Anonymous Texts

Abstract

The politics concerning the anonymity of medieval texts have become increasingly important to the project of medieval feminist scholarship in its attempts to recover — at least as much as is possible — the traces of female subjectivity within a culture where both subjectivity and creativity were deemed definitively male. Indeed, medieval literary theory, revolving around the idea of the author— auctor — as embodiment of auctoritas — the God-given authority to define, name, categorize, and represent — was fully in step with a grand narrative in which Adam, the first man, named not only the beasts of the field but the first woman too: ‘And Adam said: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man’ (Genesis 2:23). In effect, Eve could not be the writer, for she was the written upon. Like her medieval daughters, she became the product of a naming process which transformed her from blank parchment into written text, a script, moreover, frequently imbued with an entrenched and naturalized misogyny. The origin of writing as male, however, has been echoed in recent years by Jacques Derrida who, in Of Grammatology, identified the marking of the soil by the male-driven plough as itself an act of ‘writing which’ opens nature to culture via the act of cultivation. For Derrida, ‘writing is born with agriculture’, and this physical act of spatial demarcation (‘writing in furrows ) links the land and its ownership with the authoritative (male) body.¹