WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

CONCLUSION:
THE VOICE OF COLONIALISM
Dominus’s association of political authority with a post-Babylonian plurality of voices
fittingly concludes this dissertation’s discussion about the ability of speech to gather “authorial”
force without referring to meaning. The Tower of Babel, after all, is the one place where
syntactic utterances where possible without meaning because human tongues were bereft of
intelligibility by God’s intervention. Further, for medieval historiography, the building of the
Tower marks the first time where this confusion of tongues specifically speaks of the creation of
“auctoritas,” by describing the story of Nimrod, the first earthly tyrant.
Babylon, as the epicenter of both vernacular language and sovereignty, underlies
Trevisa’s understanding of the political stakes of translation. As Dominus makes clear in the first
line of the dialogue, translation necessarily negotiates “strangeness” within a polity: “Seþthe þat
babyl was ybuld men spekeþ dyuers tonges so þat dyuers men buþ straunge to oþer and knoweþ
noзt of here speche.” 436 For Trevisa, in particular, translation allows readers to create such a
political unit not because it helps them communicate to one another but because it helps them
retain gestures of authority across languages. This is in part why Dominus’s arguments, like
Trevisa’s translations, are explicitly “straunge” to everyday vernacular understanding—they
require more than a rudimentary understanding of his words to comprehend. Although the
biblical account of Babel to which he directly alludes provides no direct link between the
beginning of sovereignty and the confusion of men’s tongues, Trevisa’s couching of the story
before the flood in a discussion by a Lord on the political importance of translation implicitly
hearkens to a Latinate historical tradition. This tradition has its roots in the Antiquitates Judaicae
of Flavius Josephus, whose long history of the world accords with other general histories like
436 Qtd. in Waldron “Trevisa’s Original” 289.
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