Polychronicon

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A medieval universal chronicle in Latin, written by the monk Ranulf Higden, that traces world history from the Creation onward
2. The large fourteenth-century history of the world compiled by the English monk Ranulf Higden in the monastery of Chester
3. An encyclopedic Latin chronicle of world events and geography, composed by Ranulf Higden and later translated into English

Etymology: Polychronicon is the title of a huge chronicle of world history written in Latin by the Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden at St Werburgh's Abbey in Chester, probably in the 1320s or 1330s. The title is Greek in form: "polychronikon" combines "polys", meaning "many", with "chronikos", meaning "of time" or "chronicle", so it means something like "many-timed" or "covering many times". Higden's work traced events from the Creation to his own day, and its title announced that it gathered the histories of many ages into one book. The word became notable in English because of the translation. Around 1387 John Trevisa, a Cornish-born priest and scholar, rendered Higden's Latin into English, and in the 1480s William Caxton printed an English version, which made the book one of the most widely read histories of its age. Caxton's edition kept the title, so "Polychronicon" became the name by which English readers knew it. Few English readers today would recognise the word, but for centuries it was the standard name for a universal history.