WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

undeniable that both thinkers are able to analyze law because the idea of law, when encountered
through “close reading,” behaves as a linguistic structure; in Jerome’s terms, “sermo” or in
Derrida’s, “parole.”
As Wyclif’s efforts imply, the “close reading” associated with the “unconditional”
questioning of texts reveals a subjective wish to master and author a concept without having to
account for its “proper” accord to fixed tradition of meaning and truth. That is, in averring the
fluidity of linguistic meaning to universal concepts, a reader portrays a desire to submit truth to
the authority of his own speech. When Jerome defends Christian exegesis against Jewish
tradition in saying that “omnis sermo fidelis pro iure iurando sit” ‘all the speech of the faithful is
instead of an oath’ and when Wyclif follows suit defending the power of the voice, they both
suggest, like Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, that the authority of speech is “an
unconditional alienation” from fixed meaning because an individual’s relationship to his being is
as if he acted as a sovereign. That is, Jerome, Wyclif, Nancy, and Derrida would agree that an
individual’s speech makes truth an experience of being in the world, and not simply that speech
operates as the representation of a universal concept.
It may seem difficult to see in Wyclif and Jerome’s support for the sacred status of the
literal text Scripture the full unconditional response to meaning and language that is commonly
associated with post-structural derivation of authority from metaphoric structures. However, as
long as the coming-into-truth of a subject stands for interpretation, the parallels are unavoidable.
For example, the “virtus sermonis” ‘force of speech’ was used by the fourteenth-century
theologian and “nominalist” William of Woodford to argue, in his first support of Wyclif’s
beliefs, that the deconstructive play of meaning was not that different from the “literal” reading
of a fixed Scriptural text,
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