WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

narratives) parallels similar concerns in the Iberian Peninsula regarding the nature of story-telling
and authority within fifteenth-century Castilian historians and the Portuguese translations of
Gower’s Confessio. Because of these parallel ways of separating voice from meaning, the
dissertation argues that if Gower’s English works were translated into Castilian and Portuguese,
such translation shows how an Anglo-Iberian discourse rethought the foundations of sovereignty
in the fifteenth century.
This, of course, does not mean that we can encapsulate these parallel threads of authority,
sovereignty, metaphoricity, truth, colonial discourse, and temporality into one blanket narrative
that has as its basis the repetition of “Babylonian” imagery across multiple genres, authors, and
audiences. For even if there was a close historical and textual filiation to the various episodes
analyzed in this dissertation, even if I could prove that Duarte and Eugene had Gower’s Iberian
translations in mind through their correspondence, our analysis would generate further questions.
For example, what is the relationship of a general English understanding of the “virtus sermonis”
to Gower’s poetic? How did Gower’s Iberian translators (or their patrons) understand the various
literary heritages which informed the idea of authority in the Iberian Peninsula? And more
importantly, how did Duarte apply the strategies, which he adopted from Gower’s discourse, into
the making of a political and colonial persona? These (and others) remain, but this study has
provided sufficient grounds to consider the conjunction of English and Iberian discourses as
central to tensions of authority in the fifteenth century.
Nevertheless these questions show that there is no one single interpretive key to the
nature of fifteenth-century colonial discourse. Something keenly reflected in the way in which
this dissertation provides distinct kaleidoscopic views of the fifteenth-century disseminal
ontology of authority as seen through an Anglo-Iberian prism—a prism that distinctly
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