Medieval and Early Modern Authorship ed. by Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne, and: Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice ed. by Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (review)

With more than forty years elapsed since Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?,” it has become something of a critical commonplace to observe, wryly, that the demystification of the author has led to unprecedentedly intense, broad, and voluminous scrutiny of authorship, in which specific authors figure as significantly as they ever did, if not exactly in the same fashion as before. Defined as a discursively constituted, institutionally maintained, bibliographically transmitted, and ideologically freighted gravitational force that gives a text coherence and authority, authorship became an ideal object of study for a field of literary study newly more interested in questions of indeterminacy, sociocultural valence, and ideological complicity or resistance than in, say, artistic unity or literary greatness. Conveniently, these new questions could be asked without necessarily needing to change the texts and authors traditionally at the center of the field. Most would agree, I think, that all this is laudable: authorship study has been part of the impetus behind the field’s invigorating push toward interdisciplinarity and its heightened awareness of the material features and history of textual media. More generally, it has encouraged intricate, genuinely critical analysis of the mechanisms of literary authority. At their best, the essays in the two volumes under review—both of which derive from conferences or workshops held in the past decade—exemplify these characteristics and suggest that authorship study is still a booming industry forty years out. Yet to different degrees these volumes also at times illustrate the rule of the return of the repressed, according to which authorship study becomes difficult to distinguish from what we simply knew before as the study of great authors. This regression is not necessarily a problem in itself (and indeed may be celebrated in some quarters), but it does create the challenge of coherence for collections such as these, since the more the raison d’être of the individual essays seems to be specific authors, the greater the centrifugal force on the collection (as would be evident if the first volume listed were titled Medieval and Early Modern Authors).

Perhaps the criterion of coherence is not an entirely fair one for collections, however, and especially collections on authorship, since even if the drift back toward study of great authors is resisted, the phenomenon of authorship itself is rather diffuse—encompassing in practice everything from an author’s deployment of intertexts, to codicological and paratextual authorial strategies, to theories of literary authority (whether medieval, Renaissance, or modern), to the nitty-gritty of publishing history. Hence, two essays that have authorship as their topic may otherwise seem to share little. Not surprisingly, therefore, after defining the four “key issues” around which Medieval and Early Modern Authorship has been “loosely assembled” (15), co-editor Lukas Erne concludes his introduction by proclaiming the value of “local, detailed case studies” (25). Yet, salutary as is his rationale of thereby resisting “a single over-arching narrative,” one of the effects of this approach, in a volume that bridges the medieval–early modern divide, is to leave this divide largely undisturbed—notwithstanding Erne’s own nuanced consideration of it. Of the nine essays (out of sixteen in total) that concern early modern authors, most do not cast their glance into the medieval period at all, and those that do, despite the undoubted interest of some of their lines of argument, tend to reproduce a medieval-Renaissance narrative all too dismayingly familiar.

For example, Patrick Cheney’s intriguing argument that “the invention of the modern notion of the author is coterminous with the recovery of the classical sublime as an aesthetic category” (138), while providing insight into the constitution of literary authorship in the...