WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

clearly wrong commentary, he would show that Latinate translations did not bring any new
knowledge into vernacular culture. If the word “imeete” is merely the idiomatic past-participle of
measure, the geometrical example would become illogical to the average “educated” vernacular
speaker. The practice of geometry would allow anyone to measure the diagonal of a square by an
algorithmic deduction of the measurements of its sides. Trevisa’s all-too-literal and less-than-
vernacular translations, hence, usurps the English language from vernacular quotidian
understanding for the exclusive use of clerical readers by using a highly scholastic “exemplum
famosum” ‘famous example’ with solely secular syntax without rendering it legible for
audiences ignorant of Latinate reading traditions.
I am not saying, as Katherine Breen following Fiona Somerset suggests, that Trevisa
translates to synthesize Latinate and vernacular cultures in one language. I am, however, arguing
that his translations do not present English as a viable alternative to Latinate textuality. The
glosses in Trevisa’s On the Governance of Kings and Princes inhabit “meaning” only when we
think that their audience was not the vernacular-only, secular nobility but the Latin and
vernacularly learned, clericy. The Dominus’s desire “to haue an Englysch translacion,” in
stressing pedagogy, does not reflect the position of Trevisa the translator but that of “Trevisa” as
a foil for Latinate textuality. Although the figural “Trevisa” may have voiced a pedagogical
concern, the need to have an “Englysch translacion” for Trevisa the writer meant to literally bear
Latin texts as English, to carry English through Latin signifying traditions, without necessarily
addressing vernacular audiences.
6. Vernacular Reading: The Style of a “Trevisa” Translation
Still it is difficult to think that Trevisa’s use of English does not mean what it says at
some level for vernacular speakers. This is because what we know of Thomas Berkeley’s life
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