Chapter 7 - Authority

Summary

Auctoritas, granted by medieval interpretative communities to a host of Christian and classical writers, set in motion complex negotiations between the voices of the living and the dead. Alan of Lille had observed that authority has a ‘wax nose’, capable of being twisted in opposite directions. And in Chaucer’s lifetime, the exercise of authority was radically challenged in both ecclesiastical and sociopolitical spheres. Likewise, the emergence of writing in several European vernaculars provided new arenas in which to scrutinise and challenge both the workings of auctoritas and the ideologies that it could be made to serve. Accordingly, Chaucer dismantled and exposed both the inner contradictions of auctoritas and the price – the elisions, distortions and arbitrary privileging of some interpretations over others – at which it was achieved and preserved. That he was granted a measure of posthumous auctoritas is one of the paradoxes of English literary history.