WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

could keep universal concepts without lapsing into the Wycliffite heresies and nominalist ideas
that—as Jesse Gellrich has argued—challenged the legal foundations of ecclesiastical power. 121
In the following chapters, I will analyze the discursive structures which guided Duarte’s
conception of authority as metaphorical yet universal. As I have suggested in the Introduction,
these structures came to Duarte via Gower’s Confessio Amantis whose translation into
Portuguese united English and Iberian discourses of sovereignty. This work, as we have seen by
looking into the Prologue of Duarte’s Leal Conselheiro, framed the portrayal of “authority” in
Duarte’s own literary compositions, and was so valuable that his nobles found it expedient to
translate at the colonial outposts of Çeuta off the coast of North Africa during the same year in
which Duarte sought a Papal dispensation for his war against infidelity. As we will see, the
translation of Gower into Portuguese was not just a dissemination of a literary work but an active
joining of English and Iberian strategies for representing authority—strategies which allowed a
sovereign to conceive of authority as the veritable force of speech and discourse without doing
away with its universal foundation.
121 Gellrich 19-20.
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