Cultures of Authority in the Long Twelfth Century

Ancient and medieval usages of the Latin noun auctoritas display an intractability that induced one lexicographer not fifty years ago to warn bluntly against trying even to translate it:

The word auctoritas belongs to the most significant and lasting coinages of the Latin language. Its meaning is not always easy to ascertain, and attempting to translate it causes even more trouble. A wise person will do better to refrain from the effort.²

To guard against such difficulties, I will not unfold a full history of auctoritas and auctores from the beginning of the Latin language down to the present day. Furthermore, I will not attempt to address systematically the vast scholarship on authorship, as distinct (sometimes) from auctoritas, in the Middle Ages.³ Instead, I will aim mainly to sketch attitudes toward authority, and authors, that prevailed among rhetoricians, grammarians, and exegetes through the earlier Middle Ages and to offer a partial list of new stances that developed afterward. In so doing, I will train my sights on literary auctoritas and auctores, those implicated in reading and writing. Even within this restricted ambit, I accept the impossibility of attaining exhaustive completeness. The period I will seek eventually to elucidate may be called the long twelfth century. Centuries are arbitrary slices of time, and major transitions may refuse willfully to take place just as the ninety-ninth year yields to the hundredth. In my definition, the long twelfth century extends from after the Great Schism of 1054 that divided the Greek and Latin branches of Christendom to around the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

When pursuing a topic that can be summed up in a single keyword, various pitfalls need to be avoided. In the first place, a concept may manifest itself in practice, and that practice may in turn be reported or discussed in a text without the use of the corresponding word or words. In our parlance, authority may be at stake or the authorities involved even when the noun “authority” is not enunciated. To skirt this danger, I will concentrate upon instances in which auctoritas is named explicitly. Another caveat is particular to cases in which the specific word at the heart of a given topic boasts a long history, since the term may have different nuances now from what it once did. In this case, although the Latin auctoritas and English authority have been applied to matters political, philosophical, theological, ecclesiastical, linguistic, and poetic, the early twenty-first-century noun covers a range that overlaps only partially with related ancient and Medieval Latin words.⁴ Thus to grasp what authors and authorities conveyed as words and ideas in the twelfth century requires disentangling the past from the present as well as the Latin from vernaculars such as English. The associations these words carry in our own times may color and distort our perceptions of what lies eight hundred years and more behind us.

I. The Waxing of Authority

An examination of auctoritas that is at once philological and comparatist can shed light on the long twelfth century and perhaps also even on the present day. Etymologically, authority is very much a Latin concept in origin. Dio Cassius (ca. 155–235), writing his Roman History in Greek, comments that auctoritas cannot be translated into Greek by a single word.⁵ Although Dio Cassius may not be saying that the Latin word is untranslatable into Greek, he at least acknowledges that the Romans have a word that subsumes a span of meanings not captured in any individual Greek equivalent, and he may hint that the existence of a word with such a semantic range may speak to a uniquely Latin quality about it.⁶

Most of the prestige and many of the debates surrounding authors and authority date from the Middle Ages, particularly the long twelfth century. Or, to state the case differently, a constituent feature of medieval civilization seems to have been recourse to auctoritas. Indeed, it is entirely reasonable to describe medieval culture as being a “culture of authority.”⁷ But caution is in order when dealing with...