WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

not affect the “standing” of meaning. Thinking that changing syntax across languages could
change meaning implies that Trevisa does not conceive of meaning as the denotative
understanding of ideas by a “clear” order of words and, as a result, that syntax has as its role
more than the portrayal of thought.
In this chapter, I will argue that Trevisa’s diction prevents meaning from being
denotatively understood through vernacular syntax despite the “cleer and pleyn” language of his
translations. His approach to translation manufactures a form of exegesis that proceeds by
allusion and undermines the ability of writing to present truth for the vernacular language of his
audience. He does this by making his use of “everyday” or “cleer and pleyn” English cater only
to audiences proficient in Latinate learning. This type of writing has two important effects. First,
it preserves Latinate traditions in an environment that favors vernacular speech while keeping
English-only speakers from assimilating Latin thought into their culture. Second, it makes the
intercultural change from Latin to English by-pass the communication of ideas through the use of
signs alone. As I will argue, the wide cultural dissemination of Trevisa’s translations proves that
their effectiveness do not depend on their ability to communicate knowledge directly and openly
to vernacular-only speakers but rather in their ability to remind and evoke knowledge in a way
that is far more socially enclosed than scholarship usually suggests.
1. Everyday “Menyng”: Interpreting English Clarity
As we have discussed in respect to Castilian historiography, medieval writers could
divorce basic readerly behaviors, like the common association of reading with the unfolding of
time, from a reader’s experience of reality because they did not always think that the role of a
text was to represent abstract thought. For fourteenth and fifteenth-century England, the Oxford
English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary record a similar cultural behavior around
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