Inventing Authority: Glossing, Literacy and the Classical Text

Summary

The distinctive format of the glossed book, used especially for Biblical texts and law, but later also for secular authors, is the most satisfying model of authorship and textual authority which the Middle Ages has produced.

This statement, taken from Mary Carruthers's study of medieval memoria, seems at first glance a convincing articulation of the relationship of authority and the glossed book. It suggests that the ultimate purpose of glossing is to make texts and, presumably, books authoritative. For certain kinds of manu- script books (whether we look at them from the point of production or of use), this may be true, but it is wrong to make this assertion global or to use it simplistically as a way of ‘explaining’ glosses. The aim of this essay is to look more closely at the question of authority in glossed manuscripts and examine how it is constituted. I shall argue that this particular form of authority is conditioned by external pressures, including what might be termed ‘cultural anxiety’ about authoritative texts, by the actual context of use, and by the literacy of users. Moreover, glosses not only use a variety of strategies to preserve and create authority, but also to undermine and, occasionally, to usurp it. Once again, these strategies are closely informed by audience and the context of use. When we take all this into account, and look at how authority operates in practice, it becomes rather more problematic than Carruthers's statement seems to allow.

I shall be talking in this essay about a particular kind of glossed manuscript in use in a particular context. The general context is the educational system, where the texts of auctores formed the basis of the curriculum, with the trivium and quadrivium both constituted by a collection of authoritative texts. I intend to explore the practice of using what we would call literary texts in the earliest stages of this formal curriculum, in the art of grammar, where the texts formed the basis of instruction in the Latin language itself.