WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

not directly from surface structure to surface structure but to a semantic deep structure and back
to surface structure” because he sees himself as “a ‘mene’ between oppositions created by the
difference of language.” 338
This way of thinking of clarity as merely a medium between ideas and language focuses
on how Trevisa’s language expresses meaning while taking for granted how it actually thinks of
“menyng.” As a result, the relationship between, what Copeland calls, “translation” and
“interpretation” has generally been taken to be an ideal linguistic plane. For example, the first
detailed study on Trevisa ignores the contexts of “anthropology, linguistics, communications,
information theory, logic” in favor of a “commonsense” way of negotiating what Trevisa
understood as meaning. 339 Further, even more historicist approaches have taken this ideal
communicative plane as the underlying ways of adjudicating the efficacy of Trevisa’s
translation,s whose “gradual development of a style of translation” as determined by
contemporary ideas of common sense are said to provide a key awareness of fourteenth-century
“spoken English.” 340
The few meta-discursive reflections on translation that remain from medieval English
commentators appear to justify this critical consensus that thinks of Trevisa’s translations as
mostly preoccupied in the transmission of meaning. In comparing everyday English “nakedness”
to ornate Latinate “subtilitas” ‘subtlety,’ vernacular commentators often set up the practice of
translation through idealized dichotomies of signs to signifieds. 341 Taking these meta-discursive
338 Waldron “John Trevisa” 187, 154.
339 Notably, Lawler unabashedly supports the theoretical framework of this approach because, “by a broader
definition Trevisa’s audience includes those who still read him today—people, that is, like me; and therefore in
applying what I think of as commonsense standards of judgment…I am in fact applying a ‘sociolinguistic’ standard”
(Lawler 287-288 note 23).
340 See Waldron “John Trevisa” 188, 198 and David Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar,
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995) 157.
341 For an analysis of this dichotomy, see Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women,”
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
210