Voice and Meaning: Writing Authority in Late Medieval England and Iberia.
- Author/Editor
- Sierra, Juan David.
- Title
- Voice and Meaning: Writing Authority in Late Medieval England and Iberia.
- Published
- Sierra, Juan David. "Voice and Meaning: Writing Authority in Late Medieval England and Iberia." Ph. D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 2011. Open access at https://hdl.handle.net/1813/30761 (accessed January 28, 2023).
- Review
- From Sierra's abstract: "My dissertation tells the story of how the separation of voice and meaning in discursive structures became bound up with legitimating the fifteenth-century conquest of non-Christian lands. This is because the possibility of extending secular dominion into lands outside traditional legitimating practices necessitated a new rethinking of the use and discourse of authority. At the center of this change in meaning and voice were the Iberian translations of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' that joined two different modalities of questioning the presentation of authority through writing: a Castilian approach, which disassociated the experience of reading from the verisimilitude of narration, and an English one, which undermined the possibility of speech to communicate truth. This synthesis justified colonialism because it gave sovereigns the means to speak with authority in a place outside universal language and law. The Iberian and English traditions which influenced Gower's translation into Portuguese, therefore, support the idea that there was a growing disconnect between the power of their ideas and the ways in which they were conveyed . . . . They made . . . spaces which proved that signs could divorce their social uses from their ability to signify while still retaining their ability to change the world. These spaces, in being taken up by the Portuguese translations of Gower’s 'Confessio,' helped Europe fashion a concept of sovereignty applicable outside the boundaries of Western discourse." [MA. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2011
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
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