WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

‘shoulders’ of famed historians. Instead, he assumes the habit of the lowest of all medieval
“docendi” ‘teachers,’ the grammarian to defend his vernacular project personally.
If Higden outlines an English identity by being a small compiler of stories, Trevisa
accomplishes the creation of an English tongue by merely exchanging words. This parallel serves
to magnify his role as a translator above that of the historian. Through his commentaries, Trevisa
does not just discipline the secular “maiores” of the nobility, but he also teaches them as
incipient “minores” in Latinate knowledge. Trevisa’s readers are implicitly personified dwarves
since their knowledge of concepts, their mind’s reach, is much less developed than their
vernacular fluency, their experience and age in a language. What is more, because Higden has an
equal discrepancy between his vernacular language and his conceptual knowledge, he is a type of
“nanus” ‘dwarf’ that not only must be “learned” into English by being translated but must be
“learned,” as in taught a thing or two, about the national subjects—like the status of vernacular
proficiency—that his Latin text no longer masters.
Trevisa’s translation supersedes historical narration because it creates, it witnesses, and it
writes a language outside all possible limits of time and measure. Higden claims to add but a
little to a long tradition, a dwarfish chronicle on top of countless previous histories. Trevisa, on
the other hand, teaches and disseminates vernacular proficiency where there was but only the
inchoate work of Cornish grammarians. The incommensurability of such a work—in which a
translator is great because of the smallness of his size—is proved by how “Trevisa” voices the
passage of time. In this way, Trevisa describes the non-vernacular past which Higden inhabits as
measured by the coming of the great giant namely Christ (“þe yer of oure lord”), and the
vernacular present, for which he is responsible, as measured by the dwarfish “зongelyn” Richard
218