WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

demonstrates that the separation of voice and meaning has political repercussions. Indeed, it is
this type of Babylonian plurality—through which authority is expressed without meaning—that
forms the background to each of the dissertation’s chapters, and which can prove a helpful guide
to understanding how the dissertation’s narrative matters as a history of thought.
In the first chapter, the competing ideas of universal meaning versus disseminal voices
are shown to be the background for the fifteenth-century discussions of colonialism and
sovereignty. In the second chapter, it is the failure of Nimrod’s descendant—Nebuchadnezzar—
to arrest universal meaning through the play of representation that forms the background for
Gower’s poetic, and it is Gower’s highlighting of this failure that makes his work appear as more
than vernacular adaptations of classical stories. The third chapter analyzes the effects of
“universal” authority as disassociation of a reader’s expectations of reality from the expounding
of truth, and it explores the Babylonian notion of what it means to have an a-temporal voice,
what it means to arrest a name in perpetuity, in the context of Castilian historiography. Lastly,
with Trevisa we return to the question of how authority could be expressed through vernacular
language without reducing meaning to representation; that is, how an immediate voice could be
preserved across different cultures.
More than presenting a unified vision of fifteenth-century discourse on authority, this
dissertation tells the episodic story of the infidelity of voice to meaning. The main character of
this story is Voice, which across many guises (legal treatises, epistles, histories, translations,
poems) constantly seeks to divest itself from the heritage of Meaning. It does this through the
process of Writing by making its being dependent on a type of perpetual temporality that does
not wait for readers or writers to be effective. Through Writing, Voice finds a perfect way to be
unfaithful to Meaning because it does not have to point to something to be uttered by others.
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