Radical Historiography: Langland Trevisa, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon.

This essay argues that Higden’s Polychronicon ‘captured the political imagination of fourteenth-century writers, and that its reception in medieval England attests to the profound historiographical investments […] of polemicists, preachers, translators, and poets’, specifically, L and Trevisa. These writers, ‘in grappling with the idea of the Polychronicon as a whole work or even as a master genre, were able to theorize relations between clergy and laity in the particular ways in which they did’ (p. 173).