WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

some point their tenets could have had a practical application for a set of readers—if only as
advice on how to rule their realm. 368 As a result, a work of advice—particularly advice about the
praxis of authority—is an ideal place to distinguish how a writer explains meaning to his
audience from how he sets up his persona from a textual tradition, and so Trevisa’s translation of
De Regimine Principum can help us distinguish how Trevisa, as an instructor, was different from
“Trevisa” as a foil of Latinate tradition.
As a textual object, Trevisa’s translation also provides a unique starting point of analysis.
On the Governance of Kings and Princes is not only the sole English translation of Giles of
Rome’s popular thirteenth-century De Regimine Principum, but it is also the lone exemplar of
Trevisa’s translation, surviving in MSS Oxford Bodleian Library Digby 233. 369 Compounding to
this uniqueness, this translation is one of his least annotated, with only three glosses addressing
but one idea in the whole work: the meaning of political deliberation or “concilium” ‘counsel’ or
‘advice.’ 370 Further, unlike his interventions in other major works like Polycrhonicon and De
Propietaribus Rerum, the glosses of On the Governance do not directly engage the work’s
guiding subject, and they stylistically differ in scope, syntax, and diction from those that
accompany Trevisa’s other translations. 371
An excellent example of how On the Governance’s glosses differ from those in the rest
of Trevisa’s translations is found in the work’s longest gloss. In it, Trevisa explains a tangential
example from geometry that Giles uses to distinguish political “concilium” from other forms of
deliberation. Although geometry is a rather abstract way for Giles to explain “concilium”
368
See Lester Kruger Born, “The Perfect Prince,” Speculum, 3. 4 (Oct., 1928): 470-504.
369
Briggs Giles 82.
370
Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994) 70.
371 Kinkade 7.
222