Radical historiography: Langland, trevisa, and the polychronicon

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Volumn 27, Issue , 2005, Pages 171-210

  Steiner, Emily ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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EID: 63649084506     PISSN: 01902407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. All citations of the Piers Plowman B-text are to Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press, 1975). Subsequent citations will follow the quotation in the main text with passus and line numbers
2. Hereford, Middleworth, and Trevisa were admitted there between 1369 and 1372, after Trevisa and Middleworth had been expelled from Exeter College. Middleworth, in 1369, had also been expelled from Canterbury College because of his ties to Wyclif. Wyclif rented a room in Queen's from 1374 to 1381. For a description of Wycliffite Oxford and the scholars who may or may not have been associated with it, see David C. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 221-30
3. and Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 394-95
4. On Berkeley's patronage of Trevisa, see note 31 below. For Gaunt's patronage of Wyclif, see John Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952)
5. K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)
6. Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badly (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1987), pp. 19-21
7. and Steven Justice, "Lollardy," in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 663-64, 670-73
8. For a survey of arguments about biblical authorship, see Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 238-47. The only medieval evidence that Trevisa translated the Bible is Caxton's attribution in his preface to the Polychronicon, which John Bale influentially repeats in his Catalogue of Illustrious British Writers (1557). For Bale, the value of medieval historical writing - and by extension, the value of an English literary tradition -depended upon its incidental connections to a Reformist program, just as the textual evidence for that program, the English Bible, is supported in part by the vernaculariza-tion of a national history
9. For a fascinating recent discussion of Bale's Catalogue and the relationship that it posits between Britishness and literary history, see James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2, 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 23-43
10. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, pp. 228-30
11. and Galloway's in "Writing History in England," in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, p. 277. ("Trevisa may have first encountered the Polychronicon in Wyclif's circle at Queen's College, Oxford, for Wyclif was said to have thought it his favorite history.")
12. Hudson importantly demonstrates that Wycliffite issues were neither confined to the schools nor necessarily classified as Wycliffite in nonacademic and nonpolemical texts. See her chapter, "Vernacular Wycliffism," in The Premature Reformation, and "A Lollard Compilation and the Dissemination of Wycliffite Thought," in Lollards and Their Books (London: Hambledon, 1985), pp. 13-29, in which she describes the dissemination of Wycliffite thought from university scholars to those outside
13. See also Pamela Gradon, "Langland and the Ideology of Dissent," Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980): 179-205
14. and Margaret Aston, "'Caim's Castles': Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment," in R. B. Dobson, ed., The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), pp. 45-81
15. On the question of endowment in court circles and the schools before Wycliffe, see J. I. Catto, "Wydif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356-1430," in J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans, eds., History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 202-12
16. On the circulation of the Polychronicon in monastic libraries, see Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England I: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 55
17. and John Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 55-56, 101-3
18. Higden uses the three conquests of England as a "continuous structuring principle" (Galloway, "Writing History in England," p. 276), and he discusses the three branches of the English language (Polychronicon 2.158). Text in Rev. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed., Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, together with the English translations of John Trevisa and of an unknown writer of the fifteenth-century, 9 vols., Rolls Series 41 (Her Majesty's Stationers Office, 1882; Kraus Reprint, 1964). All subsequent citations of Higden's Latin text and Trevisa's translation are to this edition. Citations refer to Higden's book and chapter numbers and to the page numbers of the printed volume
19. For descriptions of the Polychromcon and its relation to earlier universal histories, see John Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 33-55
20. and Fowler, The Bible in Early English, Literature, pp. 194-246
21. See A. S. G. Edwards, "The Influence and Audience of the Polychronicon: Some Observations," Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society: Literary and Historical Section 17, pt. 6 (1980): 113-19
22. and Galloway, "Writing History in England," pp. 275-79. Continuations of the Polychronicon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as the Vita Edwardi Secundi and the chronicle of Adam Usk, tend to be interested in contemporary politics
23. On Caxton's transmission (and authorship) of the Brut and the Polychronicon, see Lister Matheson, "Printer and Scribe: Caxton, the Polychronicon, and the Brut," Speculum 60.3 (1985): 593-614
24. Edwards, "The Influence and Audience of the Polychronicon"
25. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 43-57
26. Taylor, English Historical Literature, pp. 134-47
27. Kennneth Muir, "Translations and Paraphrases of the Bible and Commentaries," in J. Burke Severs, ed., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500, vol. 2 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970), pp. 381-409
28. David Lawton, "Englishing the Bible," in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, pp. 454-82, (455)
29. On Higden's self-inscriptions, see Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Late Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988 [1984]), pp. 193-200
30. and Galloway, "Writing History in England," p. 276
31. Lawrence Clopper, "Arnewaye, Higden, and the Origin of the Chester Play," Records of Early English Drama Neusletter (1983): 4-11, at 7
32. and Taylor, Universal Chronicle, p. 1
33. De potestate pape, pp. 177-78
34. On Berkeley's political clout and extensive patronage, see Ralph Hanna III, "Sir Thomas Berkeley and His Patronage," Speculum 64 (1989): 878-916
35. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 130-31
36. Fiona Somerset, "The 'Publyschyng' of 'Informacion': John Trevisa, Sir Thomas Berkeley, and their project of 'Englysch translacion,'" in Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 62-100, at 65-66
37. Ibid
38. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Translations and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 224
39. Higden was the first to claim Alfred as the founder of the University of Oxford. See Fowler, The Bible in Early English Literature, p. 238
40. It is interesting to compare the Lord's translation theory here with Ullerston's understanding of biblical translation as paraphrase. See Nicholas Watson, "Censorship and Cultural Exchange in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409," Speculum 70 (1995): 822-64, esp. 841-45
41. For a cogent recent study of monastic historians' contributions to theories of English national identity, see Andrew Galloway, "Latin England," in Kathryn Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 41-95
42. For discussions of this passage, see Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience, p. 67
43. and Fowler, The Life and Times of John Tretisa, p. 189
44. On the crusading fantasies of Middle English alliterative romances, see Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 125-30, 151-54
45. On the relationship between border writing, national identities, and Arthurian historiography, see Michelle Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
46. On frontier writing and national identity, see Kathy Lavezzo, "Beyond Rome: Mapping Gender and Justice in The Man of Law's Tale," SAC 24 (2002): 149-80
47. and Kathleen Davis, "National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation," JMEMSt 28.3 (1998): 611-37
48. See also Susan Reynolds's discussion of the nation in Kingdom and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
49. Mirk, Festial, p. 38, lines 11-33