WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

citation (i.e. Giles or Trevisa would have not cited simply any authority), but it was certainly far
from sufficient. If this were the case, citing Aristotle would have been enough to assure a reader
that the scope of “concilium” did not include immutable, eternal concepts, and no abstract aside,
regardless of its length, would be required to explicate this point.
Giles and Trevisa’s citation of “iii Ethicorum,” therefore, does more than assure a reader
of an argument’s verisimilitude: it also records this example’s history. Through detailing such a
non-sequitur, a reader may look back at the provenance of “concilium” in “iii Ethicorum” and, in
glancing back, see how “concilium” may work with other discursive traditions that have
Aristotelian ethics as their base. This geometric aside, then, clarifies the material habitat (the
proximity to other texts) of “concilium” as a repeated text but not necessarily its conceptual
meaning (its proximity to an idea) as political advice. Through the exact and extensive reference
to Aristotle, a reader is not simply told what immutability or counsel are; he is told how to find a
detailed discussion on them by searching the Third Book of the Ethics, and he is shown how to
locate similar discussions by looking for the literal framing of this geometric exemplum.
To draw a modern analogy, this form of tangential yet detailed repetition behaves like the
seemingly arbitrary exercises by which a court decision cites its precedent. In following case
citation to the letter, judges do not simply defer to tradition (as if precedent were the only means
to argue a case). Their citations also are not assurances of argumentative validity (as if no one
would question their logic by citing prior decisions). No, judges follow such minute and (at
times) even tangential writing processes because these aid future readers in relating their
decision to a wider space of law, arguments, and syntax beyond the limits of a particular case.
Citing legal precedent makes a judge’s decision be more than an arbitrary interpretation of events
just as an explicit citation makes Giles’s example be more than interpretation of what political
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