin text than Higden’s in the Polychronicon manuscripts edited by Babington and Lumby (see n. 14 below).
13. Or one cross-rhymed quatrain followed by eight rhymed couplets; these are written as prose in manuscript.
14. Juventinus’s poem does not exist in a modern critical edition, and a wide range of versions exists in manuscript and in antiquarian editions. The version of the Latin poem used by Trevisa in translating Higden’s might have looked something like this:
Gallus ibi quamquam per noctem tinnipet omnem,
[Stridula] vox nulli jure placere potest
Dulce [per ora] sonat, dicunt quam nomine droscam
Sed fugiente die illa quieta manet.
Et merulus modulans tam pulchris zinzitat odis,
Nocte ruente timet, cantica nulla canit.
Vere calente novo componit acredula cantus,
Matutinali tampore ruricolans
Tunc turtud tritulat sturnus tunc [pisitat] ore;
Sed quod mane canunt vespere non recolunt.
15. Taken from British Library, Additional MS 27944, f. 8a. (England, c. 1410).