Menmuir Authenticity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-5015-1830-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 89, 281 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern CultureISSN

What does it mean to be authentic? The term is as pervasive today as it is difficult to define. To be 'authentic' in the Middle Ages or Early Modernity was no less of a complex task, albeit framed in ways different to today's concept of authenticity as an individualistic or capitalistic venture (think 'being true to oneself' or 'brand authenticity').

This volume examines a range of medieval and early modern approaches to authenticity in literature, asking how authenticity was defined, privileged, constructed, and contested in the periods covered.

Essays trace the shifting status of authenticity across four literary categories which most test the concept of premodern authenticity: forgeries, histories, translations, and continuations. Contributions engage with works across Latin, Greek, English, French, and Irish, and set authenticity in conversation with medieval and modern perspectives on authority, truth, and morality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Menmuir, Rebecca

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen

Leseproben

Part I: Definitions and Distinctions

Chapter 1 Introduction: Angles of Authenticity

Rebecca Menmuir

An Age of Authenticity?

It seems, in modern culture, as though authenticity is all around us. Across a myriad of industries the concept is applied indiscriminately, in the worlds of art, fashion, food, literature, travel, identity, and beyond. Authenticity is a central selling point, and so the competition to be “the most authentic” rages. Self-help guides advise on finding our “authentic self.”1 Tourism companies promise “authentic travel” experiences.2 And restaurants advertise their national legitimacy (“authentic Greek cuisine,” for instance), hoping to appeal to review metrics asking customers to rate the cuisine’s authenticity.3 In these ways authenticity can be found almost anywhere: as Charles Lindholm has it, “If a Rembrandt can be called authentic, so can Coca Cola.”4 We are in constant pursuit (the “quest for authenticity,” as many term it),5 and that desire fuels the production of authenticity as well as the proliferation of services which authenticate, such as eBay’s “Authenticity Guarantee” or other markers which hold authenticity to particular, albeit shifting, standards.6 Its meaning may not be easily defined, but we know that authenticity is meaningful, and so authenticity is intertwined with the pursuit of meaning in modern life.7

But authenticity is not new to modernity, even if its commodification is a modern turn.8 This volume seeks to understand authenticity in its medieval and early modern forms, covering literature across a range of European languages (including Latin, English, French, Italian, Greek, and Irish) between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. In literary studies, the concept of authenticity is typically charted from the point at which “authority moves indoors,”9 the individual idea of authenticity from within which aligns more with our modern understanding of the term (as in phrases such as “being your authentic self” or “being true to yourself”). It is linked especially to the individualism of the Enlightenment, Romantic literature, and the concept of sincerity.10 This volume argues instead for the importance of literary authenticity in premodernity, albeit configured, contested, and articulated in sometimes radically different ways, linked particularly to the collective and ideas of authority rather than to the individual and ideas of sincerity. There was, then as now, a deep-rooted interest in what it might mean to think, write, and live authentically, and a corresponding interest in and growing discipline which grew around distinguishing the authentic from the inauthentic.

Some premodern forgeries and their subsequent exposure, as well as the growth of scholarly disciplines aimed at confronting forgeries, are already defining moments in the history of literature and culture: the Donation of Constantine and Lorenzo Valla’s demolition of its authenticity, the example of the master-forger Annius of Viterbo, or Jean Mabillon’s development of systems to interrogate and (de)authorise texts.11 This volume ventures beyond these cultural touchstones, cumulatively demonstrating that they are not unique aberrations, but rather part of a wider literary-cultural landscape in which forgeries were irrevocably embedded, even after being discovered. Across a diverse range of linguistic, chronological, and geographical contexts, these chapters attest to the breadth of consistent engagement in the idea of authenticity across the period.

The volume is arranged according to four literary categories which most test and foreground the concept of premodern authenticity: forgeries, histories and historical writing, translations, and continuations. Authenticity is a central concern when writing and reading in these modes, intersecting with fundamental questions of authority, truth, and representation in literature. The contributions to this volume demonstrate that authenticity cannot be treated as a binary where the only obverse is inauthenticity; rather, it must be considered on a spectrum governed by form, where the authenticity of (for instance) a translated text is of a different sort to the authenticity of a forgery. These modes often overlap: for example, many medieval and early modern translations were of forgeries, and forgeries moreover might be considered a type of historical writing (as Alfred Hiatt has argued),12 and so each section should not be taken in isolation. The present chapter aims to introduce the medieval and modern challenge in defining authenticity, an issue which reverberates through every essay in this volume and which is taken up more thoroughly in the following chapter. I situate the idea of authenticity amongst various intersecting concepts and its medieval and early modern contexts; and I pose some key questions about each section of the volume, while introducing each chapter.

Defining Authenticity

Studies of authenticity – whether linguistic, literary, or cultural – typically proceed from a shared foundation, which is that authenticity is as difficult to define as it is widespread in its usage. Ana María Sánchez-Arce comments that “Although the term authenticity and its derivates are widely used in many contexts, their meaning is by no means stable”; Matías Martínez similarly notes that while the term “authentic” is widespread, “its precise meaning is difficult to grasp … everyone has an implicit understanding of the concept and, as a result, its meaning tends to be vague and non-systematic.”13 Nonetheless, some attempt must be made. Earliest definitions in English, from the late fourteenth century, refer to “opinions, statements, books, stories” or individuals, which or who are “worthy of belief or acceptance, reliable, trustworthy; true, authoritative.”14 To be authentic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is to have legal validity; to be something or someone that possesses authority; and in documents, to be the origin (i.e. original) and not a copy.15 It is only later, from the seventeenth century onwards, that authentic is attested in what is now the “usual sense,” that is “genuine; not feigned or false,” which nevertheless has clear links to that earlier sense of being true and trustworthy.16

The connection between authenticity and literature is evident from the earliest English uses of authenticity, as in Chaucer’s “The Book of the Duchess” (“hir stories be autentyk”) or Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (“The bible, / Whiche is a booke autentyke and credible”).17 However, literature is not a form of writing governed by facts or historical truth, not even in the histories discussed in this volume, and literature has always embodied a porous boundary between fact and fiction. This is even true semantically: David Greene has observed the “general semantic tendency for any verb meaning ‘make’ to move into the field of ‘make up’”: think fabricate, embellish, even forge.18 Chaucer’s Parson describes those who delight in lying, “in which delit they wol forge a long tale and peynten it with alle circumstaunces, where al the ground of the tale is fals” – where those who speak untruthfully sound very much like literary authors.19 Nick Groom says of literary forgery:

In a sense, the literary forger is a shadow, forging what is already itself a fabrication, and thereby showing that literature, that most monumental fabrication, is no less forged than any shadowy literary forgery. The forger shadows authenticity, echoes echoes.20

Perhaps this is why authenticity is such a generative topic for literature, whether thinking about authenticity within literature (unreliable narrators, truth-telling and speech-acts, sincerity), or the authenticity of literature (questions of authorship, forgeries, or untruths at an authorial level).

Two chapters in particular explicitly take up the problem of defining authenticity in the periods at hand, tracing scholastic attempts to clarify its meaning across languages. In chapter 2, Alastair Minnis expounds upon authenticus, the classical Latin term to which many European languages can trace their term for authentic and the corresponding noun authenticity (English authentic, Anglo-Norman autentic, Middle French autentike, Spanish auténtico, Portuguese autêntico, Italian autentico, Dutch authentiek, German authentisch, and so on).21 It is that final connection of The Middle English Dictionary’s definition of authentic, authoritative, that is crucial here, and Minnis explores the fundamental relationship...

Über Autor(innen)

Rebecca Menmuir is Darby Fellow (Simon and June Li Fellowship) in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, UK.