Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice ed. by Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (review)

In 1984 Alastair Minnis published the first edition of his groundbreaking Medieval Theory of Authorship. His purpose was, as he said, to find in late medieval scholastic writings a set of historically relevant theoretical models for medieval literature, rather than relying anachronistically on the models and concepts of modern and postmodern literary theory, as had become the fashion. In the nearly three decades since then, scholars of medieval literature have applied and expanded on Minnis’s insights. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel’s Author, Reader, Book presents nine new essays, by Minnis and others, that demonstrate how far the conversation has come in that time and that open new areas for discussion. These essays range widely in subject, yet the collection as a whole demonstrates vividly the importance and centrality of the medieval standard of auctoritas and the self-conscious effort of medieval writers in seeking its mantle.

Minnis’s opening essay follows up both on his Theory and on his work on the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Here, Minnis argues for the importance of ethics in the medieval theory of authorship, noting the move away from mimesis and toward affect in late medieval poetic theory and practice. He illuminates with great subtlety the interplay between poetics and theology during the period, and the intellectual tensions caused by that interplay. Minnis’s essay demonstrates that the place of the literary was deeply fraught.

Following Minnis’s theoretical argument, the collection presents a series of exempla in the form of chronologically arranged interpretive studies, beginning in the thirteenth century and ending in the sixteenth. Sebastian Coxon’s essay demonstrates the centrality and flexibility of the medieval idea of auctoritas, focusing on the virtue of wit as exemplified by the self-portrayal and self-mythologizing of Walter Map. Kwakkel then explores, with impressive rigour and erudition, the complex role of the scribe and compilator as the active creator of single-author text collections of Middle Dutch writers. Between the two, the reader is presented with a strong sense of the social and material complexity of texts and their makers in the late Middle Ages.

Two essays on Chaucer follow, in an order that echoes the previous two; the first, by Anita Obermeier, argues that in the Manciple’s Tale and elsewhere the poet uses his own diplomatic persona, and Ovidian tropes of censorship, to bolster his own claim to auctoritas by drawing a parallel between himself and the Roman poet. The second, by Partridge, focuses on Chaucer’s role as scribe and compilator, including his Retractions and their contexts in late medieval literary culture and book history. Both essays argue fascinatingly for a reading of Chaucer as a deliberate self-mythologizer whose own apparent humility was in fact a ploy to build his claims to authority and authorship.

Three essays follow that demonstrate the development of these issues into the fifteenth century. Deborah McGrady’s essay shifts the focus to readers, arguing that Christine de Pizan’s reading of the Roman de la Rose demonstrates a power struggle between author and reader, one that Christine ultimately uses to establish her credibility and authority among her own readers. Kirsty Campbell uses the case of the religious writer Reginald Pecock to re-examine the burgeoning role of vernacular language in the establishment of late medieval authority and authorship; she demonstrates that Pecock confidently, even aggressively, asserted the authority of English as a medium for spiritual communication, and of himself as a vernacular writer. Iain Macleod Higgins re-examines the neglected portrayal of, challenge to, and appropriation of the authority of Aesop in Robert Henryson’s Middle Scots Moral Fabillis.

Finally, Mark Vessey concludes the volume with a learned and ingenious essay on a 1515 copy of Erasmus’s Lucubrationes. Vessey’s focus is threefold: on the word lucubratio, with its combination of false modesty and claim to authority; on the bibliographical presentation of Erasmus as...