Compendious Genres: Higden, Trevisa, and the Medieval Encyclopedia

AbstractMedieval compendia, the Wikipedia of the Middle Ages, are a rich and productive source for medieval thinking about genre. For some medieval writers, writing in Latin or in the vernacular, compendiousness was not only an indicator of genre but also a pretext for genre thinking. It is at once a characteristic of a medieval genre and the means through which medieval writers experimented with genre. In this essay I focus on two compendious writers, the well-known Latin historian Ranulph Higden (died c. 1364) and his prolific English translator John Trevisa (d. 1402), both of whom saw the potential of compendia to shape genre. Higden used compendiousness to define a universal chronicle and to distinguish history from other large genres. For Trevisa, who translated Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s popular natural encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum, as well as the Polychronicon, compendiousness was a means of communicating with lay readers and of fashioning a supple and sensual vernacular. For both authors, b...