In-text medieval authority reflected in the prefaces of the Romanian patriarchal literature

Abstract

The concept of collective authority applies to the medieval and pre-modern ages, with writers as spokesmen of the social movements and mentalities. First of all, the medieval and pre-modern man was the member of a group and never ceased to be a member of that group. The prefaces of the books, published under the signature of a typographer, a high priest or the king himself, genuine poetic arts in the past literary centuries, convey a contract between the author and the virtual/real reader, asking for Grice’s cooperative principle. The relationship between the author and the reader goes beyond the reading contract, reaching a transfer of authority between the two parties. This study is based on a corpus of prefaces in the Romanian literature of the 16 th –18 th centuries in order to propose an authority model in critical thinking and literary theory. We claim that literary prefaces were used as authority strategies, becoming argumentative texts specific to a patriarchal literature. The author embodies the father figure, in Kojève’s terms, eager to impose his authority upon his reader, as a voice of his master (ruler/king), who is, in turn, the representative of the Divine authority. Our purpose is to follow the evolution of cultural models and mentalities in late Romanian Middle-Ages and early modern times in order to investigate the extent to which authority shaped social relationships and status, religion and monarchy, writing and reading.