WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

VOICE AND MEANING:
WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND AND IBERIA
Juan David Sierra, Ph.D.
Cornell University 2011
My dissertation tells the story of how the separation of voice and meaning in discursive
structures became bound up with legitimating the fifteenth-century conquest of non-Christian
lands. This is because the possibility of extending secular dominion into lands outside traditional
legitimating practices necessitated a new rethinking of the use and discourse of authority. At the
center of this change in meaning and voice were the Iberian translations of John Gower’s
Confessio Amantis that joined two different modalities of questioning the presentation of
authority through writing: a Castilian approach, which disassociated the experience of reading
from the verisimilitude of narration, and an English one, which undermined the possibility of
speech to communicate truth. This synthesis justified colonialism because it gave sovereigns the
means to speak with authority in a place outside universal language and law.
The Iberian and English traditions which influenced Gower’s translation into Portuguese,
therefore, support the idea that there was a growing disconnect between the power of their ideas
and the ways in which they were conveyed. The most disseminated examples of Castilian
historiography and English translation separated what they meant from how they said it. They
made spaces for understanding which were outside of communication—spaces which proved
that signs could divorce their social uses from their ability to signify while still retaining their
ability to change the world. These spaces, in being taken up by the Portuguese translations of
Gower’s Confessio, helped Europe fashion a concept of sovereignty applicable outside the
boundaries of Western discourse.