Description: This book investigates how late medieval English writers who translated specialized academic knowledge from Latin into English often projected unprecedented sorts of lay audiences for their writing, and worried about the potential results of making the information they presented more widely available. The well-known concerns with clerical corruption and lay education of authors such as Langland, Trevisa, and Wyclif are linked to those of more obscure writers in both Latin and English, some only recently edited, or only extant in manuscript.
Review Quotes: "Somerset's book provides the tools to push vernacularity studies...to a higher level, to the kind of serious scholarship the topic still needs." Speculum