WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

the world’ through the figuration of metaphoric play. In contrast, the English says something
entirely different seeing history as fixed by the providence of God’s mind for whom “fro ferst
was every thing present.”
The Confessio’s Latin frame is an antithetical in comparison to both the presentation and
interpretation of the Nebuchadnezzar episode found in the English text. In terms of of
presentation, the level of allusive word interchange between the Latin prose summary and Latin
verse frame are not paralleled by the English. Even a seeming straightforward phrase like
“secundum Danielis” operates doubly as ‘according to Daniel’ and ‘second of Daniel’ to
simultaneously show how the Latin verse lines poetically present the world as “variatio” in its
“second” or “double” rhetorical techniques, like hemistiches, dual rhyming, and puns. The first
two lines, “Prosper et aduersus obliquo tramite versus/ Immundus mundus decipit omne genus”
‘Fortunate and adverse, turning through its mazy trail/ Unclean, disordered [un-worldly] world
deceives every sort,’ neatly encapsulate the idea of random variation as an inevitable part of
temporality through a double structure. The first two hemistiches rhyme doubly as they clarify
Daniel’s prophecy: the world’s material adversity (“adversus/mundus”) comes from its turning
nature (“versus/genus”).
This mirroring of Latin summary in the Latin verses also has explicit interpretive
repercussions which are absent in the English. In explicitly thematizing Nebuchadnezzar’s dream
as the reflection of “variatio” ‘change,’ the Latin summary enacts an “adversus” ‘ante-turning’ of
the Latinate “versus” ‘turns/verses’ in which one form of narrative exposition turns against itself.
The explicitness of the prose’s tone mirrors the implicitness of the verses’ syntax and so literally
presents itself as ad-versity, as an anti-verse. Further, the Latin verses describe a reversible
illusion by none other than a “double play” of language: “immundus mundus decepit omne
115