WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

eader’s understanding or when they are literally quoting from another source. For example, they
elide citations altogether; they sometimes amend the citation to passage; or at times they (and
especially Trevisa) argue against, re-paraphrase, or simply omit sources at will. 376
In the same manner, the concordance of a citation by two different authors is also
common across medieval texts. However, in repeating a source’s citation, a writer would have
done more than just copy from the original; he would have pointed a reader to the possibility of a
shared textual tradition. Otherwise, if a writer would have taken Giles’s citation to be wrong, he
would have listed another source for the quotation. In particular, “iii Ethicorum” ‘third of the
Ethics’ tells us that both Trevisa and Giles wished their readers to know that this discussion of
political advice came from an Aristotelian provenance, and it is not far into Book III of the
Ethics that we see why:
As for Deliberation, do people deliberate about everything—are all things possible objects of
deliberation—, or are there some things about which deliberation is impossible? The term ‘object
of deliberation’ presumably must not be taken to include things about which a fool or a madman
might deliberate, but to mean what a sensible person would deliberate about. Well then, nobody
deliberates about things eternal such as the order of the universe, or the incommensurability of the
diagonal and the side, of a square. 377
Even though an appeal to geometry, from the viewpoint of readership, seems tangential to a
discussion on “concilium,” Giles and Trevisa focus on it simply because it comes from Aristotle,
and Aristotle was a central theorist of medieval political thinking which any “learned” vernacular
or Latin reader would have recognized.
Nevertheless, Giles and Trevisa’s fidelity in quoting Aristotle appears to hamper the way
in which this example could articulate political advice for an audience whose main interest for
reading the work was practical. From Arirsotle’s passage, the text derives the very syntactical
structure of its argument even when its goal (in addressing a particular ruler) differs in scope and
376 Briggs and Fowler “Preface” xiv.
377 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1982) Book 3. Chapter 3. Section 1.
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