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is maintained although knowing the definition of a right angle is central to Bartholomaeus’s
figuration of a triangle’s corner as the soul and although the text itself leaves an opening for a
commentator to explain the concept to his readers—“what is an euene cornere, it is determined in
anoþer place.”
Trevisa holds back from disturbing the text with an extensive abstract aside on the
meaning of a right angle not because he does not know what an “euene cornere” is but because
his source’s mathematical and moral allegory inhabited the traditional way of teaching
mathematical concepts as applied knowledge. This pedagogic tradition weighs so much on the
text that Bartholomaeus (and here Trevisa dutifully follows suit) claims to maintain the exact
terminology of his source at the risk of introducing a reader to unknown mathematical concepts,
such as a right angle. If either Bartholomaeus or Trevisa were to introduce short aside to clarify
the meaning of “angle,” they would have severed the fluidity of the theological argument. As
such, the text would have not been a pedagogical exercise since it did not clarify mathematics
concurrently with a parallel allegory in another field. 384
Turning to On the Governance, we could speculate that Trevisa’s lengthy aside about
geometry, despite its awkwardness, could be an attempt to tie the explanation of a mathematical
concept to a political one. Assuming that Trevisa’s vernacular translations reached an unlearned
and not simply a scholarly audience, his aside would work in concurrent mathematical and
political levels to bring a reader to broader conceptual understanding. In general, this would
seem to tie well with the image that Trevisa developed his commentaries as material explication
of concepts for vernacular audiences. As Fiona Somerset has argued, Trevisa’s asides portray
more than a linguistic clarification of facts. Rather, in requiring a reader to access a wider
384 Edith Sylla, “Thomas Bradwardine’s De Continuo and the Structure of Fourteenth-Century Learning,” Texts and
Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science: Stuides on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday, eds.
Edith Sylla and Michael McVaugh (New York: Brill, 1997) 186.
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