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Date/Time
Date(s) - 7 Nov 2011
5:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Location
Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us for the next session of the Seminar in the History of Material Texts. Emily Steiner, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will present on “How to Use a Medieval Alphabetic Index: John Trevisa’s Middle English Index.”
We will meet at 5:15 in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevator bank.
Steiner writes:
In this seminar, I will be discussing what I take to be the first alphabetical index in English, Trevisa’s subject index to the Polychronicon. John Trevisa, a Cornishman trained at Oxford, was a major translator working in the 1380’s and 90’s, who rendered into lively English prose some of the most influential texts of the fourteenth century. These included the massive universal history, the Polychronicon, Giles of Rome’s mirror-for-princes, De regimine principum, and Bartolomeaus Anglicus’s natural encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum. But translation turns out to be a very different sort of enterprise than navigation: it’s one thing to translate a history into English and quite another thing to create an English finding aid from scratch. Information technology and literary history don’t always go hand in hand, and Trevisa’s English index, though a spectacular failure as a finding aid, challenges modern sensibilities about what it means to use the alphabet.
Emily Steiner is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and has co-edited a collection of essays called The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2002). She has recently completed a book on Piers Plowman.