WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

However, by the fifteenth-century, with the use of the presence of speech by adherents to the
Wycliffite heresy, the principles that had justified these legal claims were no longer accepted. In
the age of the Two Councils (Constance and Basel 1417-1441), conceiving of authority as a
metaphor, particularly in the justification of Christian authority over infidel lands, was
anathemized as it threatened to make the power of the Church over temporal matters ephemeral.
It is in this impasse—between a fifteenth-century push for exploration and the threat posed by
the Wycliffite heresy—that the Church and the European monarchs involved in the process of
expansion developed a new type of discourse, one that asserted the authoritative qualities of
speech in its pure metaphoric and semantic uses without also undermining the Church’s claim to
political power.
1. Law as Representation: The Ontology of Fourteenth-Century Christian Hermeneutics
These three claims rely on one assumption which I find necessary in the following
argument: fourteenth and fifteenth-century political and religious commentators, even when
attending to “everyday” discourse, were closely aware of the textual logics which I will associate
with metaphoric slippage and a focus on the power of speech. This is a difficult argument to
make in light of contemporary philosophical criticism about Christianity. This criticism often
differentiates what it calls an original Christian ontology, which it readily admits is cognizant of
the power making capabilities of speech, versus the normalization of New Testament tenets and
logics by disciplinary structures like the Church or the State. Thus, contemporary thinkers return
to (what they call) the “original” Christian logic of language to understand the changes of
authority brought about by Christianity without also turning to the ways in which this “original”
logic was repeated throughout history. For example, Jean-Luc Nancy writes that,
Christianity assumes, in the most radical and explicit fashion, what is at stake in the alogon. All
the weight—the enormous weight—of religious representation cannot change the fact that the
‘other world’ or the ‘other kingdom’ never was a second world, or even a world-behind-the-
15