WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

For Bede and for the Christian commentary tradition of which he was a part, the process of
textual interpretation structured habit not by pointing the reader to a rule he must follow but by
making the ways by which he arrived at the truth a part of his ethical and political life. 22 The
oath-making qualities of speech made the process of exegesis into a political praxis.
Closely analyzing this Christian tradition of speech as praxis, this chapter argues that the
political usage of Christian exegesis came to a turning point in the late-fourteenth and early-
fifteenth centuries because the Church, as a political unit, began to re-evaluate the role of
metaphoric utterances and exegesis in the conveyance of “truth.” I will argue, that for the
Church, this hermeneutic change was most pronounced in its legal justification for the
colonization of non-Christian lands. This argument is inseparable from three claims which I will
develop throughout this chapter. First, an ontological tenet of Christian exegesis at the turn of the
fourteenth century was that concepts and their representation were intrinsically tied. Second, the
turn of the fifteenth century assimilated this type of “nominalism” to rearticulate Christendom as
a legal and not just as a religious community. Lastly, Popes, canonists, and monarchs closely
attended to the literary allusions, connotations, and metaphoric implications of their colonial
discourse because they recognized that the exertion of political authority rested upon the
metaphoric qualities of their discourse.
In laying out this argument, this chapter will detail the religious and metaphoric logics
which allowed the fourteenth-century to conceive of authority discursively. In particular, I will
argue that the fourteenth century’s turn to the presence of speech itself as a way to project power
allowed Popes and sovereigns to adopt legal traditions through semantic and metaphoric play,
instead of relying on explicit legal arguments, to assert Christendom’s right to infidel lands.
22 For examples of this, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic
Culture, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982) 73; Coleman Ancient 143; and Calvin Kendall,
“Introduction,” On Genesis by Bede, trans. Calvin Kendall. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008) 37.
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