In Search of the Culprit. Aspects of Medieval Authorship

Abstract

Over fifty years after Roland Barthes’ essay La mort de l’auteur (‘The Death of the Author’) and Michel Foucault’s Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur (‘What Is an Author?’) were first published, the concept of authorship is still central to literary studies, with medieval literary studies being no exception. The last two decades have brought with them a huge number of publications about the concept of authorship in general, as well as more specifically about concepts of medieval authorship. Whilst Alastair Minnis based his great book about medieval theories of authorship on the scholastic perspectives on the subject that existed in the late Middle Ages themselves, thereby putting forward a predominantly emic analysis of the topic, other scholars – such as Rüdiger Schnell, Sonja Glauch, and Eva von Contzen, to name but a few – have taken more etic approaches, in that they have primarily sought to tease out medieval assumptions about authorship by interpreting case studies that do not so explicitly foreground such ideas. Despite their different approaches to the subject of authorship, all these scholars have demonstrated that the ideas of authorship, or of the special functions of authorship, that we bring to a text have a significant impact on our reading and interpretation of it. Indeed, the category of ‘author’ seems indispensable for the contextualisation of texts and the organisation of literature. In many cases, the search for an author results in a vicious circle: the search for an actual historical person to whom authorship can be attributed relies on the texts themselves, while the information we have about such persons comes from other texts that are themselves equally unclear in terms of their authorship. At best, this search may provide us with an authorial character or an imaginative authorial subject constructed from a few anecdotes derived from other narrative sources. Yet even if we cannot find the empirical producers of medieval texts, we can still search for theoretical entities or authorial agencies that are all involved in the texts as aesthetic artefacts.