WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Word into flesh and hence cannot hold authority. In viewing authority as a signifier, Hostiensis is
the direct precursor of those who wrongfully usurp infidel lands.
In this, Vladimiri seems to have put his finger in a key aspect of the Christian discourse
of colonialism as Clement VI’s justification to conquer the Canaries clearly repeats this logic:
Sed maius dubium est de dominio infidelis super infidelem. Et hic tango aliqua conferendo et
uidetur quod per auctoritatem aut sententiam, id est Ecclesie, quod plenam potestatem habet potest
iuste statui et ordinari quod tale dominium ab eis tollatur seu in una regione seu in omnibus, sicut
sibi iussum fuerit expedire.
But there is more doubt regarding the sovereignty of infidel over infidel. And this I touch
comparing some things, and it seems that through authority or command, that is of the Church,
because it has full power, it can justly establish and ordain that such sovereignty from [the
infidels] is removed in one region or in all, such that it would release the law to itself [My
emphasis]. 69
Clement uses the same terminology that Vladimiri inputes to Hostiensis. He argues that authority
is something that can be “tollatur” ‘taken’ or ‘sublated’ from one place into another as if it was a
metaphor that could be recognized differently across contexts. For Clement, the Canaries may be
invaded not because infidels hold authority unjustly but because the very principle of “dominio
infidelis super infidelem” ‘sovereignty of infidel over infidel’ is inconceivable, or what is the
same, unrecognizable due to the abstraction of sovereignty as semantic play.
Following this logic, Vladimiri sets up Hostiensis’s argument to assume two conditions
necessary for all translation. The first is that if authority can be translated, it is so because it
points to something, because it signifies. The second is that if authority means something, it only
does so for a particular audience which can recognize it. Treating any idea, even sovereignty, as
a signifier implies that all concepts merely point (and hence can stand) for other contexts to make
sense and that their truth is not absolutely grounded upon a direct relationship of signifier to
signified. In emphasizing translation, Hostiensis construes ideas as linguistically based. As such,
if one thinks that sovereignty can be translated—that it may be removed or reapplied under
69 Martínez 102.
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