WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Trevisa’s translations were not disseminated under the metonym of “Trevisa” to teach
concepts to lay readers. Rather, his commentaries show a writer catering to a very learned
audience interested in more than pedagogic understanding. “Trevisa,” as a metonymic English
embodiment of a Latinate tradition of Ranulfus Higden, Bartholomeous Anglicus, and Giles of
Rome, appeals to the gate keepers of English writing: those bureaucratic clerics through whom
the accurate dissemination of learning, the literacy of the nobility, and the “canonizing” of an
English corpus was accomplished. “Trevisa” directed its lore to the clerical members of the
bureaucracy who, as John H. Fisher has argued, were responsible for the emergence of a standard
dialect and the dissemination of English literary works as competitors to Latinate and French
traditions. 422 And Trevisa was not alone Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Langland’s Piers
Plowman, Gower’s Confessio Amantis lay wholly within the hands of a group of scribes, who
were more than passive receptors, but also creators of a national corpus of literature. 423
Hence, by bearing Trevisa’s signature, On the Governance assured both its performative
felicity (its ability to convey a “learned” message) and possibility of its continued demand (its
mark of Latinate authority). Through the former, “Trevisa,” as a signature, taught its readers how
to “construe an Englysh” from a usurpation of Latin tradition into quotidian English signs
following the pattern of its Latinate English glosses. Through the latter, it taught them how to
recognize this type of English as “authorial” English. Trevisa’s signature—alongside the
geometric lesson found in Digby 233—works less as a way to communicate signs along a
conceptual value and more as a signal of the “eruditionem” ‘erudition’ present within a specific
compilation.
422 Fisher “Chancery” 887.
423 For a full study of this culture see John H. Fisher, “A Language Policy for Medieval England,” PMLA, 107. 5
(Oct., 1992) and Eric Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval
England (College Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2001).
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