WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

“Trevisa”—following the tradition used by Giles in his De Regimine and Higden in the
Polychronicon—introduces a reader to a habitat of a text and not to its overt meaning. This
makes the signing of a tangential geometric example more politically useful than the teaching of
a concept of governance because it helps one form an identity through a particular linguistic
articulation. As Ralph Hanna has argued, the gesture to textual habitats presents a fifteenth-
century “difficulty of translation” not because the “conversion of a text from one language to
another necessarily misrepresents its source text” but because the tactics involved in translating
continually brought to mind political questions about readership, authorship, and linguistic
identity. 424 By teaching a reader how to use English through another tradition, how to emulate
Latin speech within English language, “Trevisa” effectively helped preserved a counter-Latinate-
culture within the very heart of a rising, vernacular tradition. This type of double-speak (by
which a language would overtly not say what it should mean) could preserve the habitat of its
signs by forsaking their conceptual use and so keep a linguistic tradition (Latin) from being
diluted it into a rising syntax (English).
In his original dialogue between Dominus and Clericus found in the Polychronicon,
Trevisa makes his strongest argument for the cultural preservation of Latin textual traditions in
vernacular syntax through this type of authorial, Latinate gesturing. This claim seems
counterintuitive because, at first sight, the dialogue does quite the opposite, seemingly arguing
that English translations are valuable because of their pedagogic use and not because they keep
Latinate traditions from vernacular appropriation. In fact, the Dominus openly defends
vernacular translation as a cure for the universal incommunicability after the fall of Babel:
Dominus: Seþthe þat babyl was ybuld men spekeþ dyuers tonges so þat dyuers men buþ straunge
to oþer and knoweþ noзt of here speche. Speche ys noзt yknowe bote зif hyt be lurned. Commyn
lurnyng of speche ys by huyryng. And so always deef ys alwey dombe, vor he may noзt hure
424 Ralph Hanna, “The Difficulty of Ricardian Prose Translation: The Case of the Lollards,” MLQ, 51.3 (1990): 325.
252