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WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

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“prevaricacione” ‘distortion/prevarication/dissimulation’ of our first father, the “prothoplausti,”<br />

Adam. In taking human nature (and not form), Christ restored the incorruptibility which Adam’s<br />

deceit had clouded and so assured the “libertas” of all humankind.<br />

This Incipit claims that liberty is foreign from dissimulation as it is achieved by<br />

humanity’s direct equivalence to God. This is in essence Vladimiri’s argument against<br />

Hostiensis. Property and political liberty cannot be taken away from the infidels because God<br />

“creavit haec indifferenter propter hominem, quem formavit ad suam imaginem” ‘created these<br />

things indifferently because of man, which he formed to his own image.’ God created the basic<br />

ideas of autonomy, liberty, and sovereignty for all of humanity and not simply for those which<br />

worship him. The incipit to Creator Omnium largely repeats these claims except for one<br />

important difference. It avers, like Hostiensis, that it was God’s act of representation into human<br />

form (the “adventu Christi”) and not man’s original resemblance to God from creation that<br />

guarantees his universal liberty and autonomy.<br />

God certainly created “libertas” certainly indifferently to all of humanity, but its<br />

continuance in earth, after the “prevericacione” ‘distortion’ of the “prothoplastui” ‘the first<br />

author’ of mankind is only maintained by the coming into flesh of the second author via the<br />

incorruptible body of the “purissima Virgine Maria” ‘purest Virgin Mary.’ Creator Omnium,<br />

therefore, argues like Hostiensis (and, to a certain extent, like Wycliff) that authority is<br />

inevitably representable but that the type of representation is not. Through Christ, the<br />

representation of authority restores liberty, but through “prothoplausti prevaricacione” ‘the<br />

deception/the dissimulation of the first author,’ it guarantees slavery. Both Eugene and Vladimiri<br />

argue that Christianity guarantees the universal autonomy for all humans because its divine laws<br />

apply to all regardless of differences—because the dissimulation of a human, his metaphoric<br />

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