WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

I believe both of these alternatives are untenable. As regards the first, the dissemination
of Giles’s work in European culture makes it difficult to argue that Thomas Hoccleve’s
Regement would have limited the scope of Trevisa’s translation. For one, medieval readers do
not seem to have compartmentalized their reading as if when they read a political work they
would not read another—even if it was the same work. Thus, De Regimine was copied in 350
manuscripts even when its source, the more popular Secretum Secretorum, was disseminated in
over 600 Latin copies alone. 411 Further, noble households often possessed different copies of the
Secretum or De Regimine, and it would be difficult to say why the presence of one translation
would preclude the proliferation of another in a different circle. This was certainly true in France
were the continued dissemination of Henry de Gauchy’s translation certainly did not prevent the
creation of the translations of Jean Golein or of Gilles Deschamp. 412
The second alternative, that political events made the suppression of the vernacular
version of De Regimine expedient, ignores that De Regimine presented no polemical or
heterodox political advice. As a result, the English translation of De Regimine would not be
necessarily tied with political dissidence any more than the several vernacular versions of the
Secretum Secretorum, which, because they contained works of alchemy, certainly could be read
as heretical. As Charles Briggs has argued the popularity of Giles came less from his
presentation of unique political advice but from his ability to compile several forms of advice
authoritatively. 413 The wide dissemination of De Regimine across Europe (and certainly in more
politically charged environments than fifteenth-century England) suggests that a popular work
411 Briggs Giles 20-21.
412 Ibid. 16.
413 Ibid. 20.
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