WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

the last two chapters of this dissertation, I address the political uses of this disconnect by the
vernacular traditions of story telling and translation in Iberia and England.
Chapter three begins this analysis by asking, what did it mean to write truth with
authority in the Iberian Peninsula? It answers this question by analyzing the Spanish
historiographical tradition that was influential to Duarte’s own literary background. In particular,
I argue that, in an attempt to cope with the challenges to authority brought about by Pedro I’s
deposition in 1369, Castilian historiography separated the pathos of reading from the authority
by which it sought to give credence to history. The texts of major Castilian historians, like Pedro
López de Áyala and Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, purposely sought to detach readers from the act of
story telling so that a subject’s personal projections would not taint the objectivity of the
historical events portrayed. This way of writing made narratives objective not because an author
could attest to the veracity of their events or because a reader could sympathize with them.
Rather, their objective authority was possible simply because their structures could be repeated
for any time, place, or person. The result is a disjunction by which temporal events had
authenticity when read outside of time, and historical events were veridical only when no one
author or reader could relate to them as lived experiences.
Continuing an analysis of this literary “crisis” of authority, chapter four analyzes the
disassociation between represented “truth” and authority in an English setting. It finds that this
disconnect was most influentially developed not by historians but by the nascent English effort to
theorize vernacular translation—a turn which, as Andrew Cole has argued, foreshadowed
Duarte’s own musings in the subject. 18 By focusing on the translations of John of Trevisa, I
argue that the fifteenth-century translation of scientific and political works framed the
interpretation of texts as authorial only when these texts were prevented from being denotatively
18 Andrew Cole, “Chaucer’s English Lesson,” Speculum, 77.4 (Oct, 2002): 1130.
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