WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

elated to the taking of “infidel” lands. Since the mid fourteenth century, the papal encyclicals of
Clement VI, paralleling a “nominalist” philosophical tradition, conceived of authority as a type
of absence, as a mere metaphor, in an attempt to disregard secular claims to the possession of
infidel lands. This metaphoric strategy attempted to monopolize the discourse of conquest so that
only the Pope could claim legitimacy to mediating sovereign claims of “infidel” lands.
Although the theorization of authority as a type of metaphor did not begin with the
discussion of who possessed the Canaries, it certainly took a political turn with the defense of
“infidel” sovereignty by the Council of Constance in 1415. In the early fifteenth-century, the
advent of the English Wycliffite heresy threatened to divest the Church of its temporal power by
taking the metaphoric qualities of sovereignty as its foundational argument. Following Wyclif,
secular rulers and lay priests alike began to think that if (as the early fourteenth-century
“nominalists” had argued) universal ideas were nothing but representation, then political
authority was possible only through its representation in the active deeds of the sovereign.
According to James Muldoon, this allowed thinkers to claim that the Church, having only
jurisdictional authority, could not claim sovereignty to things which kings, prelates, and
Christians struggled daily to maintain. Therefore, the seizing of infidel lands via conquest
jeopardized the status of the Church as a collective political unit by thinking of sovereignty only
as represented usufruct. 17 As this chapter will conclude, to avert this power loss, the Church
paradoxically denied that authority could be simply based upon the strength of utterances and yet
asserted that the voicing of authority—through the translation of God into human flesh—was
necessary for a political understanding.
17 James Muldoon, “John Wyclif and the Rights of the Infidels: The Requerimiento Re-Examined,” The Americas,
36.3 (Jan., 1980): 309.
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