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explain a concept, such as in-textual definitions or doublets, without devoting an entire signed
gloss to a passing defintion. 373
We could blame the awkwardness of Trevisa’s intervention on the abstractness of Giles’s
geometric exemplum. After all, Giles’s digression is not one that, as elsewhere, works “as
relevant support of explanatory example” of his political argument or that, advances his points
by way of analogy. 374 From Trevisa’s long commentary, we can infer that the level of abstraction
in Giles’s example even prevents it from articulating its political claims. Thus, whatever
explicative failures can be found in Trevisa’s long aside, we can attribute them to the tenor of
translating something so tangential while still wishing to explain a concept to the reader. The
original tangent of Giles’s work would then explain why On the Governance does not
incorporate what “costa” and “dyameter” mean so that the reader could understand a concept.
Trevisa’s translation formulates the original example in a way that needs a tangential elaboration,
and so it faithfully parallels its stylistic place in De Regimine while teaching a Latinate concept
to his vernacular audience.
Still we should not be quick to attribute Trevisa’s short-comings to his original text
particularly given the brevity by which Giles introduces this abstract example:
Et que mutationis non subiacent sub consilio non cadunt. Ideo dicitur iii. Ethicorum. quia de
eternis id est immutabilibus nullus consiliatur. Nullus enim quaerit consilium de diametro si est
commesurabilis coste vel de quo cumque immutabili.
And of those [things] which are not adjoined of change, they do not fall under counsel. Therefore,
in the Third Book of the Ethics, it is said that this is because no one takes counsel about
373 In-textual definitions were deviations form the original which a medieval translator would use to explain a
foreign word; for instance, when Trevisa translates the definition “Parapsis”: “Parapsis is a square vessel wiþ foure
sydes y-liche,” adding “foure sydes y-liche” to explain what a “square” is (John Trevisa, On the Properties of
Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Propietatibus Rerum, 3 vols, eds. Seymour, M.C.
et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) 2.1378). Doublets are when a translator would use two vernacular words to
represent a Latin term such as “rosteþ and tosteþ” for the Latin “torrere” ‘to roast’ (Greetham “Models” 147-149).
374 See Janet Coleman, “Some Relations in the Study of Aristotle,” Political Thought and the Realities Power in the
Middle Ages (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1998) 148-147 and Briggs Giles 116.
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