Authority (auctoritas) in Medieval English Literature
Quick game interlude. Off the top of your head, name something that is highly valued in contemporary literature. Here's some appropriate quiz-type music to get your noggin working.
Okay, time's up. Ding ding. That's right, folks: Originality.
Chances are, "originality" was somewhere high on your list of qualities, because we currently clamor for our authors to have a fresh voice. We don't want the same tired plots and characters re-hashed over and over again, right?
Right for us, maybe. But just the opposite was true for medieval author and readers. Most medieval authors weren't into fashioning new tall tales. They borrowed (to put it politely) from each other left and right. One example of this "borrowing" is Chaucer's great masterpiece, Troilus and Criseyde, which he basically pilfered from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato.
Oh, and keep in mind that concepts like "plagiarism" and "intellectual property" just flat out didn't exist back then. So not only did medieval authors take ideas from each other, they were also greatly concerned with shoring up their credibility by showing off how well they knew classic works.
Basically, these medieval authors strutted their stuff by getting all their Classic Lit and Biblical references lined up in a row. Many routinely drew on a vast number of Latin sources. And used as many Latin phrases as possible.
For example, the hen-pecked Chauntecleer makes a crazy number of Classical allusions when arguing with his wife in The Nun's Priest's Tale. In a lot of ways, being a medieval author was all about how skillfully you could choose, adapt, revise, and combine your textual authorities and sources… not how innovative you were.
Chew on This
Of course, one could also use auctoritas to be deliberately deceptive. If an author wanted to say something (politically dangerous, perhaps) and later have plausible deniability about that thing, he could always cite an authority. In fact, he could even make up an authority to cite for his opinions. This is what Chaucer does in Troilus and Criseyde when he cites a guy named Lollius as being his source of information for All Things Trojan War-ish. There's really no such person as Lollius, but Chaucer uses him as a way to deflect any blame for changing the story a bit. How might the name "Lollius" just scream authority for educated medieval people? Why not use someone named "John Ball" instead (which would be much more Middle English-y, we might point out)?
Chaucer strikes again. His Wife of Bath is quite notorious for throwing authorities out the window, even while she pretends to use them like a good little medieval writer/orator should. Check out our "Quotes" section to see how she handles this issue. How does she balance personal experience with authority? Which authority do you find more convincing: her own, or the authority that comes from the books she cites?