WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

etter understood among themselves; and setting agreeable forms of government over them, as if
they were a people derived from themselves. 442
The multiplicity of tongues allows men not only to leave building a single Tower for the expanse
of the world but also to take “possession of that land which they light upon.” That is, the
strangeness from one another causes humans to give unique names to the lands they inhabit
simply because they inhabit them and not because they rightfully own them. In other words,
without universal meaning as a way to communicate with my neighbor, the creation of polities
must privilege the syntactic “denomination” of my identity—the immediate force of the voice—
as a way to retain my name upon the earth and their power over the land they find.
After Babel, humans are “intelligible” to one another not by representing one image but
by mutating their voice into that of the other. It is this use of language that allows the extension
of the first human empire—that of the Greeks. According to Josephus, the Greeks were able to
grow potent by authoring certain “mutations” to their original speech by which they could give
“names to the nations that sounded well (in Greek) that they might be better understood among
themselves” so as to make others believe that they were a people “derived from themselves.”
Thus, the Greeks were able to sound as if they were the first nations, as if all other tongues came
from their original peoples, and by “claiming to themselves the glory of antiquity,” (we may
even say in the same manner that Trevisa uses English to appropriate Latinate authority) they
were able to set “agreeable” governments upon their people and upon their neighbors.
In the figure of Babel, the “virtus sermonis” ‘force of speech’ associated with vernacular
plurality not only reflects Trevisa’s authorial gesturing but it also mimics the broader discourse
of authority in fourteenth and fifteenth-century justifications of colonial expansion. I have argued
that the success of fifteenth-century colonial discourses came from a fundamental disassociation
442 Ibid.
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