WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

debated nor their words thoroughly analyzed. In Dominus’s words, “always deef ys alwey
dombe;” he that has no strength of voice, has no access to truth or “lerning.”
The dialogue between Dominus and Clerius about translation—like Trevisa’s general
attitude towards translation—is therefore not one over the necessity of conveying ideas to a
general populace. Rather, it is an ontological defense of language as immediate force—as useful
without communicating concepts. As Margery Baxter has argued, the emphasis on the
immediacy of language has a political aim in England: it justifies the creation of communities
(particularly Wycliffite adherents) outside traditional textual habitats by empowering the
receivers and speakers of a language without the need for the intermediary of the Church to
interpret their meaning. She writes,
In this interpretation, Lollard reading is governed by the same rules as Lollard ownership or
dominion: it comes only by grace, not by grammar and Donatus…At such a level of theological
abstraction, language is but the empty and dead covering of an unmistakable supernal presence
which is not read but almost speaks itself directly to those with ears to hear [My emphasis]. 435
For Trevisa, this is precisely what legitimates Dominus’s arguments for English translation.
Inhabiting the very force of “speche,” the “virtutis sermonis,” Dominus refuses to cite his Pauline
sources explicitly. Instead, he appropriates their language and arguments into his own
terminology—as if they were his but also as if they did not need an exegetical tradition to be
understood. In so doing, he obviates the mediating role of a Latin tradition by appropriating
scriptural references directly for his own purposes. Dominus argues without a tradition and
without logical steps, vindicating translation without citing a single “auctor” and even mocking
Clericus when he turns to authorities to them for support. Dominus’s speech makes him truly a
“dominus” ‘lord’ of his own language, without having any debt to tradition or a mediating
435 Qtd. in Hanna “The Difficult of Ricardian Prose” 337
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