1 - Writing, Translating and Imagining Italy in the Polychronicon

Summary

In the last two decades, scholarship has taken the Latin Polychronicon out of the cobwebs, reflecting on its historiographical geography and materialist history in the light of such concepts as transnational, national and local identities. In the course of these reflections, as well as in recent genre-focused studies of the place of antiquity in universal history, the Polychronicon's visual and verbal representations of Rome – especially as they relate to Britain – have played a non-negligible part. While I am indebted to many of the insights provided by these studies, what I propose here is both more straightforward and more ambitious: I wish to explore and reflect on the Polychronicon's cartographic, chorographic and historiographical space of an ‘Italy’ that is inclusive of, but also in excess of, Rome. Since the near ubiquity of this space precludes exhaustiveness, I will focus on some of its recurring features that may help us assess the place of Italy in the historico-geographical imaginary at a time when the island of Britain is already linked to the Italian peninsula by commercial and mercenary activity, but the works of the great trecento authors have yet to make an impact on English literature.

The ‘writers’ of the Polychronicon were multiple, and for the purposes of this study can be defined as three: the Chester Benedictine Ranulph Higden, as he revisited and revised an earlier version of his work at some time in the 1350s; John Trevisa, as he worked on his translation for Thomas Berkeley in 1385–87; and the unknown translator behind the only extant manuscript of his work in London, British Library (BL), MS Harley 2261 (c. 1475). Widely circulated, prolifically copied and continued, before and after being translated, the Latin Polychronicon can hardly be apprehended in all its variant versions, so there is little alternative but to refer to the edition by C. Babington and J. R. Lumby, which collates five Latin manuscripts and includes the two English translations.

When using the term Polychronicon in what follows, I will essentially be referring to features of the text that are common to author and translators, whose distinct voices will be referred to as those of Higden (for the writer), Ranulph (when signing additions under his initial R), Trevisa, and Harley 2261.