Cultures of authority in the long twelfth century

Abstract

Ancient and medieval usages of the Latin noun auctoritas display an intrac tability 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 attempt ing to translate it causes even more trouble. A wise person will do better to refrain from the effort. 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 pres ent day. Furthermore, I will not attempt to address systematically the vast scholarship on authorship, as distinct (sometimes) from auctoritas, in the Middle Ages. 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 re stricted ambit, I accept the impossibility of attaining exhaustive complete ness. 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.