In Search of the Culprit. Aspects of Medieval Authorship (original) (raw)
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In 16 th-century vernacular literature, authorship is not yet as clearly defined as in later centuries. It is still characterised by the presence of degrees of authorship and makes use of the various concepts of anonymity. Authority and the fictional status of a work are discussed whenever instances of authorship are mentioned in the text. This practice, of course, comes with consequences for the text itself. This chapter will focus on one outstanding example of dealing with authorship: the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587). Though it is a work of imaginative literature, it integrates factual sources with literary invention. The text does not explicitly discuss the circumstance that its parts have been taken from somewhere else and transformed into something else. It does, however, try to emphasise its origin with a single author, namely the protagonist himself.
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The term "author" has become so much a part of our vocabulary and literary attitude that it's natural to feel that it must always have been so. As Heidegger says:"The artist is the origin of the work.The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other." 1 Since the Renaissance, the author has been conceived as the professional "literary figure" who writes works according to conventions, which he both internalizes and transforms to make an "original" creation. Literary criticism, theory, and history were bound to consider the work and the author together. Opinions have varied radically as to the extent of the author's being qua individual that may find expression in his work. What has not been questioned-at least until recently-is the fact of there being an authorial presence behind the work and recoverable through it. T. S. Eliot, for example, argued that the author is someone who comes to grips not with a personal psyche, but with a poetic medium, which he calls "tradition": [T]he poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. 2 Kenneth Burke argues, on the other hand, that it may be precisely the discovery of his "personality," or at least aspects of it, that the poet V. Greene (ed.
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This dissertation argues that by pioneering new ways of constructing and reading literary character, writers of twelfth- to fourteenth-century romance also claimed a new authority for vernacular fiction. Through readings of several key medieval texts, the dissertation not only illuminates character as an underestimated critical tool used by medieval writers in but also intervenes in the ongoing scholarly discussion of medieval authorship. It begins with Le Roman d'Enéas, a twelfth-century adaptation of Virgil's Aeneid that, by revising tensions in the characters of the Latin royal court, familiarizes the epic for a courtly audience and posits its writer as an authoritative interpreter of the Aeneid. Next, medieval concepts of memory and contemporary serial narrative theory are used to argue that Chrétien de Troyes, inventor of French Arthurian romance, creates a model of character that requires audiences to read his romances as a corpus and thus establishes himself as the au...
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This article examines the role and function of author attributions in multi-text manuscripts containing Dutch, English, French or German short verse narratives. The findings represent one strand of the investigations undertaken by the cross-European project ‘The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript’, which analysed the dissemination of short verse narratives and the principles of organisation underlying the compilation of text collections. Whilst short verse narratives are more commonly disseminated anonymously, there are manuscripts in which authorship is repeatedly attributed to a text or corpus. Through six case studies, this article explores medieval concepts of authorship and how they relate to constructions of authority, whether regarding an empirical figure or a literary construction. In addition, it looks at how authorship plays a role in manuscript compilation, and at the effects of attributions (by author and/or compiler) on reception. The case studies include manuscripts f...
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The notion and construction of authorship has been reinterpreted and shaped throughout history. In the Iberian world, the rise of authorial self-consciousness begins to manifest in the early thirteenth century with the gradual rise of vernacular languages as literary lan- guages, which afforded a new understanding of the writer’s craft and place in society. The establishment of decrees within the sixteenth-century book trade reshaped it by making it compulsory to register on the work certain bibliographical details. The turn of the seven- teenth century, furthermore, witnessed a rapid commercialization of the literary product — despite remaining rooted in a system of patronage, literary production began to give way to the active role of printer-publishers and booksellers. Writing for publication was a complex venture for most aspiring authors, to be sure. Nevertheless, literary careers continue to be qualified, chiefly upon gender grounds. This essay, therefore, reflects on the role of gender in early constructions of female au- thorship within Iberian book history, using a critical stance on Christine de Pizan and Teresa de Cartagena, informed by new approaches to the field. The aim is to vindicate the early role of women as authors within the Iberian literary field.
The interplay of pseudo-authors in 13th-century Arthurian romances has attracted the attention of scholars since the very beginnings of Medieval studies. Already P. Paris had brought to light the main authorial cross-references in the texts, and subsequent scholars have continually interpreted and re-interpreted them. The development of narratology in Arthurian studies brought a fresh approach to these matters and, especially with the works of E. Baumgartner, specialists became more aware of the relation between fictitious authorship and concrete determination of the social background of production and fruition of the romances. The Arthurian pseudonyms constitute a community of clerks and knights who, in ongoing collaboration, endlessly extracted new stories from an inexhaustible ‘livre du latin’. While identities are all imaginary, it is indisputable that they knew each other's texts and that their stories were read in a courtly context very similar to what they depict. The bibliography on this topic is abundant. However, insofar there have been relatively few studies that have analysed this fictitious community from the point of view of textual transmissions or adopted an embracing perspective including the multilingual fortune of the Arthurian novels in prose. In this study we will try to address these two points and show how textual transmission enriches this fictitious community, in an ongoing dialogue with non-fictitious entities and some concrete interlocutors.