WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

II (“þe seconde kyng Richard after þe conqueste”). 359 In Trevisa’s frame, Higden’s narration of
time, no matter how popular, could never match how Cornish men taught England how to
“construeþ an Englysch” and to make identity from the nothingness of current times.
Ironically, Trevisa’s authorial gesture for an English vernacular is only legible from the
stand point of Latinate learning and not by reading his English at face value. Nevertheless, even
if his pedagogical “style” is merely a posture, we cannot deduce that, in using Latinate tradition,
Trevisa thinks of his vernacular syntax as anything more than a way to clarify concepts. Indeed,
this gloss can be explained, like the majority of Trevisa’s signed interventions, as the teaching of
a concept: it intervenes to comment upon a social phenomenon, and it expands a foreign concept
to the average vernacular reader. 360 These two functions of commentary explicitly use “menyng”
in a very restrictive sense as a concept. The signifier “Trevisa” (even if it stylistically addresses a
Latinate tradition of “R”) can work as a direct, useful, and pedagogical source of information for
a vernacular audience unschooled in history and general clerical training.
It thus appears impossible to deny the common scholarly perspective that reads Trevisa
as “committed to writing in order to transmit and retain meaning,” particularly when his use of
English appears so “intelligible and accurate, yet suitably idiomatic.” 361 Still, our analysis shows
that, from the standpoint of the “average educated reader,” there are no real syntactic markers
that would help differentiate at what point Trevisa’s comments leave aside what Ralph Hanna
has called “literary shaping” to portray more directly “a real relationship” of signs to concepts. 362
Therefore, we should be wary to accept at face value that Trevisa’s readership would be able to
359
For the motif of the “young” and “dwarfish” Richard II in poetic satire, see George Coffman, “John Gower,
Mentor for Royalty: Richard II,” PMLA, 69 (1954): 953-964.
360
Charles Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 81.
361
Ibid. 77-79.
362
Ralph Hanna, “Sir Thomas Berkeley III and his Patronage,” Speculum, 64. 4 (October 1989): 892.
219