WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

INTRODUCTION
Although the following is the first comparative study of English and Iberian discursive
shifts of authority, it certainly is not the first study of the disassociation of meaning and voice in
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Since Johan Huizinga’s study of the courtly art and culture of
France and the Low Countries, the late medieval period has been characterized by cultural
historians as a time in which social mores and traditional structures of power were disassociated
from discursive structures. 1 It has been hard to argue with Huizinga’s thesis because, in his
words, “the political stage of the kingdoms of Europe was so crowded with fierce and tragic
conflicts that the peoples could not help seeing all that regards royalty as a succession of
sanguinary and romantic events.” 2
In fact, fourteenth-century Europe witnessed more than its share of “sanguinary and
romantic” ways in which homogeneous ideas of authority were separated from traditional
discourses and seemed to lack a type of universal meaning. To name a few: the regicides across
England, Germany, France, and Castile brought a challenge to the power of the king; the Great
Schism severely shook the authority of the Church; the rise of the Turkish infidel and the
Wycliffite and Hussite heresies showed that the idea of Christendom was far from unified; the
monetary scarcity occasioned by the drying up of Dutch and Belgian gold and silver mines
disassociated value from a fixed measure; and the labor and food scarcities brought by the Black
Death unsettled the medieval class system and allowed the creation of states of identity beyond
the three traditional pillars of medieval society.
1
Edward Peters and Walter P. Simons, “The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages,” Speculum 74.3 (Jul., 1999):
617.
2
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: a Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the
Netherlands in the 14 th and 15 th Centuries (London: Arnold, 1924) 9.
1