Encyclopedic Style

This chapter turns to Trevisa’s accomplished translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s natural encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum. Medieval encyclopedias like Trevisa’s subvert modern expectations of natural history by showing first, that the history of information culture includes both literature and the literary, and second, that the history of English literature includes the translation of big Latin encyclopedias into the vernacular. Trevisa’s continual immersion in De proprietatibus rerum helped him develop a vibrant and affecting prose style, an accumulative style, that was both indebted to Latin encyclopedism and deeply innovative in its shaping of literary English. At the heart of Trevisa’s encyclopedic style is the idea of the “property” as simultaneously a literary ornament and the character or trait of a created thing.