John Trevisa's Information Age

Emily Steiner is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale University. She is author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature and Reading Piers Plowman. She has also co-edited The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, with Candace Barrington; Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts, with Lynn Ransom; and The Cambridge History of History Writing: England and Britain, 500-1500 with Jennifer Jahner and Elizabeth Tyler. She is Director of the International Piers Plowman Society.

• 1: Paris in Gloucestershire2: Big Form: Trevisa's Vernacular Megagenre3: Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon4: Alphabetical Logic: John Trevisa's Index to the Polychronicon and the English Concordance to the Bible5: Encyclopedic Style: On the Properties of Things6: Encyclopedic Verse and Vernacular Science: The Book of Sydrac7: Holy Encyclopedism: Stephen Batman's Middle AgesAppendix

It is heartening to have this new comprehensive edition of C manuscript accompanied by a novel and easy-to-read English translation of the romance. The Old French text has benefited from fresh insights that Short brings in his informative introduction and the ample notes; a conspectus of the main narrative episodes of the romance is also helpful. As a modern-language version of a lesser-known medieval work, Short's edition and translation not only contribute to deepening our appreciation of the text and its tradition but also act as a reminder that hybrid, not easily classifiable texts falling outside of formed canons are undeniably worthy of scholarly attention.