WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Within the glosses of On the Governance, the scribes read the learned exposition of
Aristotelian geometry, ethics, and science. From this, they inferred the work of a man who was
not shy of using his extensive knowledge to chide, compliment, or expand upon his texts as he
commonly does in the Polychronicon. For example, in arguing against one of Higden’s sources:
Trevisa: It is wonder that Gregory telleth so mad a maggle tale of so worthy a prince of
philosophers as Aristotle was. Why telleth he not how Aristotle declareth the matter of the ebbing
and flowing of the sea? Why telleth he not how it is written in the book of the Apple how Aristotle
died and held an apple in his hand and had comfort of the smell, and taught his scholars how they
should live and come to God, and be with God without end. And at last his hand began to quake,
and the apple fell down of his hand, and his face wax all wan, and so Aristotle yielded up the
ghost and died. 420
In this gloss, Trevisa answers Gregory’s Latinate Aristotle story—of an unworthy death—against
one from explicit Jewish and Arabic origins, known as De Pomo. Trevisa’s gloss repeats not
only the main story line but the scholarly address of this pseudo-Aristotelian work to its readers:
quem librum cum non inveniretur inter cristianos, quoniam eum in ebrayco legimus translatum de
arabico in hebreum, sanitate rehabitata ad eruditionem multorum et de hebrea lingua transtulim in
latinam in quo a compilatore quedam recitailia insertuntur.
which book when it is not found amidst Christians, thus we read it translated in Hebrew from
Arabic into Hebrew, having [our] health rehabilitated, we translated from the Hebrew tongue for
the erudition of many into Latin in which certain recitations were inserted by the compilator. 421
“Sanitate rehabitata ad eruditionem multorum” ‘Having our health rehabilitated to the erudition
of many’ might as well be an interpretation of Trevisa’s role as a compilator and translator of
Aristotelian role who attempts to rehabilitate Aristotle against Gregory’s “maggle” tale. In the
same manner, through its presence On the Governance and elsewhere, the metonym “Trevisa”
reinvigorated and made the vernacular a possible language of erudition—of rehabilitation of
Latinate traditions—for those scholars who could understand the use of very complex Latin
references within everyday English.
420 Qtd. in Fowler The Life 186, trans. David Fowler.
421 Qtd. in Lynn Thorndike, “The Latin Pseudo-Aristotle and Medieval Occult Science,” The Journal of English and
Germanic Philology, 21.2 (April, 1922): 237.
250